Crossing The Digital Divide

In reading what I have of Crossing The Digital Divide I wish I had it when I was teaching at Peoria Central in 2004, or at least afterward for some kind of emotional and intellectual therapeutic recovery aid. What is described in some general and occasionally specific terms by Barbra Monroe of the possible construction of the digital divide is very much an over view of my experience there.

As I was reading I found myself often underlining statements and sections and merely writing “Yes”, “Exactly” or “I Remember Something Like that!” rather than writing more detailed notes. My experiences were not exactly that of the case studies. Where my personal experience lays is mostly found in the last chapter when Monroe revisits the locations of the case studies. Her descriptions of the wake and aftermath left by technology are pretty much, in one way or another, the conditions of the high school I briefly in which taught.

The real difference is the technology at Peoria Central can actually be describing as somewhat stable. What they have there is what they will have. The funding for the computer lab will probably not be reduced. Upgrades will come approximately when needed, but not precisely. That school system is not the best, according to the standards of the NCLB program but it is achieving enough to not have funding pulled.

The similarity between the situations described in this book and what I was exposed to is the student demographic: Income at the level of destitution for most of the families of students. Most of, but not all, families were welfare families. About 75% of the students had near zero interest in school because they did not see it as being useful. They realized they would end up on welfare themselves, like their parents, or working an at minimum wage job barely getting buy week to week. They understood, consciously, because of how and where they were forced to live that their future was bleak and that college was just not an option. It was not a lack of interest, really. They had accepted what the powers out of their control had ordained for them.

I also find I wish I had read this book last year when I was working on a project regarding the digital divide. Most of the material I found oriented on not the have and have-not’s but on generational affinity. Crossing The Digital Divide would have helped me move from looking at the concept of “digital natives and digital immigrants” into the real issue of socioeconomic and the culture of forced destitution that defines the digital divide.

In light of that, if I have the opportunity, down the road, to teach at the collage level I will at least use this book as one of foundational texts for communicating to my students what this is all about. If I am able to get into the professional field I want to this text will temper some of my conceptual work and will also serve as a reality check when developing digital entertainment projects or programs.

I have crossed over the divide, crossed back, and then crossed over agian. For that experience I am forever changed…