0nes and zer1s

This week I read Mind the Gap: The Digital Divide as the Civil Rights Issue of the New Millennium by Andy Carvin, NPR's senior product manager for online communities.

I found the article to be very interesting. I will admit, I try to get an impression of where an author is going asap. When he started out the paper with overused catchphrases of the internet and stated that before the internet, "click here" was completely baffling, I started to get the feeling that somebody was about to feed me a line. However, I was relieved when the paper took a turn for the better and he gave me some numbers. I will paraphrase them here:

• Households making $75K or more were 20 times more likely to have net access. I took that to mean if you took a sample of people that was the same size out of each income bracket, that for every one household with an income under $75K that had internet access, there would be 20 households with the higher income that had access.


• 6.6% of Americans with education levels of elementary school or less use the Internet.


• In rural areas, people with college degrees are 11 times as likely to have a home computer and 26 times as likely to have home Internet access as those with only an elementary level education.


• People with college degrees are 10 times as likely to have Internet access at work than those with only some high school education.

I found these statistics to be pretty significant, although I would assume that conditions have improved over the last 8 years. He went on to state that although these statistics show a link between Internet access, education, and income, there are other implications aside from access alone. He goes on to mention that even if the people did have access, the type of content that would be accessible to them would be limited. People with lower literacy levels won't be able to take as much advantage of resources and information on the net as those who do. Other reasons he mentioned were that even though the technology is there, it doesn't necessarily mean it will be used and that if in order for the power of online communities to be utilized, a person has to be willing to make relationships in a virtual setting.

This paper got me to thinking a little more modernly about what the current generation of smart-phones and their Internet browsing abilities bring to the table of the digital divide. With a data plan, a typical phone can run close to twice the cost of broadband internet access at home. What kind of benefits will people with access to these devices with the world's information at their fingertips 24/7 enjoy? What sort of disadvantage will those without be at?

Cyborg'd

I just read Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" This blog entry discusses what I took from it to some depth.

I found this to be a tough read, mostly due to my own limited vocabulary. I am glad she used all of the big, picturesque words though, otherwise it probably would have been REALLY long. :P As a side note, I wasn't aware that a lot of technology was so far advanced in 1985. The alignment between what she wrote about and modern technology is impressive.

The driving concept that I took from the paper was that the author perceived that technology may provide a way for certain groups of minority women (or even women in general) to find an identity or a sense of empowerment that might advance their cause as a group or as a gender in society. Throughout the essay, she talks about cyborgs, which are mash-ups of man and machine. She draws parallels between cyborgs and several aspects of humanity, such as an illegitimate child's independence from his/her father.

I think quite a bit of her talk of cyborgs and feminist comparisons to the metaphor went over my head and weren't gully realized by me.

With respect to gender and technology, I think that Haraway indicates that technology can open up doors for women. It wasn't clear to me if she meant that women would gain access to tech jobs because the men might not want to stoop so low as to do work for the military and women would find a good opportunity there. I sensed she was headed in that direction, but it seemed like she never really said.

I thought it was interesting that she pointed out that all the good technologies operate using things that we cant see (ie. televisions, cell-phones, etc).