-------------
Andrew Thomas <andrewt@ucla.edu>
Subject: [ed253aS01]Digital divide and Robins & Webster -- some thoughts
Date: 4/27/01 11:32pm
Strangely, perhaps, I found the chapter on education to be particularly relevant to the digital divide. Though I'm sure we'll pan R&W in class Monday, I think they provide an invaluable service of forcing us to confront our deep partiality of new technology. Though we're critical of Gates, I think we're all a lot closer to him than we may care to admit.
Through Robins and Webster's optic, the digital divide can be viewed as the response to social inequality by technophiles. Preoccupation with the digital divide presupposes that access to technology = social mobility. Kellner has stated the inverse: no knowledge of technology, no chance of success. But Robins and Webster raise the corollary. They quote the Brown and Scase study of recruitment practices, which suggested that qualities employers looked for were coded versions of old social ranks. The growth in university education didn't precede a commensurate growth in upper-level management jobs. Those privileged positions have stayed within the family. In the US, we've seen a growth in VocTec and IT continuing education. These people, though, fill up the lower ranks of technical jobs and employers see them as inferior. A certain amount of mobility is possible, but it's scarce and tenuous. What about the engineers (as in Michael Lewis' "The New New Thing") who've become the captains of industry? Is this an ascendance of engineers, or of engineering? In other words, engineering in the past has been to a degree what immigrants and working class youth have pursued in order to get a foot in the door and these jobs have been relatively well-paid and stable. Still, the engineers were not at the helm of large corporations, even those like IBM. Now they are at the helm, but is it that engineers have taken over or that those who would have been in the leadership positions anyway decided to pursue engineering rather than business degrees?
What I'm saying is that preoccupation with the digital divide potentially masks the fact that social stratification is resistant to skills-acquisition. Crudely put, social mobility based on family ties (like those of our current president) still trumps social mobility developed through skills acquisition.
You may say yes, but improving access to what Robins and Webster call ICTs is an important first step. Robins and Webster's important contribution to this debate, however, is to implore up to stop, pause and reflect (the function of a joke...to reference D&G, I believe). This sort of incrementalism, based as it is on a tenuous formula of skills = success, can serve to distract us from the ultimate goal, which is deeper and wider democracy. In sum, we must talk about the digital divide in these terms: how can we utilize computer technologies in our struggle against entrenched social stratification and break through the barriers to mobility this structure has erected. I still maintain this may be possible (i.e., through using infotech to democratize discourse) though it's important to note where infotech manifests itself as absolute mobilization of labor, cybersurveillance and other ogres of modern capitalism. Where I disagree with Robins and Webster is where they share with Foucault the notion that any kind of observation serves only to objectify, that profiling is, primarily, oppressive. I think the logical extension of this is that reclusion is the only escape.
-------------
From: Richard Kahn <DeluzianFlow@aol.com>
Subject: Digital divide & Robins and Webster
Date: 4/27/01 12:09pm
A commendable post worthy of a better answer than this...some questions arise:
a) by "democratize discourse" are you intending the R&W combative model, or
the model of consensual striving that they fight? i would be interested in
your opinion as someone who is obviously very tech knowledgeable about their
claims that the Net is basically a consensual technology that asks people to
form watered-down commodity identities.
b) would you accept that IT technologies have as their ultimate capital goal
the erection of a giant middle class that drains from both the top and the
bottom?
c) do you agree that there is room to fight against inequity on macro and
micro levels?
R&W fight IT on macro level by representing it as but one possible avenue for
the evolution of society -- a highly questionable avenue considering the
plethora of other human potentials. However, it occurs to me that if IT
technologies reproduce historical capital relations in form (and so content)
as R&W say, it therefore also reproduces/furthers historical struggle against
those relations. By proliferating voices (new voices, unheard voices,
questioning voices) through its structures, we destabilize those structures
and move them in new directions from below. Thus, on the micro-level, any
individual creative use of IT is a microfight against corporate pressure to
use it only in certain ways and for certain reasons.
d) do you think that R&W would counter this by saying that it unfolds as a
capital vehicle of such great domination (global) that it subverts
micro-rebellions of the Gods Must Be Crazy sort by assimilating them and
reproducing them as friendly, commodity versions of its own agenda?
-------------
From: Doug Kellner <kellner@ucla.edu>
Subject: Digital divide & Robins and Webster
Date: 4/30/01 9:02am
Hey everyone:
my dsl was down so i'm catching up with the flurry of activity!
The new Robins and Webster looks good but let's describe them as "theorists
who advance the cutting edge of critical neo-luddism" rather than
"technophobia" that is a bit negative...
The comments below by Andrew and Richard dichotomize debates over net
politics and effects to two opposing positions, a polarizing we need to
overcome:
1) democracy as difference versus consensus. Curiously, this debate
replicates the Habermas-Lyotard debate where JH argues for consensus as the
criterion of truth and democracy, Lyotard for dissensus and difference. In
fact, I would see democracy as both a diverse debate that presents
conflicting opinions and attempts in some contexts to reach consensus while
registering differences. Put differently, deliberation, debate, and reaching
agreement are different stages of a democratic process so it is a mistake to
identify anyone with democracy tout court;
2) the net has been accused of producing a fragmenting heterogenization and
now is getting blasted for increasing homogenization; paradoxically, I would
maintain it promotes both at once and there are positives and negatives on
both sides...
