In a couple of months Apple will release their next version of iOS, when it does one new feature will be more important to me than all the others: the ability to teach an Apple device to pronounce my name correctly. It’s such a tiny thing, but for me and millions of others who don’t have names like Dave or Jennifer, it will represent something else: a way to feel just that much more included in the digital revolution.

Since the Internet age began, we’ve heard talk of democracy, openness and inclusiveness. As Evgeny Morozov points out in his most recent book To Save Everything, Click Here, Facebook’s mission statement is “to make the world more open and connected,” and founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to use technology to solve the “really big issues for the world.” But for many that ideal hasn’t rung entirely true. For obvious reasons, the companies of Silicon Valley first launch products aimed at “mainstream” users. Though that can result in small things like knowing the pronunciation of some names and not others, more complex issues – like which languages services are available in – can also arise, and in the process, make the web more inviting to some than others.

Twitter, for example, was only available in English and Japanese for the first few years of its existence, limiting its initial growth and utility to those two groups of speakers. It’s a trend that continues. Just this week, a promising new discussion service called Potluck launched, and it too is English-only for now. While the practical reasons are obvious, it inadvertently sets an unfortunate precedent in which the latest and greatest are reserved for the places in which the technology gets made – and everywhere else is an afterthought. If these new digital services are as revolutionary and society-changing as their makers say, there’s something profoundly unfortunate about that dynamic.

Of course, websites and apps are made all over the world. China has a Twitter-like service called Sina Weibo. Meanwhile sites like Google Plus – which have failed to hit critical mass in North America – are big in places such as India and have been tailored to those markets. The limiting factor in getting access to new digital tools tends to be much more basic things like electricity, Web access and money, and obviously those are the larger issues that need to be solved. More.

See: The Globe and Mail

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