New Media problems

I've never been one of those people who has felt attached at the hip to their cellphone, felt completely lost when its not within reach or feels the need to show it off at every opportunity. But today I do feel at a bit of a loss, my cellphone (which I've really enjoyed using over the last year and a half) has died on me: the joystick doesnt respond to anything (not even offers of R1million), and the phone switches itself off everytime I close the slider. So its pretty much useless to me at the moment.

The even more frustrating part is that I have been phoning back and forth between the manufacturer (Siemens) and my service provider (CellC) with little joy. I am actually just really frustrated with both of them and generally hating having the phone - which I've loved up to this point. Its a Siemens SL65, it's small, good looking, great battery life, great features - but that all means sqwat at the moment!

Its a major problem when we become dependant on technology and things that we lived perfectly without before we got hooked!

The future of ICT Policy in Africa

I have returned from a workshop on ICT Policy and Regulation Visioning in Africa - trying to figure out what the priorities are in terms of ICT policy and what the next step is. What I found particularly refreshing and exciting about this workshop was that it was African perspectives and ideas about an African problem/issue. Although funding for the projects will come from Europe or America, the ideas for how we deal with our own issues is coming from us - Africans and we are (I hope) not willing to settle for being told how to deal with our problems from people who have no idea.

While it was exciting to see the progress that has and is being made across the continent, it also made me realise how much is still to be done. There were many important issues which came out of the two-day workshop, but the most important one is that this is a process which is on-going, so even in countries that have well-estblished ICT policies, there are areas of concern, areas of learning and developments which need to be undertaken.

I came back to Grahamstown in RSA with a renewed sense of what the needs are and faith in the fact that highly-skilled and committed Africans are dealing with them.

Unexpected Findings, New Media and Nairobi Airport!

I've been meaning to get back into blogging after our server (which housed my previous blog) was stolen in January this year - I found the perfect setting today at 06h00am in a grotty lounge at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya! I discovered, much to my amazement and delight, that this small and hidden away lounge has a wifi hotspot. I took a chance connecting to the wireless network, had to play around with my firewall properties but am online - in the most unexpected place.















This is what I love about ICTs and New Media - the fact that you can be surprised almost everyday by something new. Whether its something you find on the Internet, or someone; whether its figuring out a technical problem on your pc/cellphone/laptop - whatever it is, the fact is that there are so many possibilities that you are bound to come across something unexpected.

I really wouldn't have thought coming into this lounge that it would allow me to check my email, surf the net in preparation for the workshop I'm attending and be able to give an account of all of this in real time to people across the world.

New Media really is about interacting and although I'm not engaging with anyone in this lounge, I'm definately interacting with them by interacting with the information that I share on this blog - and so is everyone who reads it.