That word — I do not think it means what you think it means.
Ars Technica is reporting some disappointing data on the web’s so-called “democratizing” effects. They report that political participation using web-centric methods such as emailing representatives or donating using paypal.
Here’s the money quote:
The depressing take-home from Brady’s talk was that, at least when it comes to participation in politics, the Web isn’t quite the democratizing force that many of us had hoped it would be—in fact, it makes things worse.
Basically, the less educated you are, the less likely you are to be politically active enough to use technology in service of it, or technologically savvy to use it for politics, or else some combination of the two.
No duh.
Is this for real? Did anyone really expect that the web was going to magically erase inequality? It’s the most logical thing in the world that poorly-educated people don’t take advantage of technology — they don’t take advantage of many things, like the opportunity to get an education, for example.
But moreover, why is Ars using the word “democratize” to mean “eliminate inequality?” The hallmark of anything democratizing is that increases freedom and opportunity, not equality, and that’s just what the web has done. But the mere existence of freedom guarantees nothing — in this case, even after controlling for broadband availability, the study still showed that the less educated you are, the less you take advantage of the web. Not that it’s not available to you, not that you’re prevented from doing so, just that you choose not to.
As usual, education is everything. So many things flow from it; lack of political participation and tech-savvyness are already heavily correlated to low levels of education. The web can’t address the symptoms if the cause is going untreated.
March 9th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Yes–but it’s not exactly that people with (supposed) access to technology “choose” not to use it–it’s more that what appears to be physical access is impeded by lack of cultural/political/transportational/economic access to it.
For example, if the only place to check the web is the library, and there’s no public library nearby–and the library seems to be a place for rich, old, white women–a young, poor, black teen may not feel think of going to the trouble of walking far, or taking a bus, to get to the library.
And if high school classes don’t teach good skills on how to surf the web, and it’s humiliating to ask a librarian for basic help, that same teen may feel further disempowered.
Yes, we can say the teen isn’t “choosing” to take advantage of what’s, in theory, available. But “choice” isn’t just about what’s physically available. It’s also about what’s psychologically and culturally available. That’s a bit of what’s behind the comment that “education is everything.” And, hear, hear–like everything else, as you say, the symptoms will only disappear when the cause is addressed. Mostly, that’s poverty (causing unequal access to resources) plus a healthy dose of old-fashioned cultural stereotypes feeding fear on both sides of the “digital divide.”