R&W go for the bad homogenization, surveillance, domination, side, there are
arguably positives here; e.g. not bad to have shared spaces and opinions, to
mediate differences, etc.
3) and as for politics we need to go for the micro and macro at once; see
the last chapter of my book POSTMODERN THEORY for the argument.
See you in class, dk
-------------
From: Doug Kellner <kellner@ucla.edu>
Subject: FEED Alert: Debunking the Digital Divide
Date: 5/2/01 2:02pm
Q U O T A T I O N O F T H E W E E K
It is certainly true that there are racialized disparities in access. But
it is also true people of color have been producing, manipulating, reconfiguring, and consuming technologies for decades. In fact, we would not even have these technologies if not for the work of women of color in Silicon Valley and in export processing zones across the world. And our musical genres and artistic forms would be far less rich if not for the artists and musicians of color who have been using technologies-the computer, scanner, the sampler, mixer, etc.—to invent and rework images and sounds. But we don't ever hear stories about their interactions with technologies because the digital divide has conditioned us to assume that technologically disadvantaged means technologically disabled. As a conceptual framework, it has no other way of interpreting the very complicated relationships between race and technology.
-- Thuy Linh Tu in the FEED Dialog: Debunking the Digital Divide
http://automedia.unitymail.net/UM/T.asp?A1412.20219.1099.1.14459
-------------
Andrew Thomas <andrewt@ucla.edu>
Subject: Fw: FEED Alert: Debunking the Digital Divide
Date: 5/02/01 2:11pm
This feeds into my suggestion that the "underprivileged" (perhaps
'subaltern' is a useful concept in this context) may be best positioned to
understand and exploit the nascent essential capabilities of this
technology.
I hasten to add, however, that as a political stance this notion is an easy
resource for apologists. The true digdiv issue is distribution of resources.
In other words, the creation of Jazz doesn't make segregation OK.
-------------
From: Lisa Dague <huaiza@hotmail.com>
Subject: Digital divide
Date: 5/7/01 12:17am
Hello,
I'm a bit slow checking my e-mail this week. These are interesting
questions. I'm considering them in light of the McLuhan reading we had over
the past week.
1) What sense do you make of the concept of the Digital divide? i.e.. How
do you define the digital divide?
It seems to me that there are many ways of understanding digital divide. I
am most concerned with a macro concept of the divide as it relates to
international relations and globalization. Is computer technology the
best/only way in which nations can develop? Considering that they were
designed for North American / European audience, climate, and resource
consumption patterns, computers may not prove sustainable or appropriate in
certain settings. If that is the case, where are individuals in those
settings left in comparison to citizens of computerized nations?
I also wonder if McLuhan's ideas about how media developments change social
balances in sense representations and inherently interact with other media
to be interesting in the digital divide context. Since McLuhan argues that
the adaptation and use of computers depends on the technologies already
present and the current balance of extended senses, it would seem arguable
that the digital divide could be described as differing strategies for using
computer media caused by how different groups have reacted to and integrated
computers into their other media. If the other media are lacking or
incompatible, this could cause problems.
2) What are some ideas you have for bridging this divide and promoting
technological justice?
I think someone needs to redefine the problem. How can computers be made or
redesigned to be useable in the contexts that exist rather than forcing
people in those contexts to adapt to computers in the same way others before
them have? McLuhan argues that new media "are put out long before they are
thought out." (49). Would it be possible to think out the effects, uses and
possible interactions of computers with other media before insisting on
introducing them everywhere? I have my doubts, but...
3) How would you engage high school students in studying issues of the
Digital Divide?
I haven't taught in high school in the US, but I might engage my community
college ESL students in digital divide issues by first broaching computers
in general in discussion. How are computers used today in school, work, at
home? Does anyone in class have one? Who uses the labs at school? What
are some reasons people might have for not using computers? Then I would
probably send the students out to gather whatever information they could
find on the subject through interviews, web searches, library... I would
probably have the students compare computer use in their home countries with
use in the US, discuss it in groups, discuss it as a class... I would try to
find something for the students to read about the topic, or a video or audio
recording to get some outside opinions on the topic. Then I would have them
write about it. I don't know how engaging that would be for high school
students here, but I have followed similar methods on health care system
issues and other topics which seemed to work well at the community college
level.
See you all in 16 hours or so,
Lisa
-------------
From: Doug Kellner <kellner@ucla.edu>
Subject: Digital divide
Date: 5/7/01 11:27am
Hey everyone:
Lisa's application of McLuhan to digital divide below is extremely
illuminating. I think its fair to say that McLuhan gives us an entirely new
way of looking at computers and other technologies and issues like the
digital divide. Just to repeat a couple of points that Lisa makes below that
strike me as extremely important:
1) if computers are a new environment that affect us in multiple ways, its
not enough just to put computers in people's hands and tell them what to do,
using a standardized model and method. Rather different people are going to
have extremely different uses and do very different things.
2) Thus, to understand computers we thus need to have a very systematic
understanding of how computers provide new environments and ways of doing
things; and in teaching computer literacy we need to convey a sense of
multiple literacies.
Thus "overcoming the digital divide" involves much more than just making
computers accessible and teaching people how to use them but requires a new
understanding of education and literacy.
We can discuss tonight, cheers, dk
|
