digital divide 2.0
I just emailed this to the CRACIN list:
I thought people might like this one. The person was referring to the way that municipal wireless networks might be rolled out.
“Digital Divide 2.0″
http://ken.ipl31.net/2006/04/01/community-wireless-summit-2006-soundbites/
The term “digital divide 2.0″ shows up 24 times on the net - according to google. I’m sure that we’ll start to hear it more.
Ulises Ali Mejias (aka: ideant) - someone I briefly interacted with when a few of us were first talking about group uses of del.icio.us - recently wrote something interesting on the upcoming Digital Divide 2.0 re: ubiquitous computing:
Digital Divide Redux
Most of the discourse surrounding the digital divide (cf. Sassi 2005) centers on the ‘problem’ of those who have no access to technology, and what the role of those who do have access should be in addressing this problem. The digital divide has become a metanarrative in its own right, establishing that the inevitable goal is more technology, applied to more aspects of our lives, and available to more people. Only then will the playing field be leveled, and true progress will be achieved, we are told.
I do not mean to suggest that some of the problems of our age could not be alleviated with more technology or, more accurately perhaps, with a more even distribution of the technology we already have. But here I am interested in the discourse invoked by the word ‘divide.’ As I have summarized elsewhere (Mejias, 1999), the discourse of Modernity relies on a distinction between modern societies and pre-modern societies to establish a primacy of the former over the latter, a primacy defined to a large extent in terms of technological progress that pre-modern societies must strive to achieve. Massey (1999) has argued that this dynamic enacts in space what is assumed to be a lag in time:
When we use terms such as ‘‘advanced’’, ‘‘backward’’, ‘‘developing’’, ‘‘modern’’ in reference to different regions of the planet what is happening is that spatial difference are being imagined as temporal… The implication is that places are not genuinely different; rather they are just ahead or behind in the same story: their ‘‘difference’’ consists only in their place in the historical queue. (Massey 1999, quoted in Rodgers 2004, p.14)
However, it is not simply a matter of waiting for those ‘laggards’ to catch up. As anyone who has seriously studied the development of the so-called Third World can surmise, capitalism requires the existence of lack for the many in order to generate plenty for the few. The digital divide, in other words, is there by design.. . . .
In Defense of the Digital Divide as Paralogy (v 1.0) - full post
Another quote from the same post “If we are to take Lyotard’s analysis seriously, the gadgets and gizmos we are currently enamored with —edublogs, eduwikis, eduRSS feeds, and such— are nothing more than the tools of hegemonic capitalism.”
Frankly - I wish this issue was talked about more. Yes -Stephane - there are probably lots of academics and others already discussing it and I’m not saying that I came up with this idea ;-) - but I wish that I heard this being discussed a lot more.
This has a lot to do with my hesitancy to describe myself as techno-progressive.