Technology in the Third World: Too Much, Too Soon?

Without America's advances in technology, there would be no Internet, no YouTube, and certainly, no Facebook. Without America's greedy, business profit mongers, this technology would not have spread viral across the globe, and into the hands of those who might use it to promote radical social and political cause. 

 
Instead of religious zealots rioting across the Islamic world this week over a YouTube video placing their prophet Mohammed in a less than stellar light, 

they would rather have been focusing their time on charging women who had been raped with adultery and stoning them to death, cutting off the hands of petty thieves,

and beheading whoever they believed at any given moment was not worthy of life in accordance with their interpretation of the teachings of mohammed, and the will of allah.

They are a simple, savage lot by civilized Western standards, and even after the west, has blessed them with satellite TV, Internet, KFC's, Hardees, McDonald's, Abercrombie and Fitch, and iPhones, they remain a simple and savage lot.
 

After two days of silence, the new leader of Egypt made his first comment on the crisis taking place at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. And, where did he make it? !!!Facebook!!! The leader of a sovereign state commented for the first time, since the onset of a potentially serious international crisis, on Facebook! LOL! ROFLMAO! J/K.

Perhaps you might consider "friending" him. I haven't taken the time to check out his profile pic, but, tell me, is he standing shirtless in his bathroom holding an iPhone up to the mirror? With the enormous flood of new technology pouring into the Third World, it appears things have mostly been left up to monkey see, monkey do. 

Why ask if a region is ready for it. If they have the money, that's being ready enough. What matters most to western technology suppliers is that they have a new, rich market with money to burn  (when not off burning down foreign embassies).

I strongly believe that one cannot change thousands of years of primitive culture and behavior, by force feeding technology and consumerism down the throats of the rest of the world, which may simply not be at the right place in its intellectual and cultural evolution to handle the full impact and ramifications.

 

Just because we manage to make the Third World LOOK like us, it is in all actuality, NOT us.  Put a suit on an ape, and an iPhone in its hand, and it is still an ape.

~gj duerrschmidt