"When I was young, in the late twentieth century, we accessed the internet the way God intended: with a computer over a dial-up connection. In the snow . . . Uphill . . . Both Ways!"
And way back then there was a very real concern over the tendency of computer and internet users to be both white and male. This phenomenon was not really given much attention at first as very few people outside of the military, academic research and computer science circles (all of which also tended to be white and male) knew about the internet. However, with the invention of the world wide web and with "America Online" allowing its, at the time, massive user base access to the web, it rapidly became clear that whatever the future held was going to be built around the web. A short time later the term “digital divide” would begin cropping up everywhere. There were soon plenty of studies that clearly demonstrated this divide and for several years many short-sighted bureaucrats would suggest addressing this problem by throwing money at it. Funny Story: It turns out that did not make the problem go away.
Now, had those overwhelmingly white, male bureaucrats stopped writing checks and, instead, bothered to check with the people sitting on the other side of that divide, they might have heard accounts of something much more shocking than a demographic under-representation on the world wide web. This could have saved a fair amount of paper, not to mention many hours spent in fruitless meetings. It turns out that this digital divide was a symptom of something much, much deeper, far more sinister and much older than computer networking.
The problem is that we live in a patriarchal society. It is obvious to most of us that the game has been rigged nearly from the start to favor the landed gentry. There are many theories of why and how light-skinned men took control of virtually all western societies and these theories make for fascinating reading. But, regardless of the how or why, not one among us can deny that control was usurped and that processes, laws, dogma, mores and even religious traditions were carefully constructed to try and keep it that way for as long as possible.
Combine this intentional power grab with the phenomenon sometimes mislabeled as the “tyranny of the majority” and you get old, wealthy, white men running the show. And the funny thing about majorities is that, even in a democracy with secure voting rights for all, the majority are still able to oppress minorities without even trying or being cognizant of the true implications of their actions or inaction. This is because of a deceptively simple problem hidden just below the surface in many accepted western, capitalistic concepts such as supply and demand and majority rule.
Before you declare me a hopeless radical, give me a chance to explain myself in one short demonstration. Let’s say, for example, you have a company that makes guitars and that you and your employees, like the majority of humans, are right-handed. Even if you do not have anything against left-handed people, and genuinely wish them well, you are almost certainly going to contribute to their oppression and severely compromise their choice of instruments unless you take proactive steps to do otherwise. Look at what simple supply and demand economics tells us. On the chance that you even decide that it might be profitable to produce a left-handed instrument, it is going to be inferior to your right-handed instruments since your shop and your employees will be setup and trained to produce right-handed instruments. Therefore, if you even concede to make a left-handed guitar, you will almost certainly charge more for what will likely be a poorer instrument. That is a gross oversimplification of a thorny theory with an intentionally innocuous outcome, but I think it makes the point.
Now let us get back to computers and the internet. There is a very real authoritarian doctrine in western culture that seeks to keep the reigns of power in the hands of the patriarch. Of that there is no doubt. Women and minorities have, of course been historically deprived of everything from learning to write, learning math, learning engineering, etc.. This has gone on for so long and is so ingrained in our culture that those in power do not even have to actively oppress to inflict damage. Our traditional gender roles and racial stereotypes do the work without anyone having to actually say or do anything. Add to this plenty of people who still do and say plenty to support active oppression and you get . . . us. It is a difficult problem precisely because of the subtle ways in which it is sometimes expressed.
So finally we come to the biggest hurdle to bridging the digital divide which is that works most often cited come from a time when the world was still accessing the internet exclusively with computers. Whenever one of those old articles pops up, I just kept thinking of my wife and all of her friends constantly checking everything on their iPhones. The fact that computers are now a distinct minority on the web might give people with only access to the old studies unwarranted comfort in dismissing the still-all-too-real divide. Imagine the irony if smartphones and Instagram could actually claim victory where all those minds and dollars could not. No. It would be far better for us to admit that access was never the most significant issue. The divide was never really about whether or not a specific group can access or use for the internet. It is a combination of motive, intent, benefit and the level of interaction that a group is capable of realizing that is the real question. Checking Facebook, playing games, and sending email are qualitatively removed by an order of magnitude from starting an online business or developing a new application.
