Just Grab Your Hat and Take the Ride

I fix computers for a living. Over the past year I've serviced PCs, laptops, notebooks, and servers; I have ably deleted registry entries to get Microsoft Word up and running again so that grant applications were submitted on time and somehow got Dragon Naturally Speaking working for a user afflicted with multiple sclerosis; on the same computer I've switched from the friendly Windows interface to a UNIX command prompt and back again. Perhaps this is no surprise because my father also worked on them - he serviced mainframes for 25 years at IBM. Next to our rotary phone was a stack of punch cards for jotting down messages and his workshop was stocked with a lifetime supply of dustless rags, isopropyl alcohol, and oil all emblazoned with the IBM logo. I recall well going into the bowels of the Montgomery Wards headquarters in downtown Chicago on take-your-son-to-work day. It was a large well air-conditioned room with spools of magnetic tape strewn about and lights flashing everywhere. Computers are in my blood.

Several of my friends work in IT and most of the rest use them at work and have one at home. And so it's easy for me to forget that there are, in fact, people out there who don't own a personal computer, don't use one at work, don't make them the centerpiece of their lives, and/or just plain avoid them at all costs. Not everyone is a "digital citizen".

I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago talking to a woman in her 50s who expressed to me her disappointment that The Capital Times had stopped daily publication. After I said that she'd have to read it online, she replied that her computer was in its own room upstairs at her home and she wasn't going to go into seclusion in order to read the "paper". This woman fit the stereotype in my mind of people who don't opt into a digital lifestyle – people like my mother. Older folks, that is.



After that conversation, I stumbled onto a couple things which further expanded my notion of who is across the digital divide. First was a recent post at the Freakonomics blog called "The Adverse Impact of Web Based Hiring on Minorities":

JobApp Network helps other companies to hire. Applications can be made either over the phone or online. Edgar Johns, an employee at JobApp Network, analyzed data his company had on over 25,000 applicants to restaurant and retail job positions. Looking at means in the data, he found something striking. Of those job seekers applying by phone, more than 40 percent were minorities. When it came to applying over the web, the share of minorities fell to less than 20 percent. His conclusion: as firms move more and more toward taking only online applications, there could be an adverse impact on minority applicants.

This sounds like a good reason to improve our public libraries to ensure that Internet access is available for as many people as possible.

Yesterday I found "Generational Myth" by Siva Vaidhyanathan. (Vaidhyanathan spent some time here at the UW and I saw him speak at the Overture Center a few years ago.) In the essay, he argues two points: 1) that not all kids today –the so-called "Digital Generation" – are all that digitally inclined and 2) the notion of generations isn't particularly useful and doesn’t explain a whole helluva lot.

Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and he offers his observations on how digital his students are:

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can't deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.

College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don't like is the price of books.

Of course they use Google, but not very well — just like my 75-year-old father. And they fill the campus libraries at all hours, just as Americans of all ages are using libraries in record numbers. (According to the American Library Association, visits to public libraries in the United States increased 61 percent from 1994 to 2004).

Keeping in mind his comment about how most of his students don't know HTML, there's also this bit:

On my blog, Sivacracy, Elizabeth Losh, writing director of the humanities core course at the University of California at Irvine and author of the forthcoming Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009), kept the online conversation going: "Unlike many in today's supposed 'digital generation,' we learned real programming skills — with punch cards in the beginning — from the time we were in elementary school. What passes for 'media literacy' now is often nothing more than teaching kids to make prepackaged PowerPoint presentations."

On my first read, Losh's comment came across as that of an old fogey – "Things were better in my day" kind of criticism (whining?). Perhaps Vaidhyanathan should have used the Socrates playbook and defined exactly what he means when he refers to students being "digital". While his point that they still read books instead of e-books is well taken, is being able to code or understanding how radio waves propagate the benchmark for determining whether one is "literate" in digital media? I don't think it does anymore than one must know how the internal combustion engine works to structure one's life around the automobile or to understand how a clock works to have your life ruled by arbitrary points in time. When I think about a "digital generation", I don't think of a massively large group of code monkeys; instead I envision large numbers of people who use cell phones and computers in their daily lives outside of work or school. Were people 30 years ago who listened to music but ignorant of how the phonograph & the 8-track worked not really as analog as we thought because they didn't understand the sound reproduction technology of the day? Should they have been considered part of the pre-electronics era?

There are people out there who can open up a text editor and code a webpage in HTML yet do not understand TCP/IP, DNS, how routers work, and the like so, while they can create webpages, they have little or no understanding of how it gets from their server to a user's PC. And to use myself, a so-called "IT professional", as example – I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag. I know a bit of HTML but anyone who reads this blog can tell that my skills in this area are very limited. Yet I can help enterprises hum along smoothly on the IT end of things. Down the hall from me are coders who, when Windows has a problem, have absolutely no idea what to do except call me. They can create and maintain large databases (something I decidedly cannot do) but, if a .dll file becomes unregistered, they are helpless and are, for better or for worse, at my mercy.

Vaidhyanathan's argument for the futility of using the concept of generations is more cogent. Here are some excerpts:

Once we assume that all young people love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that match those presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliché or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs. Then, lo and behold, young people rush to adapt to those changes that we assumed all along that they wanted.

Invoking "generations" demands an exclusive focus on people of wealth and means, because they get to express their preferences (for music, clothes, technology, etc.) in ways that are easy to count. It tends to exclude immigrants and non-English-speaking Americans, not to mention those who live beyond the borders of the United States. And it excludes anyone on the margins of mainstream consumer or cultural behavior.

A short list of the best of those who are studying and writing about the effects of digital media on youth must include Eszter Hargittai, a sociologist and associate professor of communications studies at Northwestern University, who has received a major grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to study digital communication and youth. In a recent paper in Information, Communication & Society, "The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age," Hargittai and Gina Walejko conclude that the habit of creating digital content and sharing it across digital platforms correlates with a person's identity traits. When asked in an interview in the May 2 issue of The Chronicle which demographic groups are less Web-savvy than others, Hargittai responded that women, students of Hispanic origin, African-American students, and students whose parents have lower levels of education tend to have less mastery of the inner workings of digital technology than other groups do.

There are just some of the relevant highlights for me. Vaidhyanathan goes into much more depth as he invokes David Hume in his fight against Karl Mannheim. But it's important to note that minority students make up a large portion of those who are the less digitally inclined among us and I think that Edgar Johns' findings at JobApp Network are quite understandable in light of this.

Vaidhyanathan's concerns relate to pedagogy – schools can be more effective by recognizing that not every student has the same access to or abilities with technology. For my part, the essay broadened my understanding of who is not like me with regards to computer literacy. Plus it makes me wonder what assumptions Madison's schools and the UW make about the "digital literacy" of its students and the importance placed on them. Lastly, it makes me worry about the rise of an analog underclass that is unable or has a more difficult time accessing resources and performing quotidian tasks that increasingly are done via computer.