In my digital inclusion mahi, fragility is a constant state which motivates me to strive to stay strong to succeed.
Fragility may be regarded as a weakness and debilitating condition for some, but I love fragility’s connection with exquisiteness, fineness, and brittleness.*
Equally interesting to me is that their antonyms include roughness and rudeness, solidity and strength, and coarseness.
As a social entrepreneur for digital inclusion, I feel success or failure is a totally inappropriate way to measure performance. Perhaps on a project-by-project basis, it is OK, so accountability for results can be measured.
But in the long haul, fragility must equally be valued, else my enterprise becomes a ‘cash cow’ and loses track of its purpose to serve those at the ‘bottom of the pile’ and becomes a ‘cherry picker’ looking for easier targets.
Life and time is not a straight line, and whilst things begin and end, the digital divide endures.
No one is going to solve the digital divide problem in a hurry, so the best way is to treat it as a journey between states.
A successful digital inclusion social entrepreneur steers a fragility dashboard with these dynamic dials to read the situation:
- As exquisiteness pushed and pulled by roughness and rudeness
- As fineness balanced by solidity and strength
- As brittleness versus coarseness
Striving to help people in the most fragile positions in life be digitally included is challenging to be sure; however, equally, it gives me a powerful purpose to jump out of bed each day and do my best on these terms.
* “Fragility.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/fragility. Accessed 14 Jun. 2024.
This blog post is a collaborative creation by Alistair Fraser, with the innovative assistance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o and DALL-E 3, showcasing the synergy of human creativity and advanced AI technology.