And so I now humbly announce a long-overdue moniker change for the "digital divide" brand. I believe the market is ripe for the name "digital achievement gap" or DAP for short. This name change will put the onus on developing equal demographic representation with regards to computer device skills rather than outdated ideas of access. Access to the web is pretty universal these days. We need to spend more time paying attention to what is being done with that access. Programming classes, venture capital and business development will help. However, at the core we need to make sure that everyone can visualize a place for themselves at the table.
Several years ago I volunteered to teach .html and web page creation at an inner-city school. The school had all the computers and network equipment you might find at a wealthy suburban school and yet the computers were only used for doing drill and kill games and the occasional web search. In fact, they had two very nice labs with brand new computers. However, no one had bothered to plug in the switch for one of the labs. Therefore, even though all the computers were wired, the lab had no internet access! After plugging that lab (which would become my classroom) into the wide area network, I began asking about student's favorite websites to try and determine what sort of layout we might start with. I discovered that few of them had ever used a computer to do anything other than play games or look for music. Those students ended up creating a website for their school and the web became a new country to explore for many of them. The lesson I learned that year was that just buying a bunch of computers does nothing to address the digital divide.
The irony is that the lack of computer skill I witnessed that year is rapidly becoming part of a vicious circle as the trend towards distance and online education means that those with the ability to leverage scripting, rich online resources, and applications continue to build upon their advantage. The lack of the skills themselves become the barrier to learning the skill. Only by adding computer science, digital citizenship and web studies to our core curriculum will we put these skills where they belong: as yet another academic foundation missing in the achievement gap.
If we can find a way to force schools and local governments to address the knowledge barrier and we will soon have a richer more varied menu of applications and websites and services. That is what equity will look like.
And way back then there was a very real concern over the tendency of computer and internet users to be both white and male. This phenomenon was not really given much attention at first as very few people outside of the military, academic research and computer science circles (all of which also tended to be white and male) knew about the internet. However, with the invention of the world wide web and with "America Online" allowing its, at the time, massive user base access to the web, it rapidly became clear that whatever the future held was going to be built around the web. A short time later the term “digital divide” would begin cropping up everywhere. There were soon plenty of studies that clearly demonstrated this divide and for several years many short-sighted bureaucrats would suggest addressing this problem by throwing money at it. Funny Story: It turns out that did not make the problem go away.
Now, had those overwhelmingly white, male bureaucrats stopped writing checks and, instead, bothered to check with the people sitting on the other side of that divide, they might have heard accounts of something much more shocking than a demographic under-representation on the world wide web. This could have saved a fair amount of paper, not to mention many hours spent in fruitless meetings. It turns out that this digital divide was a symptom of something much, much deeper, far more sinister and much older than computer networking.
The problem is that we live in a patriarchal society. It is obvious to most of us that the game has been rigged nearly from the start to favor the landed gentry. There are many theories of why and how light-skinned men took control of virtually all western societies and these theories make for fascinating reading. But, regardless of the how or why, not one among us can deny that control was usurped and that processes, laws, dogma, mores and even religious traditions were carefully constructed to try and keep it that way for as long as possible.
Combine this intentional power grab with the phenomenon sometimes mislabeled as the “tyranny of the majority” and you get old, wealthy, white men running the show. And the funny thing about majorities is that, even in a democracy with secure voting rights for all, the majority are still able to oppress minorities without even trying or being cognizant of the true implications of their actions or inaction. This is because of a deceptively simple problem hidden just below the surface in many accepted western, capitalistic concepts such as supply and demand and majority rule.
