Message-ID: <199609282157.QAA22357@anditel.andinet.lat.net> Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996 16:33:41 -0500 From: Reinaldo Vicini <mailto:interext@ANDITEL.ANDINET.LAT.NET> Subject: Re: "Appropriate technology" still useful? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Dear Joachim and friends:Please allow me to continue my perhaps boring dissertation about technology appropiateness.
As you might know, we could identify two different types of technology: The product-oriented technology, and manufacturing-oriented technology.
End-user technology, well, I can't argue about, since we have seen it: Telecommunication technologies, Transportation technologies, Biotechnologies, etc. Our life expectancy is now higher than it was one hundred years ago, even at the poorest places on earth.
Manufacturing technology is being pushed by *consumer needs* to get closer to the individual needs of consumers. If a "profit-first" company does not meet its consumer's needs and expectations it will go to the drain. Remember, for instance, allmighty IBM. Who ever though that IBM, the symbol of capitalist domination would have as dramatic problems as it did four years ago?. Lack of focusing in what their consumers needed. IBM delivered what he wanted their customers to buy. Wrong.
Should we take "natural"or "artificial"?. I cannot take for granted that manufacturing processes are bound to "not natural". Absolutely not. I would look at it more as "ndividualy-fitted"or "mass-fitted". Nowadays, all manufacturing technology is being fitted for less homogeneous output, suiting special consumer needs. That is now why even in a country like mine, you can order to a local car plant the car exactly as you want it. They even give you an id number that helps you tracing where the car is at the assembly plant at the time.
My point is exactly that NOT JUST NGOs are trying to work on the Appropriate Technology approach. Let's look at it from the commercial level. How many thousands of products you find exclusively fitted for the Brazilian market? How many products yopu find in Rio Grande fitted only for this area.
Appropiate Technology, I believe, is not only a matter of finding a tailor-made windmill for a small village. It is developing products and processes to fit the needs of the population. Again, there must be a critical mass to allow tailor-made solution for a local problem. And they, at the end, decide what is right or not.
This is not a case of developing countries only. Please, if you have the time, take a look at Michael Porter's "Competitive Advantage of Nations", to see how Italy's Sassuolo Region became an international powerhouse in the ceramics and tile industry overcoming serious limitations on factors of production.
FINALLY
Nothing lasts forever. Even the Roman Empire finished after more than two thousand years of domination. I would say, as Borges states, if we are living in an infinite universe of time, we have infinite possibilities. It is in our hand to turn the page. We have seen big turnaounds in our own lives. Are we going to be inferior to the challenge? I refuse to accept it! The secret as you say, is to use our own resources and skills to develop goods and services that fit our needs, but also, I would add, to fit a greater audience of potencial customers.
Our time is always the time.
Reinaldo Vicini mailto:interext@anditel.andinet.lat.net http://www.colomsat.net.co/rotarios.bogota
Como todas las cosas est½n llenas de mi alma emerges de las cosas, llena de alma mía. Mariposa de sueôo, te pareces a mi alma, y te pareces a la palabra melancolía _____________________________________________
Poema 15 - Fragmento Pablo Neruda 20 Poemas de amor y una cancin desesperada
---------- From: Joaquim Moura <mailto:joaquim.moura@persocom.com.br> To: Reinaldo Vicini <mailto:interext@ANDITEL.ANDINET.LAT.NET> Cc: Marcus A. Hairstone <mailto:MHAIRSTONE@worldnet.att.net>; Barbara Bloch mailto:<bb@partners.poa.com>; Gary Heusel <fhyd001@unlvm.unl.edu>; Joaquim Moura mailto:<joaquim.moura@persocom.com.br>; Lew Guerin <lguerin@mcs.com>; Truda Roper mailto:<ex031@mail.vt.edu>; William Nylen <wnylen@tophat.stetson.edu>; Tom Abeles mailto:<tabeles@tmn.com>; Cathy Healy <cathhealy@aol.com> Subject: "Appropriate technology" still useful? Date: S½bado 28 de Septiembre de 1996 11:13 AM
I refer to Reinaldo's last message (copied at the bottom of this message)
Firstly, how can Reinaldo admire Schumacher's "Small is beautiful" and find the concept of "technology appropriateness" absolutely nonsense? Secondly, why did the world, smaller by telecommunications, change the "appropriate technology" into an "insult to intelligence of our developing countries"? Did he read the book, indeed?
Dear Reinaldo, "appropriate technology" is not supposed to be a second class technology, typical of corrupted and old-fashioned countries, or a collection of resources already tried and failed. No, appropriate technology is just what the name tells: more appropriate from the environmental point-of-view, for instance, or from the job creation point-of-view, or from the local resources utilization point-of-view. I cannot see how neoliberalism can substitute adequate local resources using, job creation or environmental soundness by cable TV programming, American football games or Brazilian soap operas, which have incredible audiences in many countries around the world, including Russia, China and Cuba...
The world became smaller but the problems are still getting bigger and bigger every day. Yesterday night I saw a TV program showing the modern life in Russia. A remarkable issue is that in Russia now they can see Brazilian soap operas. Is this a real progress, since soap operas just show egotism, greed, envy, precocious erotism, revenge, jalousie and very personal materialistic concerns? In the Brazilian TV soap operas (from TV Globo, famous around the world) - even more than in the modern commercial American movies - all the characters are concerned just with their "petit bourgeois" problems, and they never discuss any social or intellectual issue. They are always and for many years now teaching the people that life can be lived without any social or community awareness and commitment.
Also, "appropriate" technology is still an inedited solution for the populations' problems. In Brazil, for example, just NGOs have tried projects based on "appropriate technologies", never the government - at least, not at a significative level... But I am sure that if government tries it, it would produce an important and total upgrade for the population's quality of life.
And tell me, Dear Reinaldo, what is the relation between products' QUALITY and TECHNOLOGY? Remember Bach, Da Vinci and Freud, for example: how much technology did they need to produce their outstanding works? (just to stay inside the occidental tradition, but I also know other high quality products from many other cultures, based on their own "tech-etnologies"). Do the "natural" products have less quality than the "technological" ones? Do you prefer eating "natural" food or vitamins or the "last generation" industrialized food and vitamins? Do you prefer fertilizing your garden soil and healing your plants with "natural" composted hummus and sound management or using "industrialized" "fertilizers" and pesticides? Do you prefer (in daily conditions) preventive "natural" living habits and "soft" therapies or the "technological- industrialized-chemmical" medicine products and methods? Do you prefer clothes made of "natural" or synthetic fabrics? Natural or synthetic wood to cover a wall with? There are many other examples, for every aspect of our lives, where you shall choose between nature proven experience and industry's "profit-first" concerns and motivation.
Of course, there are also the issues where "tomorrow"'s technologies are very welcome, like airplanes, emergency medicine, computers and networking, but a whole population cannot make their living on these intensive capital (and few jobs) industries.
Just adopting conventional "modern technologies" and neoliberalism will keep a country underdeveloped and dependent to the developed ones forever; but by properly mixing appropriate and "state-of-the-art" technologies, we will be able to fully develop our nation's whole potential. ___________________________________________________________________________