Dear Google, my birthday wish for knowledge equity

Dr Kris Rampersad addresses Institutionalised Inequities on the Internet

An open letter to Google on knowledge equity through the internet in the Googleverse – partnering for paving a pathway and a level playing platform in the Post Pandemic Planet

Dear Google,

Thank you so very much for the beautifully illuminated GOOGLE candles that greeted me when I opened my favourite internet browser on my birthday. It is indeed heart warming that you recognize your reach and influence through your individual users, even those of us from small islands at the near extremities of the continent, if not the world, with illusions to grandeur.

As you might have noticed I shared it across my social media platforms – not to make them jealous or anything – well maybe a little bit – Facebook and Linked-In which also provided platforms for me to share your greeting and by which countless offered me birthday wishes too – must indeed be envious.

Please do not think me ungrateful, then, or as my nonagenarian Ma would say, neemakharam – you can Google its meaning while I create my encyclopedia of new age terms. I know how ungracious we the beneficiaries of global magnanimity – such as the simple privilege of even having access to the technologies of others like this and other handouts – must seem! Granted the recognition, and in gratitude for the thoughtful candles you lit up for me in all my favourite colours, I feel I should share with you the wish I made as a blew out the delightfully multihued  GOOGLE birth candles you lit for me. It was a simple wish, and one that I believe is not beyond your magnificent, magical, mystical powers that extend in awesome wonder across the vast world wide web, to fulfil.

The Wish for Technological Equity in the Post Pandemic Planet

As I huffed and puffed and tried to blow out them there virtual candles, Dear Google, I wished that in your great reach and might across this universe, that the same privileges and courtesies that you extend to select parts of the world, could be evenly spread, in other less significant and less recognized parts, like these from whence I am.

You see, while I have touted the tremendous potential and opportunities of the internet and new media and social media in leveling the playing field to equalize opportunities and create an equitable platform for all, that is yet to be realised, Dear Google.

You were one of the first who was championed as a global partner for provision of online learning materials for the millions disadvantaged with the corona lockdown that deprived all of access to libraries and schooling. You were one of the first announced as a partner in UNESCO’s initiatives to strengthen online learning processes in the wake of the virus.

Seeing my friends and colleagues in education nurtured on cumbersome bureaucratic education systems and structures, scramble helplessly to grasp and adapt to this new demand for online learning which has compounded the existing deficiencies of culturally-suitable learning materials, I felt with my experience of media and education, I could bridge the gaps and help their cause.

Armed with all my eagerness, I visited your Google Play Books Partnership Centre, ready to partner in such a seemingly forward-looking initiative, to attempt to correct the dearth of homegrown culturally appropriate learning materials that continued to plague our societies through colonial and post colonial times would not extend into the post pandemic period.

You see dear Google, I do not just believe, but from my own ground work, I have concrete experience and evidence in working with marginalised communities as the Mayans, Maroons, Rastafari, Mestizos, Creoles, decimated and minimalised Tainos, and developing indigeneous Indian and African cultures across my region, that we could considerable reduce the agitation we see in the world today.  

It is with fervour that I begin to fill out the partnership form, inspired by the invitation ‘you’re joining a community of thousands of publishers and self-published authors.’ How this could complement the presence of Amazon which, with its high publishers’ mark up, forces us with limited resources to increase the price for our products which makes them unable to compete on this marketplace.

Lo and behold – or as my nonagenarian Ma may say from her ancestral instinct, Are Baap Re – as I accessed your partnership platform, filling in the required data, I am stomped in my tracks as I come up against a wall that seems as high as the one that was proposed for Mexico, to realise that your boasted partnership services are only available to 41 of the world’s 197 countries.

Ironically, Mexico is the only country listed from this region with access to the programme. Those of the likes of my place has no place in your world, along with the 155 other countries. My optimism is immediately shattered. So much for believing I can add the perspectives from my end of the world to the global knowledge pool.

In fact, only 20 percent of the world’s countries have the opportunity of accessing your psuedo global partnerships, my Dear Google. It includes no other countries of the Caribbean or in Latin America, and just a couple in the multi-countried Pacific…. While we are welcomed to freely post our materials for open access – and indeed I have done this since your birth, many moons after my own – and while many of us indeed support open access availability of knowledge – we do have some nagging basic needs, like feeding, clothing and sheltering ourselves, paying mortgages, facing utility bills to access the internet – need I list them. How are we to meet those demands when we cannot monetise our knowledge products to support ourselves and families as we try to diversify the world’s knowledge pool for that less feel estranged, disenfranchised, underrepresented, marginalised and alienated?

This is compounded by the fact that there are little or no opportunities that support our knowledge creation efforts otherwise – through trust or grant funding, especially as they are channeled through mega institutions like yours. The same is true for Amazon, YouTube and other similar affiliate programmes as access to those international avenues for creation and marketing of audiobooks so our authors and publishers like myself can feed ourselves from our research and knowledge products is similarly negated.  

In essence, the institutionalised bias of knowledge creation and dissemination continues to be replicated, even when available technologies can even the playing field, and we watch our societies disintegrate. Fed and nurtured on copycat systems and processes, they can do little but jump on bandwagons in mimicry of their own potential because the education system into which they were thrown were created to negate self-potential and wipe out abilities and capacities at independent thought and action. The continuous loop and on-going spiral of entrenched inequalities! Surely it is not how you envision your role in the world!  

I have written countless times within your platforms, asking for broadening of the systems to accommodate our regions and am yet to receive a response, except that I will be notified when they are.

Many of these are the countries identified as those most at risk by the World Bank – small in size with limited natural resources, narrowly-based economies, distanced from major markets, and vulnerable to external shocks, such as COVID-19, which affect growth, impact on poverty. The World Bank recommends that sustained development progress will require long-term cooperation between governments, international development partners and regional organizations – but I know from hands on work in the international systems that these high sounding pronouncements are mere platitudes because those mouthing them are divorced from the realities of those who are affected.

Aren’t these the societies on which you, my dear Google, can have the most impact? Or is it deliberate to entrench the status quo by restricting access to provisions that could broaden the reach

The modern online marketplace that replicates the old colonial mercantilism of harvesting our knowledge, with no compensation, having it repackaged by institutions of higher education, research, and others by those who sit at desks without doing an iota of ground research, under the guise of crowd sourcing and other disguised terms for intellectual exploitation, to feed skewed knowledge into global data bases – skewed because the resulting data and recommendations are void of understanding of critical contexts and ground realities.

So my Dear Google, my wish when I tried to blew out them there electronic multi-coloured candles was that we can have a meaningful partnership where we can work together to level the playing field for the minimal privileged few, to accommodate the needs of the disadvantaged many. Perhaps by such means we can move closer to more enlightened solutions to gnawing equity gaps that can pitch us on a more inclusive path to recreating the post pandemic planet.

That you be more representative of the world you represent: that was my birthday wish as I tried to blow out them there polychromed candles you lit for me, as you too come of age in your 21st, Dear Google.

Take the GloCal Covid Challenge for equity in the post pandemic planet and let’s explore a genuine partnership.

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