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.

Despite all my pictures on Flickr, there is a large gap of my life that is without images. From the age of 10 to 35, almost no images of me exist - and those 25 years have a lot of memories. A lot of friends in different parts of the world. A lot of people would have called me a misfit during those years - even a freak at times. The long hair years, the short hair years, the 'go fast' years, the sleeping on the couch and floor years.

They were good years. I made so many good friends in those years, especially from 17 to 30. Some of them were swallowed whole by the digital divide - at times, a name will come to me and I'll search for them on the web, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. They're gone. Its almost as though they never existed. So when I read this article, it really hit home. Nowadays, most of my friends are a part of the digital circle to some degree. My mother, on fixed income, is in some of these circles and thrives in some of them like Flickr. But ol' Marc, my roommate and Arby's junkie? Gone like so many others.

They don't exist except in my memory. I don't expect them to be dead, mind you, but for all intents and purposes these people do not exist on the Internet. For all I know, they're working the same dead end jobs we were all fighting to avoid. They might be married now with little ones running around, and I daresay that I think a few of them may be behind bars. None of them were bad people, mind you, but some of us made bad choices (including me). Some bad choices just lead to other bad choices. Life goes on.

I remember when I returned to Trinidad. It was part of a year long negotiation between the old man and myself - on the phone, he would tell me how great things were and that he wished I was down here. After a year of that, any well intentioned son would consider it. And the potential was supposed to be there; Trinidad was supposed to be an internet hub in some of the original plans I had seen in the 90s.

And I wanted to start my own software company. A proprietary software company, back then, doing contract work and competing with the folks in India. It seemed possible over the phone, my father being the bright ray of sunshine that he could be when he believed in something. I'd seen it before. In the 1980s, when he was trying to sell Rain-X down here and no one was buying (and for a while there during this decade, guess what? 20 years later...) When he was starting the advertising magazine from within this same house, the 'Trini Trader' - and when a fellow named Jeeran Singh hosed him on that by doing sales and pocketing the money. 'The Solar Company', where I wrote his business plan and when the bank wouldn't loan him money because of the collateral... it was my issue with the business plan. Someone had to be blamed, I suppose.