Will Some Cultures Leapfrog the Industrial Age?

I was just taking a walk and listening to an NPR podcast about an Afghan version of American Idol that recently finished its first hugely popular and wildly controversial fist season on what I assume is the bravest television network in Afghanistan.

The emergence and popularity of this show in a country often portrayed as America’s polar opposite says a lot about how we are all more alike than different.  However, that’s not the point of this post.

During an interview with one of the Afghan show’s creators, it was mentioned that the SMS voting in final rounds was so intense that it literally overloaded the network and temporarily shut it down.  The creator said he wasn’t surprised since this was the first time Afghan audiences had had the opportunity to participate in a show in this manner and that many were not familiar with sending text messages.

Well, no shit! As far as I understand it, Afghanistan is still largely an agrarian society.  While some of the innovations of the industrial age are present, this is not a part of the world that ever made the true transition that we saw in the United States and Europe.  This means that Afghanistan, along with numerous other cultures from places like China, India and throughout Africa, will be simply skipping the Industrial Age altogether as the Digital Age takes shape.

We are already seeing amazing examples of how the Digital Age is able to be adopted by each culture in unique ways that tend to support and expand on existing societal foundations.  Think of how rural farmers are now able to use cell phones to check on the price of produce at markets a two-days walk away, allowing him to cart the proper amounts of the most valuable items.

While the Industrial Age certainly created sweeping changes in the Western world, it is going to be fascinating to see what happens to those cultures that simply skip it altogether.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment