The Sisyphean Digital Divide: A Personal Perspective

When I read 'Should we tackle the digital divide or live with it?', I intended an immediate response - one that would agree with it to a large extent, yet I stayed my hand because of the depth of agreement which I have. And that depth comes from personal experience, as most agreement or disagreement does.

When Michael Grimes wrote:

...At three o’clock this morning I finished a frantic flurry of blog posts and Twitter tweets, and tried to sleep. Instead I began to panic.

When this happens – and it happens a lot these days – I feel that I’m on an irreversible and rapid ascent to the peak of my sanity, at which point I shall burn-out: not from work but from trying to keep abreast with technology (and currently with today’s hot potato of ’social media’). I feel like I’m constantly trying to catch-up, desparate not to fall behind. The world is changing incredibly fast; I already feel as though it’s running away and I no longer have the energy to keep up...

I know what he means. I've known what he meant for quite some time, but I'd like to flesh out what it means to me. Most of the things I've read on the Internet - the buzz, the memes, the deluge of RSS and emails that puddle on my hard drive - most of it is actually garbage. I do not write of the pass-it-on jokes or the spam that are a large part of the cost of doing business on the Internet - I'm talking about the loads of crap I read about technology from the next greatest operating system (!), the next greatest concepts from social networking to whatever-comes-next, and so on. Most of what I read aren't even new ways of looking at old things - they are new phrases for looking at old things. In other words - it's worth sending to Haiti to fix their soil problem.

Truth be told, a lot of people that I know may think of me as a technology activist - and indeed, I am, but not in the way that many would think. I don't easily get excited about technology anymore, I don't feel the need to use cyberspace as a landfill of worn out ideas spouted by people in funny hats.

There's a world out there - and you may be a part of it - that desperately seeks the next-best-thing and in desperation may cling to the next thing in the hope that it is the next-best-thing. There is use of technology and there is proper use of technology.

People of my age and older may recall that computers were to make the paperless office a reality and decrease the amount of work we had to do so that we could spend more time sipping mai-tais on the beach somewhere. 20 years have passed. Computers now generate more paperwork than they decrease due to legalities, lack of equal access and the fact that it's just easier to read things while seated on the throne. There's a reason that we have a room for disposing of our bodily waste, in case you're thinking of designing the ultimate geek chair with a toilet within.

Thoreau was right then, and is probably still right. The masses on the Internet may not have tarried with the likes of Thoreau; the masses on the Internet may find that a break of a few days while reading Thoreau may be more advantageous than keeping up with the septic flow of information we find in the bloodstream of the Internet.

Why do I write 'septic'? Consider the Internet as a closed system - indeed, it is if you are to ask someone without access - it has no system to take out the trash as our own bodies are designed to. There's no place to flush. Intellectual excrement continues to float in the bowl - and if that were not bad enough, new people keep encountering it and sticking their heads in it, then spreading it around.

It is not to say that all information on the Internet is bad. Far from it - a lot of the Internet can be worthwhile, but if the information society is democratic then the popular vote seems to go for intellectual excrement. If I hear, for example, the phrase 'social networking' one more time I may get some trained monkeys to fling poo at the utterer of the phrase, if only for the reason that human interaction is not encapsulated by anything called 'social networking'. Smart Mobs? Same thing. People have been working across great distances for quite some time - and doing it quite well. Self-organizing? People do that anyway, if you want to impress me get self-organizing laundry and sandwiches that make themselves.

Do I sound jaded? Maybe I am, but if I am I do have a right to be so. After 25 years in computing, as an amateur and professionally, I can't honestly say that computing has really increased the quality of life of people. For every pro, there seems to be at least as many cons. And this is where we get back to the digital divide which, in fact, encapsulates much of the issues related to quality of life. But does it?

A lot of people think of the digital divide as something purely socioeconomic. It isn't. Some think that it's a matter of having access to neon toaster-lookalikes with wifi. It isn't. Some think that it's a matter of education - an odd thought where people who aren't harnessed to the stone like Sisyphus are thought of as ignorant. It isn't. Some people think it's a matter of policies. It isn't. The truth is that the digital divide, as a concept, encapsulates all of that and more - and everyone who writes or speaks of the digital divide dilutes the larger issues by focusing only on their own perspectives. I do this as well; we all do: it is our nature to simplify. But in simplifying, are we simply creating an equation we are more comfortable to solve?

Streams of 1s and 0s are not going to save the world. I think that is what many people are trying to do - save the world, but in 'saving the world' aren't we just trying to make the world into what we think it could be? Taking two extreme examples, both Gandhi and Hitler both were trying to make the world a better place from their own perspectives. When one can understand the commonality and, more importantly, the difference, one has something of worth to work with in redefining the world to fit our own perceptions.

1s and 0s will not feed the world. People and soil will. Can 1s and 0s play a role in feeding the world? Yes, I believe so - but can 1s and 0s also starve the world? Yes, both in the literal sense and in the figurative intellectual sense. Food for thought.

At the end of the day, the digital divide exists because of our own perceptions of what the world should be. But what should the world be? We can, hopefully, agree that people all have Rights. We can, hopefully, agree that we all need to eat.

Technology allows us to tell stories, but it doesn't allow us to give them happy endings. We have to make our own happy endings. While technology may be a tool in doing so we need to be careful not to use technology for the sake of technology. We should be increasing the quality of life everywhere, but we seem only to be able to communicate disparity in the quality of life. Some might say that this is a good first step, but let's be frank: it is only a first step.