Monday, March 2, 2009

The Effect of Poverty on the Use of Technology (Part 2)

There are numerous factors that affect the flow of market forces. To name a few, some of these are population, GDP of the area, access to the area through physical transportation, possibility of continuation of business.

What poverty does is to suck in a vicious cycle of lack of access and lack of investments the inhabitants of a particular area. I define poverty here in terms of geographic limitations to develop my discussion of its effect on remote and rural areas, which I suppose are not as technologically advanced as their urban counterparts.

I asked myself, when I was a kid, why do people need or want to move to Metro Manila to search for a job to sustain their way of living? (I grew up in Bani, Pangasinan, when it was not yet as developed today). The answer, it seems, was due to the slow traffic of investments towards my childhood hometown. And this slow traffic, coupled with the information that rural people gather from urbanized areas (i.e. about the vast opportunities, their different and somehow envied way of living), created the idea that life in more technologically advanced places would be easier.

In a way, this is true. Life is easier with technology helping us in our day to day lives. However, with technology at hand, life becomes different from what we were used to (unless we already grew up in such a set-up). And this difference makes life with technology complicated.

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Rivera, Jan Michael A.
02-16779

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