Week V: IT and Difference, a.k.a., the
Major Topics:
Major Topics:
- The danger of "technical fixes" (OLPC?)
- Experts and amateurs: redefining skills
- Masculine performative norms and gendered cyberspace
- Reconstructing local and ethnic culture in real-time
- Do access differentials make skills, interest, class, and income more important than race and gender in giving voice to citizens?
- Multiple voices or cyberchaos?
- Net "democracy"?
Assigned Readings:
- By Mark Warschauer, "Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide," poses a damning critique of simple dichotomies of info "haves" and "have-nots," proposing that differences within groups (by class, race, or gender) are probably more imporatant than those across groups, and that we need to recognize systematically that "technical fixes" won't work unless we understand underlying social dynamics.
- Here's a summary of a UofM study that girls do pretty much as well as boys in math in grades 6-12 (they actually do slightly better), yet their interest is far lower, indicating a possible cause for the paucity of women in IT education (a recent book by Fischer and Margolis, Inside the Clubhouse, exhaustively documents how women's interest in computing majors declines through college as well).
- The techno-enthusiasts at the MIT Media Lab hope to rescue the Third World with a $100 laptop; the necessary information literacy presumably will appear, somehow. FYI, here's the link to the Website of the makers of that $100 laptop.
- Here's a very smart report, "Toward Equality of Access," from the Pew Trust and Gates Foundation on how libraries and their service help bridge the digital divide.
- Hermann Chinery-Hesse, a Nigerian software entrepreneur, has had considerable success in "negoiating" a solution between leading-edge technology and the local conditions in West Africa. Here's his story.
- One of the most exciting attempts to bridge the digital divide is an effort to put networked PCs in the projects.
Recommended Readings:
- A nice, social-science based piece on the gender gap on the Net, by Bruce Bimber: "Measuring the Gender Gap on the Internet." A classic example of solid statistical work—but you don't have to know about regression analysis to appreciate it.
- An artifact of an era when the government actually cared about the digital divide, here's a massive government study on the digital divide (October 2000)—the free-market approach now makes the US #19 globally in broadband diffusion.
- In a project that involved our very own Sharon Smith, a School of Information alum and former GSI in this course, here's the executive summary of a report on focused IT-enabled efforts to improve rural health services in Africa.
- Here's the full report on the project in which Sharon Smith participated
- Eszter Hargittai wrote a very nice piece, "Second-Level Digital Divide: Differences in Online Skills," which, though a bit long (otherwise, we'd have assigned it) on a gendered divide based on skill.
- As a sort of FYI, here's a story about how an earlier public service provider, Bonneville Power Authority, is helping to diffuse broadband to rural areas.
- Though a bit dated (from 2000), this UCLA Internet Report offers a good profile of Internet users' demographics and activities.
- Derrick Cogburn, a former faculty member at our School of Information, has long argued that the old, state-controlled telephone companies in Africa have inhibited the expansion of services to both digital lines and rural connectivity; this article on voice over IP in Africa, bears out his argument and indicates that imaginitive people are developing work-arounds to the recalcitrant national telecomms.
"Digital Divide"