The Digital Divide

Banks and Selfe & Selfe are both primarily concerned with how technology can play a restrictive role for people stuck on the other side of the digital divide. Although it may be nice, and even common, to believe that technology is the great democratic equalizer we've all been waiting for, the situation is not nearly as straightforward. Banks specifically addresses how the issue of access to technology affects racial minorities, specifically African Americans. Selfe & Selfe are more focused on the technology itself can have violent, colonizing effects on its users. They both came at this issue from different angles, however, both urge teachers to create students who won't just consume technology but will actively critique it, too.

Power and agency are written all over these two articles. Selfe & Selfe want to take away some of the all-encompassing power held by technology producers and put it in the hands of teachers and students. While we may not be able to re-write the software (at least not right now), we also may not have to. Instead, we can simply study technology's many interfaces to figure out what improvements we would want. While reading the chapter, I wasn't sure what the authors were ultimately trying to argue for - because I certainly don't know anything about computer programming. However, by allowing us (as teachers and students) to start this process by critiquing technology, this plan also will let me, anyway, learn more about the technology I'll be analyzing.

Banks specifically wants to put power and agency into the hands of black Americans, and he clearly lays out the groundwork for this with his extensive survey on research in the field of African American rhetoric with regard to technology access. He makes the argument that not just material access that matters because people must also be willing and know how to use it. Coming from a rural part of Iowa, I can easily apply this sentence to most of my neighbors as well as the African American community. I like that Banks speaks honestly about public access to computers - most of the time you'd have to go to a cramped public library and be restricted to only a certain amount of time. Is that really the same thing as sitting on your couch, laptop on the coffee table, going through menus and learning how your computer works? Absolutely not - and that factor is the same across racial lines.

As for what Foucault would say to all this? Perhaps these are two different ways to attempt to buck the Panopticon, but ultimately, it still feels a little like we're fighting a losing battle here. In Selfe & Selfe we're told to start analyzing technology for its colonizing, dominant role - but no matter what, technology is still going to be political. We can learn to distance ourselves from it and be cognizant of its colonizing effects, but I still had to jump through about 16 different web pages before I could finally reach this one, and no amount of analysis was going to save me from that. In Banks, it's made clear that material access is only the tip of the iceberg because people also have to have a reason and know how to use technology. How do we give that to anyone on the other side of the digital divide without ultimately becoming missionaries for technology (and doing some colonization ourselves?). It's a tricky situation, and Foucault might just tell us that we're all trying really hard - but still very stuck.