Needle In A Haystack

One of the things that myself and others have said in the past is along the lines of the next Albert Einstein being in some part of the world where there is presently no internet access. It's one of the rhetorical statements made about the digital divide that is used to demonstrate that we have no control over where geniuses are born.

But I now question this statement for a variety of reasons. First of all, internet access will not dictate where the geniuses are born - it will dictate what the geniuses can access, or not. And then, too, is a genius someone who would benefit from the Internet? History is littered with geniuses that didn't have internet access. In fact, people who are considered geniuses in history books can be linked to the fact that the internet exists at all.

Blanketing the Earth with a warm and fuzzy Internet may nurture a genius - but it can also work against a genius as well, making them even more remote from their immediate surroundings where they could, quite possibly, have the greatest impact. Would a young genius be wasted in coming to solutions for the their environs? Are we being reasonable? A form of digital divide will always exist because there will never be 'equal' access. There will always be differences in access. It's the way that the world is, and while it is not the way that we want the world we should accept that equal access is only something that we can approximate.

So I'm not sure if the 'genius in a rural village' is a worthwhile piece of rhetoric. Maybe approximating equality is.