Texting While Riding

I was recently talking about my experience in El Salvador in the Peace Corps with some family members and explaining how I feel like I am living back in time a little bit. It isn't considerable since they have electricity and running water (though those developments are recent), but they live off of farming nearby lands and have little transportation besides their own feet. Also they wash their clothes by hand and hope to have kids of both genders in order to fill both of the gender roles in the house (boys - work in the fields and girls - do chores in the home). The one thing that is odd is that it isn't quite like being back a few decades due to the technology that is here.

The majority of families have televisions, even though they only get three channels, and they sometimes don't have enough money to buy necessities. Cell phones are pretty common and just today I witnessed a new "texting while driving" situation. I was riding in the back of a pickup on my way to go grocery shopping and saw a young cowboy on a horse heading out to his cornfield...yup, texting. And a couple of teens in my community have internet via USB/phone access, including me. I have even gotten facebooked by several people in my community. So it is an interesting contrast. I'm living back a couple of decades with the exception of modern day technology. Essentially, they've just bypassed all of the experimenting and changing of technology that the United States and other developing countries went through.

People here didn't witness the size change of computers or cell phones from monstrous to pocket-sized. They didn't have the internet that didn't include YouTube and Facebook and that was principally used for finding and sharing information. They didn't get email addresses to communicate with people - they only have them to sign up for Facebook. They didn't have cell phones that just made phone calls; although, all of the modern gadgets on a phone aren't financially accessible to most people out here...yet.

One of the unfortunate side effects of this relatively instantaneous access to modern technology is that a lot of education regarding these technologies hasn't been passed along. They haven't learned that things like chain emails and inane quizzes aren't to be sent out to EVERYONE you know. A lot of people pick inappropriate or weird email addresses - something that all of us, at least in my generation, might be guilty of originally (mine was sciencegeek1187). But there are 20+ year olds making email addresses like sexygurl101@. Nobody has really educated the proper use of some of these technologies. Viruses are abound on cyber cafe computers due to opening inappropriate websites and I've received my fair share of PowerPoints with kittens and bible quotes that they all think are adorable/inspirational. Phone etiquette isn't too bad, but volume level of listening to music and proper backtone selection could be reviewed.

This introduction of a new technology without the education compliment is reminiscent of the introduction of plastic here. Nearly all of their trash here was biodegradable (for example: banana leaves and corn husks were used to wrap things), but then some developed country introduced plastic. I won't mention any names. I have my issues with plastic, but I'll agree that it is convenient and has had some amazing applications. The problem is that no one here was educated about what to do with plastic when it doesn't function in its designated manner anymore. So this country is covered with littered plastic. Consequences of lack of education. And I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. So as people in a developing nation, let's try to at least do the service of providing some education along with our new ideas/technology so as not to screw over some poor country trying to keep up to date.