I never did before library school and the computer boot camp finally wore me down. Oh, it was hard! It was almost like switching religions, to go from a sunny belief in serendipity to deciding that I could achieve mastery and precision if I tried.
And lo, the faithful have been rewarded: I find myself on the cozy side of the digital divide. That's a phrase you hear a lot of in library school. On one side are those who use computers. On the other are the digitally dispossessed. There's quite a crowd of them; in fact, there are whole countries on the wrong side of the divide. But even if you do have a computer, it's not hard to fall behind.
The other day I helped a friend set up a new e-mail account to replace an old one with compromised security. As I explained to her, having an insecure e-mail account is like living in a house without a door. I still can't decide if it's worse than not having an account at all, which is like being technologically homeless--that's why they call it an address. She's just finished her first formal computer course. Tomorrow we're going to set up her new monitor. Where do you stand on the digital divide?
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Henry Jenkins says we should think about the digital divide more in terms of "the participation gap", which touches on what we talked about in class this week, the difference between information literacy and information fluency. Like a modern-day Cassandra, Jenkins keeps trying to sound the alarm, that as a society, we will pay a high price if legislation like DOPA, or school and public library knee-jerk policies banning social networking access, continue.
In his paper,"Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century"
he say that increasingly, the world "is divided into those for whom the internet is an increasingly rich, diverse, engaging and stimulating resource of growing importance in their lives and those for whom it remains a narrow, unengaging, if occasionally useful, resource of rather less significance."
I see this in my own public library, in terms of the creative and whimsical blogging going on with some kids, the ones who get online at home, compared with the ones without computers at home, who seem to just spend their time posting banal comments on each others' myspaces.
What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what a person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high band-width, and continuous connectivity. The school system’s inability to close this participation gap has negative consequences for everyone involved. On the one hand, those youth who are most advanced in media literacies are often stripped of their technologies and robbed of their best techniques for learning in an effort to ensure a uniform experience for all in the classroom. On the other hand, many youth who have had no exposure to these new kinds of participatory cultures outside school find themselves struggling to keep up with their peers.
Thanks for reading my blog, Marie! I like the new distinctions between information literacy and information fluency; it reminds me of the distinction between Third World and Fourth World countries. That is, you can have some degree of computer readiness--you can read, type, do a few basic functions--and yet still find yourself at a distinct disadvantage in today's world. Especially today's economy. With kids, the problem is, as it's always been, how to teach the advanced, average and lagging students the same subject in a single class room.
oops...here's the link to that
Jenkins paper again. If it doesn't work, the url is
http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF
Is your book club for 18+ only?
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