Digital Divide assignment analysis (Sarah Oelker)

Bridging the Digital Divide

• Bringing technology to those without it

• A new way of aiding those in need?

• Same old programs with new equipment?

• Which is most important: clean water, vaccines, or computers?

• Is all aid equally valuable?

Africa

• Computers for Africa: sending older computer systems to Africa so people can use them for business and train on them

• Community Radio in Africa: hand crank radios so people can hear broadcasts in rural areas

• Nigeria's National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA): national IT policy

• Institute of Computer Technology: technology training Ethiopia, Kenya

• USAID's Leland Initiative for internet connectivity in Africa

• TAMWA publishing on women's issues in Tanzania

Asia

• Philippines: telecenters in rural communities so citizens can use phone, fax, computers

• HP Labs, Bangalore: phone and internet connectivity

• MIT Media Lab, Mumbai: Media Lab Asia providing wireless net

• Institute of Computer Technology: technology training in China, India

• Vietnam: Decree 7/2000/QD-CP on developing the software industry, 2000-2005

South America:

• Committee for the Democratization of Information, Brazil: training centers in poor areas to teach computer skills

• Institute of Computer Technology: technology training in Peru

Middle East:

• World Economic Forum: public school computer training and equipment in Jordan

Who provides aid

• Governments (Vietnam, Nigeria) can sponsor initiatives

• NGOs (USAID, World Economic Forum)

• Universities (MIT)

• Corporations (Hewlett-Packard)

Types of aid

• Equipment: computers, fax, printing machinery, radios

• Training: job skills, information skills

How tech aid can help

• Job skills

• Ability to apply for jobs and prepare for them

• Information skills that aid learning

• Information to teach communities about issues

Connectivity

(cont.)

Connectivity

• Connectivity: Cultural Practices of the Powerful or Subversion from the Margins? Hawthorne

•Home and the World: The Internet as a Personal and Political Tool Pattanaik

• Women Click: Feminism and the Internet Pollock & Sutton

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

Do you have a Power PC?

A Power Mac?

Are you connected to power?

Do you have power?

“The first questions are power questions. They assume you are part of a culture, a race for power. They assume that you are connected to power, because even

if you have a laptop, it needs recharging, and the batteries never last long enough to write anything of substantial length. If you say no to the first three

questions, then chances are you don’t have much power at all.” (Hawthorne 1999, 118)

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

• Cultural Practices of the Powerful• Not seeing• Cultural Homogeneity• The Local• Knowledge• Community Networking: Subversion from the

Margins?

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

• How is power a practice (social fact)? Give examples.• Digital revolution has brought about an escalation in the

culture of the Powerful and domination through culture and the Internet has become the newer mechanism of colonisation

• global domination through culture results in less visible cultures to be silenced; ensures access to global markets and global labor

• culture of the Powerful does not promote reflection; it does not see the mechanisms of their own structures

• economic systems developed under capitalism extended to globalised economics and digital culture

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

Not seeing• unmarked categories signify hegemonic systems of

knowledge (power-serving)• Unmarked (man, white, Western, the able, US-based

Internet domain names) • Marked (woman, black, non-Western, disabled, non-US

based Internet domain names)• marked categories are identifiable / unmarked categories are

not identifiable (whiteness is not visible)

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

Cultural Homogeneity• monocultures vs. diversity • what will prevail: ignorance, reductionism,

homogeneity• homogenizing cultural production in digital world is

mowing down the cultural icons of other cultures (what one perceives, the predominant cultural icons are American)

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

The Local• global vs. local• local is the place called ‘home’ (where we live, have

lived, the world we know intimately, imprinted in our memories, what constitutes our experience, what is our community, and our experience)

• Indigenous peoples rely on their environment (and knowledge of it) for food, medicines, spirituality, art, etc. are an embodiment of local threatened by global

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

The Local• movement from local to global scale

• disconnection to the place, to the past, to community histories, individual histories

• displacement of uniqueness of the local; local becomes irrelevant as everyone wants the global product (CNN, Coca-Cola, WWW)

• if you cannot trust experience and the reality of the local because what matters is mediated to you by image, there is potential for local to face prejudice, discrimination

Connectivity (Hawthorne)Knowledge

• dominant knowledge vs. outsider knowledge • local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, women’s

knowledge, marked knowledge of marginalized and outsider groups

• faces the threat of annihilation and erasure in the face of homogenized digitized western knowledge

• faces the threat of misrepresentation and exploitation

• the case of the Banabas (Pacific Island nation) and the Banaban Heritage Society

• self-determination vs. global participation

Connectivity (Hawthorne)

Community Networking: Subversion from the Margins?• problems for marginalized groups: lack of connection,

cooperation, lack of information• feminist activists (also other groups) use the Internet to

protect their ‘knowledge’ and experience as basis for their right to participation and self-determination

• networking projects (e.g. feminist publishers in South East Asia website (Pattanaik article)

• use of the internet for political action, campaigns, sharing information and resources through websites

Women Connecting

• List examples of ways in which women are connecting on the Internet?

• How does the ‘feminist way of working’ translate to the Internet?

The AFYA Project

• Bishop, Ann Peterson, Imani Bazzell, Bharat Mehra & Cynthia Smith. 2001. Afya: Social and Digital Technologies that Reach Across the Digital Divide. First Monday 6 (4) (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_4/bishop/index.html)

• scope, history, reach

• methods, techniques

• evaluation of the project

• Afya-net.com: The Online Healthcare Information Portal for African American Women (social+technological literacy in the area of health information)

Ecofeminism

definition Ecofeminism is the social movement that regards the oppression

of women and nature as interconnected. It is one of the few movements and analyses that actually connects two

movements. More recently, ecofeminist theorists have extended their analyses to consider the interconnections

between sexism, the domination of nature (including animals), and also racism and social inequalities. Consequently it is now

better understood as a movement working against the interconnected oppressions of gender, race, class and nature.

(Ecofeminism website: www.ecofem.org/)