“The stage is being set for a communications revolution.... In addition to the telephone and to the radio and television programs now available, there can come into homes and into business places audio, video and facsimile transmissions that will provide newspapers, mail service, banking and shopping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centers, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify. In short, every home and office will contain a communications center of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life.”
~Ralph Lee Smith
Anyone who’s met me in the physical realm knows that I’m a perennial optimist. I’m all about innovative (and preferably slightly off the wall) developments in contemporary society, especially when they relate to constructing sites of meaningful discourse. There are dozens of examples out there already involving digital media - many of the best of which are chronicled in Jessica Clark’s Public Media 2.0, including my personal favorite, World Without Oil.
And yet in moving towards the sort of participatory culture that is essential to the functioning of a democratic society I feel like this sort of approach is pretty impoverished. This isn’t to say I don’t like optimistic white papers about how to create a participatory future grounded in equality (Hell, I more or less dream about it), but sometimes (oftentimes) when reading them I get this sense of a techno-topian futurescape where we, as humans with Heads Up Displays will be able to create some imagined ideal Habermasian public sphere.
Certainly it’s fair to believe the future is full of the potential, but the language we use in describing it often obscures the structural barriers to a democra-topia free of second-class citizens. It’s like we’re marching behind a parade leader who’s convinced us to look up at the infinite possibility of the blue sky so we don’t ever see the potholes along the way – unless we’re in the unlikely margin who “just happens” to fall in.
Granted, unbridled optimism surrounding technology is anything but new – that quote that opened this whole post isn’t even about the internet (yeah, that’s how people talked about cable television in 1970). But if anything that just speaks to why it’s a problem. We seem to keep thinking the way to solve society’s problems is to invent some new platform or program, rather than to actually address the root cause.
Fairly intuitively, the initial stumbling block to discourse-enabling digital programs is access – particularly at home. Ellen Seiter makes this point pretty saliently with the simple parallel that no child who is only able to practice the piano in the corner of a school gym after school for a few hours until the janitor kicks him or her out is going to be a grand pianist – that is reserved for students with the privilege to have their own piano so they can not only practice but play and experiment as well (of course, there’s a lot more nuance in her full presentation of the argument). And many white papers take this point to heart and, like the Knight Commission, argue that broadband access should be made widely available so people can practice using technology at home.
But in presenting wider internet access as the solution, it washes over the cause of the problem in favor of focusing on the solution. Whether it’s purely class or race based isn’t terribly important to this point (of course it’s some intersection, and I personally lean on the side of a possessive investment in whiteness) – what is common, though, is that the structural reasons why some people cannot afford this access is scarcely, if at all, interrogated. So planned obsolescence would still mean lower classes are more likely to have out of date hardware that may be (or become) unable to perform critical functions – an effect redoubled by the inability to have multiple computers which would allow multiple family members to participate.
And the worst of these problems continue outside of technology generally. As a example illustrative of myriad others, children from lower socio-economic strata, primarily non-white and immigrant children, would still have a vocabulary that is 30 million words smaller than their more privileged peers by the age of 3, meaning the discourse they enter into is always already constrained. And that’s before even entering the extremely unequal school system.
Really, there are dozens of reasons why equal broadband access doesn’t mean equal access to participation – but the rhetoric used within these white papers certainly makes it seem as if everything will be equal with a few small changes that ensure access. Of course, to get policies passed this sort of language is understandable – on a very basic level, if it seems like THE solution, it will get more support.
But the more utopian/blue skies reforms that get passed, the harder is becomes to challenge the underlying inequality because those policies are used as excuses to say that disadvantages are not structural - making future struggles for parity of any sort that much more difficult, since they not only appear solved, but resources and time are misdirected to treating symptoms, all the while exacerbating the real issue and pacifying those who may otherwise help solve it.
I get not wanting to admit racism and classism are more than overt, individual acts of hate. It’s hard to see ourselves as perpetuating a racist/classist system (much less engage others in discourse about it). But maybe we should because otherwise we seem doomed to re-inscribe inequalities into every new “fix.” I want and can envision a democratic society based in rough equality, and I definitely think that new media literacies hold a lot of the keys to making that happen, but there’s no way it can happen if the focus is on hot new solutions rather than the problems needing solving.
No comments:
Post a Comment