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Volume I
Issue 5
8 September 1999 |
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Breaching the Digital Divide By Michael Nicolella Not long ago I was enrolled in an art class at a small university. The class, Digital Imaging, involved among other things art on the Internet. We had begun by using the pixel-editing program PhotoShop and were moving into methods of presentation. The students in the class came from many disciplines, which was a pleasant relief from the company of other art students, and our professor had a rare talent for working with people, to the point that finance majors unveiled some of the best work of the class, as my pretensions withered. A former skeptic, I remain enthralled with the possibilities that computers offer the artist. Still I sat in that class as we discussed the viability of web art and I said,"I think the Internet is pretty much a middle-class phenomenon." Attribute that statement to the environment that I was in at the time, or to remaining prejudices, or to personal web experiences that were narrow in their scope. Some of the people there took it as an accusation; I was not thinking of artists when I said this. The part of me that tends to make unreasonable demands was preoccupied with people who do not have reliable access to the Internet through schools or workplaces. I later decided that most people who like the idea of the Internet would seek out a way to have access to it. However if Internet technology is presented to people through billboards for online merchants and instant news update services there is something lacking in its promise. The nature of this promise and the source of its personal significance are not clear; inasmuch as I've ever understood my circumstances I have not seen any of my big ideas dependent upon anything that occurred during a given time, but I know all along that they have been. What seems banal one night, like a bus stop where I stand every evening, is thrilling the next as headlights come on at dusk. When younger I thought I would write for Road & Track magazine or design automobiles. These plans changed, and explaining why means referring to books I have read, people I have known, places I have been, and so on. So as for the Internet, I want everyone in the world to have it at their disposal. I have statistics from the United States Department of Commerce, from the report Falling Through the Net III: Defining the Digital Divide, released 8 July 1999 by its National Telecommunications and Information Administration. "Falling Through the Net III: Defining the Digital Divide demonstrates that users access the Internet for important, life-sustaining purposes such as job-hunting, education, and locating health information through libraries. This complements research by the 57,000-member ALA that indicates that already more than 75 percent of the nation's public library outlets are providing public access to the Internet." This quotation is from an American Library Association bulletin, which goes on to write that about seventy percent of rural libraries, and nearly eighty percent of libraries in poverty-stricken areas, provide Internet access. These statistics are fairly satisfying, considering the recentness of the Internet explosion, and they give truth to the democracies of commerce, thought, and personal life that are described by web proponents. Says Lynne Bradley, of the ALA: "Indeed, our nation's libraries are one of the strong, critical partners to build and maintain a sense of community and close the gap between the "have's" and "have not's." Libraries have historically served as people's universities. They will continue to provide access to information of all types and in all forms, including Internet access." So notwithstanding the paucity of Internet access, let alone personal computers, in low-income households, the most motivated percentage of low-income or rural populations has some access to the Internet for information necessities. It seems uncertain whether human curiosity is provoked and developed by the limited usage resulting from such restricted public access. When the Internet has been productive for users I know, the ease of online commerce and of point-to-point communication have been important. However the 'net also facilitates another sort of human exchange. For example, the mp3 binary music file format illustrates my regard for the Internet. Musicians revel in mp3 because it provides a standard distribution quality and frees them from the demands of the Wal-Mart and Sam Goody sorts of merchants who control most of the market access for music in this country. Being able to broadcast a graphic image and an idea, and ultimately something of enduring value, over computer monitors all over the planet in a manner that I have no ex post facto control over is a creation process that I will probably continue to sound out for some time. Since early childhood, time spent with these sorts of exploratory processes has been much of my best education. Throughout the history of industrial American life, there has been a lifestyle now known as "off-grid": generating one's own electricity, building an efficient fireplace to heat a house with culled waste-wood, recycling all waste, growing food organically on subsistence level, reusing rather than consuming commodities. I have been fascinated with this idea for some time, attracted to the romance and beauty of an industrious rural life, but unhappy with the implicit skepticism of its solitude. My enthusiasm for the dynamics of digital exchange technology sometimes seems merely a substitute mental hobby for time spent in the woods or working with my hands, but I know it is more than a surrogate. My concern for Internet access for marginalized people in the United States, let alone in Africa, sometimes seems as melancholy and dreamy as my environmentalism: storing a megabyte of data on the web burns something like a pound of coal. But satisfying myself with this inertia would leave me either utilitarian or thought-ridden, neither being assumptions I would make. For there is a different sort of necessity at work here. Resources: The American Library Association may be found online at http://www.ala.org/washoff A pdf version of this government report is available for download at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/digitaldivide/ The report can be read using Adobe's Acrobat Reader version 3, downloadable for free from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html About the Author: Michael Gabriel Nicolella is obsessed with art, writing, hiking and London.
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