I participated in a truly mind-boggling panel Sunday in which I joined awesome people like Lee Felsenstein and Greg Brown to discuss whether bringing technology to the developing world was a "boon or bane". Lee, inventor of the Osborne, the first portable PC, and of the pedal-powered PC intended for use in Laos, went first. He had barely introduced the pedal-powered PC concept when the moderator, one Sylvia, who appeared to be channeling Sally Jesse Raphael or some such TV host, accused him of using child labor (kids pedal the bike to power the PC in powerless rural Laos), pulled in her teenage son to opine whether he would like to pedal for internet access, and generally was rude and dismissive of most everyone on the panel.

The Berkeley Blog reports the evening better than I will attempt to do here so I'll pull out a few choice excerpts from their report. But the gist of the argument is that exporting technology is exporting consumerism and destroying local cultures. My argument, which I didn't really get a chance to make (although I fared better than others on the panel), was that by building up tech skills, production skills, and know-how, people in these places will have a chance to control the means of production and will have a voice in deciding what kind of media they want. To sit in Berkeley and sip lattes while bemoaning the MTV-ization of the world is merely to guarantee how it will go down.

So, here are some choice excerpts from the Berkeley Blog report:

Next up was Greg Brown, an extremely personable entrepreneur who was involved in bringing satellite TV to Africa. Once again, he got part-way through his talk when Sylvia started berating him, this time about bringing MTV to the developing countries, and what a terrible thing it was. Greg seemed more comfortable challenging Sylvia than Lee was, and he pointed out that while cultures can lose local identity when you bring technology in, they also need the ability to voice their own concerns to the wider world, which broadcast gives. Unfortunately, no one wanted to discuss the empowering part of offering choice and the possibility of talking back to the Western World using the West's own technology, the moderator and the audience just wanted to blame Greg for importing the wasteland of current American popular culture to the developing world.

Last up was Richard Koman, who had been part of the Internet Archive's Bookmobile in Uganda project, and who talked about the reception the bookmobile got in Uganda (and painted a far less encouraging picture than Brewster Kahle has when I have heard him describe it). Richard got interrupted as well, in his case by questions from the audience like "Why didn't you use African books?" (they did have a few primers written in African languages, but Ugandans wanted English books, and African books published in English are generally copyrighted) and "Why didn't you go to Oakland" (the need is much greater in Uganda).

Many of the questions and challenges had an incredibly patronizing undertone of the wealthy (white) do-gooders trying to protect the poor (colored) noble savages from the ravages of western technology, following which the do-gooders would get into their Volvos and drive back to their homes in Berkeley with electricity, clean running water, telephones, and fast Internet connections and write in their blogs on their i-Macs about the horrors of technology for the third world. Both people of color in the room picked up on the tone and commented on it, but nobody responded directly to their comments. It was Berkeley at its most superficial and most stereotypical. Along with the bizarre in-your-face with sophomoric challenge moderating style, it also seemed like such an unproductive dichotomy to draw, like a bourgeois church club in 1820's Manchester England resolving that England should spare India the pollution and working conditions (and power) of the satanic mills of the industrial revolutions.

It was disappointing that the discussion was so unproductive and superficial, because there are serious issues worth working on nearby. Technology and western culture are coming to the developing world, and anyone who has lived or traveled extensively in the developing world is aware of the deep hunger for both. The more interesting and actionable question is how can we empower people in the developing world to be producers of culture, and users of technology for their own benefit, as opposed to being just consumers of monopoly culture, and objects of technology. That's a discussion that I'd like to engage in with some of Berkeley's many technologically literate and socially conscious residents, but it wasn't to be had during tonight's the Berkeley CyberSalon, which is too bad.