Technologically Determined Monks?

After this last weeks reading of Negroponte's 'One Laptop Per Child', and then reading subsequant blogs about the believed effects such a wide distribution of laptops to young children in poverty sticken countries would have, I couldn't help but remember my year spent abroad living in Thailand.

In 2003 I was an exchange student and went to live in one of Thailand poorest regions, Esan. Tourism here is minimal, and while people may still use squating toilets, while young ragedy kids still run up to stopped busses at traffic lights to sell 'flattend chicken on a stick' to patrons, and clothing is all handwashed, the media technology they had was the newest you could possibly imagine.

I would be walking down the street, and see monks with shaven heads and bright orange robes talking leisurly on the newest cell phone; at malls I would see huge gaggles of young school monks (every male has to be a monk for at least two weeks in their teenage years) each gathered around computer monitors, gaming archads, or even purchasing playstations.

But you know what I noticed most? While they may have all the newest electronic media devices, they are everybit still Thai. Monks, cell phones and all, still meditate, and sing songs in the early morning as they walk down the street to eat what food people put out for them at dawn. Kids sill learn their ancient history and what it means to be thai. Even though they can watch America shows on their fancy computer screens or tv's showing burgers and pizzas, the food they still prefer is, low and behold, fried rice and fried noodles. (trust me, its probably safest that way as my personal experience with 'american style speggeti' invovled fettichini noodles, ketchup, karrots, and sliced up hotdogs...)

I'm not saying that technology does not influence, it most certainly does. It opens up and brings in new ideas, knew thoughts, ways of being, acting, eating, everything. But just because you give a child a computer does not mean that everything will be different. It does not mean, for one, that it will solve all of the problems of third world poverty or even that it will neccesarily help, nor does it mean that it will change their culture so much in the end as to be unrecognizably westernized and take children away from the cultural elements they grew up with. Giving every child a computer in poor regions is simply adding one more new elements to a group of humans in a world that is always under constant change and reconstruction. Nothing is every static.