Killing Digital Unpeople

There are people in this world that are unpeople; they don't exist to people. Every group of people has it's own group of unpeople to balance it; the poor don't exist to the rich, the digitally unincluded don't exist to the people who are digitally included, and so on. People with radios don't know about the people who don't have radios, people with televisions don't know about people without televisions, people with telephones don't know about people without telephones, and people with internet access don't know about people without internet access.

There are people with blogs, and to them people without blogs don't exist. And if you don't have RSS, you might be an unperson to people who do. And if nobody knows you, nobody links to you and nobody continues to know about you. Meanwhile, blogging bubbles rise and fall by feeding the demand of... mostly other bloggers who want to be linked to. Sad, actually.

Monolingual people don't read outside of their language, effectively making people of other languages unpeople.

People in one country think only of their own country. People in one region think only of their own region. People of one culture may look down on people of other cultures. In the same way we create associations that link people, we create disassociations which separate the unpeople.

Of course, there are exceptions and matters of degree of how much un exists in the unpeople. Some people try to bridge these divides. Some don't. It's a fact of life.

Technology

In the context of technology, unpeople exist because people who have the technology form new groups which support each other - propping each other up - and usually don't include the people who don't have the access to technology. There are exceptions, but, in the end, it's still a matter of unpeople.

In the context of the disastrous Hurricane Katrina, people were supposedly notified about the evacuation. I say supposedly because - does everyone have a radio? Does everyone have a television? And if people don't have these things, if they are unpeople to those who did have these things... they would have expected their version of 'everyone' to know. Some people just might not have had the time to get to hear about the coming disaster. Some people may have just been dumb and stayed. But can anyone say with certainty that they talked to anyone that they considered an unperson? Of course not. It's not normal to talk to unpeople. If you do talk to unpeople, what do you talk about? That's the problem, isn't it?

So, when we talk about the digital divide, we're really talking about unpeople for the technology haves.

But the second you start discussing unpeople, you kill the digital unpeople. When you start assisting them, you make them people - and the unpeople perception dies, dwindles... and even if they don't have access, they at least exist. Maybe that's why we shouldn't be looking at what the cameras push through the televisions, or what we can find on the internet. Maybe, instead, we should dedicate more time to finding out what's to the left and right of the camera, and finding what isn't on the internet.

Education should have taught more of us that it's what we don't know that's most important.

Let's go kill some unpeople. Let's make them people. The unperson you save may be yourself, from a certain point of view.