[governance] IS THE DIGITAL DIVIDE A PHANTOM?

Dan Krimm dan at musicunbound.com
Sun Jul 29 21:45:19 EDT 2007


At 5:46 AM +0300 7/29/07, McTim wrote:

>> Try reading or using a domain name that's coded in Chinese.
>> See how accessible it is.
>
>We clearly have differing definitions of "access"   For me, It's
>accesible if I can ping the host (Do I have acccess to the Internet?).
> For you it's reading a page?  Try Google's "translate this" feature.


Now *that's* funny.  I've had occasion to try Google's machine translation
many times recently (I'm coordinating a project that aspires to be as
international and multi-lingual as possible on pro bono resources, and I am
not functionally multi-lingual myself, even though I passed the language
requirement for my college degree some 30 years ago or so).  I can assure
you that machine translation algorithms provided by Google and by my Mac
Dashboard do not provide genuinely reliable "access" to other languages.

Perhaps there are better available for a fee, but if so I am not aware of
them as I don't have resources for the fee.  Perhaps there is still
potential for these algorithms to be improved over time, but until they
are, machine translation is a partial solution at best, and worthless at
worst (i.e., when the writer is using highly idiomatic forms of expression
or other creative license).

Access in a rudimentary technological sense without access in a
productively functional sense is no access to the real value of the tool.
The narrow sense of access is ultimately not extremely relevant.  Access to
something of value requires access to everything that is necessary in order
to get the benefit of that value.

If you have a different definition of "access" then your definition seems
to be inferior in the context of the goals importantly at issue here.

Dan
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