Before you declare me a hopeless radical, give me a chance to explain myself in one short demonstration. Let’s say, for example, you have a company that makes guitars and that you and your employees, like the majority of humans, are right-handed. Even if you do not have anything against left-handed people, and genuinely wish them well, you are almost certainly going to contribute to their oppression and severely compromise their choice of instruments unless you take proactive steps to do otherwise. Look at what simple supply and demand economics tells us. On the chance that you even decide that it might be profitable to produce a left-handed instrument, it is going to be inferior to your right-handed instruments since your shop and your employees will be setup and trained to produce right-handed instruments. Therefore, if you even concede to make a left-handed guitar, you will almost certainly charge more for what will likely be a poorer instrument. That is a gross oversimplification of a thorny theory with an intentionally innocuous outcome, but I think it makes the point.
Now let us get back to computers and the internet. There is a very real authoritarian doctrine in western culture that seeks to keep the reigns of power in the hands of the patriarch. Of that there is no doubt. Women and minorities have, of course been historically deprived of everything from learning to write, learning math, learning engineering, etc.. This has gone on for so long and is so ingrained in our culture that those in power do not even have to actively oppress to inflict damage. Our traditional gender roles and racial stereotypes do the work without anyone having to actually say or do anything. Add to this plenty of people who still do and say plenty to support active oppression and you get . . . us. It is a difficult problem precisely because of the subtle ways in which it is sometimes expressed.
So finally we come to the biggest hurdle to bridging the digital divide which is that works most often cited come from a time when the world was still accessing the internet exclusively with computers. Whenever one of those old articles pops up, I just kept thinking of my wife and all of her friends constantly checking everything on their iPhones. The fact that computers are now a distinct minority on the web might give people with only access to the old studies unwarranted comfort in dismissing the still-all-too-real divide. Imagine the irony if smartphones and Instagram could actually claim victory where all those minds and dollars could not. No. It would be far better for us to admit that access was never the most significant issue. The divide was never really about whether or not a specific group can access or use for the internet. It is a combination of motive, intent, benefit and the level of interaction that a group is capable of realizing that is the real question. Checking Facebook, playing games, and sending email are qualitatively removed by an order of magnitude from starting an online business or developing a new application.
And so I now humbly announce a long-overdue moniker change for the "digital divide" brand. I believe the market is ripe for the name "digital achievement gap" or DAP for short. This name change will put the onus on developing equal demographic representation with regards to computer device skills rather than outdated ideas of access. Access to the web is pretty universal these days. We need to spend more time paying attention to what is being done with that access. Programming classes, venture capital and business development will help. However, at the core we need to make sure that everyone can visualize a place for themselves at the table.
Several years ago I volunteered to teach .html and web page creation at an inner-city school. The school had all the computers and network equipment you might find at a wealthy suburban school and yet the computers were only used for doing drill and kill games and the occasional web search. In fact, they had two very nice labs with brand new computers. However, no one had bothered to plug in the switch for one of the labs. Therefore, even though all the computers were wired, the lab had no internet access! After plugging that lab (which would become my classroom) into the wide area network, I began asking about student's favorite websites to try and determine what sort of layout we might start with. I discovered that few of them had ever used a computer to do anything other than play games or look for music. Those students ended up creating a website for their school and the web became a new country to explore for many of them. The lesson I learned that year was that just buying a bunch of computers does nothing to address the digital divide.
The irony is that the lack of computer skill I witnessed that year is rapidly becoming part of a vicious circle as the trend towards distance and online education means that those with the ability to leverage scripting, rich online resources, and applications continue to build upon their advantage. The lack of the skills themselves become the barrier to learning the skill. Only by adding computer science, digital citizenship and web studies to our core curriculum will we put these skills where they belong: as yet another academic foundation missing in the achievement gap.
If we can find a way to force schools and local governments to address the knowledge barrier and we will soon have a richer more varied menu of applications and websites and services. That is what equity will look like.