Boge - Everett and the "Digital Divide"

Everett spends a great deal of time parsing the media and critics’ assessment of the “digital divide.” Her book, as discussed in class earlier in the semester, was written before the invention and wide scale use of smart devices. How might Everett’s argument articulate the digital divide or lack there of in 2020? Are their new versions of this divide?

Everett’s basic argument boils down to the manner in which “digital divide” discourse is wielded in essentializing and limited ways. While there is certainly unequal distribution of internet/technological resources, hyper-focusing on the lack obscures how African Americans in particular, but other racial groups more broadly, have always and continue to be technologically savvy. I quote her at length to further elucidate her argument:

• “In recent years that marking has assumed the form of a potent trope of repressed racial difference in the information age, which we better recognize as the rhetoric of the “digital divide.” Its cultural currency and global circulation inhere in its apparent distillation of intransigent racial stereotypes of certain groups in the West, especially that of black people as genetic intellectual inferiors.” (149)
• “Moreover, I contend that its deployment in high-profile, highstakes discussions of technology diffusion and state fiscal policies threatens to become a disabling self-fulfilling prophesy of endemic black technological lag. I hasten to add here that in challenging the digital divide’s overdetermined signifying power to simultaneously benefit and thwart universal access initiatives, I am in no way denying the distressing fact of unequal technology distribution. My concern is that in the glare of the media spotlight on the digitally disadvantaged, we become blinded to the other fact of significant black technomastery and new media activism despite tremendous odds.” (149)
• “The point is that all too often an essentializing digital divide rhetoric has the effect of reifying dangerous misperceptions about the futility of investing scarce high-tech funding in minority communities, when presumptions are that precious resources might be better allocated elsewhere.” 150

Racial stereotypes flourish when the digital divide is not deployed as a deeply nuanced and structural issue. Everett encourages us to balance the “technomastery” and “media activism” of racial groups with the material inequalities pervasive in technoculture.

As for the contemporary implications of her arguments, the notion of the digital divide persists and, in many ways, have been exacerbated by the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. CNN, just this morning, posted an article proclaiming the damaging effects the digital divide is ravaging on the education system. Such instances are very real. Low-income neighborhoods, in particular, are disproportionally more likely not to have broadband access or devices to complete technologically based work, such as online schooling. Accounting for the material inequality is important. However, such depictions reify tropes of low-income and rural kids as technologically illiterate, backward, and woefully uneducated. CNN does a reasonably good job of drawing attention to the structure that produces these unique problems. I am still left yearning for more complex representation.

A 2001 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (you can access this article through the UI libraries) has some contemporary resonances. Henry Jenkins, a prolific media scholar, explains in the piece, "the rhetoric of the digital divide holds open this division between civilized tool-users and uncivilized nonusers[.] …As well-meaning as it is as a policy initiative, it can be marginalizing and patronizing in its own terms." I do think inequality concerning the internet and technology is widening. Wealth inequality and income inequality grows each day exponentially and has direct correlations with access to the internet and technology. However, there still is a lack of nuance in contemporary discussions regarding the structural problems that need to be fixed. When we focus solely on access, and not the quality of that access, or what information/representation is available once you are connected, or supporting POC run tech-companies, or breaking up technology monopolies (such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook), we miss the bigger picture. Getting crappy internet access to a rural community does not solve for their lacking healthcare infrastructure. Giving low-income children an iPad doesn’t provide more school funding and prevent racist gentrification and red lining practices.

All of this to say, the digital divide persists, and our lack of nuance regarding how to discuss such a problem remains, as well. Media networks and popular discourses are fixated on particular narratives of struggling schools and poor rural kids, which distracts from the incredible structural barriers that need to be overcome to holistically solve for the digital divide—symptomatic of entrenched systems of oppression and domination. Balancing the material realities of lack of access, and the broader systemic implications, is an important next step if we want any hope of closing the digital divide, altogether.