Nidahas » Musings on design, web standards and free software from a Sri Lankan geek.

It happens both ways

2005.09.11

We often forget that the web is an open medium that speaks to the whole world. People have to be extra careful when throwing stuff online - you just might end up hurting someone, perhaps inadvertently, but quite possibly very badly. It is true that the eastern world has had difficulties in making itself heard online, but that is no excuse to turn frustration in to indifference, or worse, hatred.

On the Slashdot bullshit entry here at Nidahas Mat left an interesting comment:

We all have predispositions. Whether it’s a country, person or an experience - it’s an inherent quality in people.

To which I left a pompous answer saying “Yeah, you do need thick skin, especially when it’s brown”.

And then few days later I made a post that involved certain remarks on the situation at New Orleans which was rather sarcastic (actually, that’s an understatement). I took it off after reading a comment left by James. That post should never have gone online, and I sincerely apologize for being a jerk. Racism and indifference to other people’s suffering, no matter where it comes from, should be vehemently despised.

We all make mistakes, and we learn from them. What I learnt from this is that shit can happen both ways. If you don’t do something about it, you’ll always be in the receiving end. If you’re not on the lookout for lapses in your part, you’ll be shooting down your own argument. It doesn’t help us in our efforts to pimp asian design and designers if we start ridiculing our audience, even unintentionally. I’ve seen better people slip in to this mistake.

Take the Web Standards Project, for example. From the WaSP FAQ:

For an educational site, it makes sense to allow access not only to affluent, able-bodied school-children with graphical browsers, but also to children in Third-World countries who only have text-based browsers access, or disabled students using specialized browsers.

I’m sure they didn’t mean to use the term “third world countries” in a derogatory manner, but for someone like me from that region, it just ruins a beautiful web page. It immediately brands WaSP as a “first world” thing, something “they” can do to help “us” rather than something we all can do to help ourselves. It is important to watch our words when we know people from all over the world are going to fight for our cause, sooner or later. Perhaps we were late in adopting web standards, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re any less passionate about them.

There’s no way we can stop everyone from calling our countries “third world”, in the same way we can’t stop people from calling Bush an idiot. What we can do is change the way we perceive their use of the term. I don’t know about Bush, but at Nidahas, being from the third world is a “differentiation factor” (let’s just use marketese now that we’ve already used “branding” as well). For us, a third world designer is someone who gets the job done with minimum resources, a hacker of sorts. Nothing is third about the talent and ingenuity of people in this part of the world, even if we’re third in every other way. We intend to rebrand “third world” as something good, atleast within the small sphere of standards advocates.

In the mean time, may I suggest WaSP use the more third-world-friendly term “developing nations”?

Update: As Ben mentions in the comments, WaSP has since changed the FAQ. We appreciate the move.

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