Week 7: Thoughts on the Digital Divide in Society

(Readings at bottom)

The first reading, about the internet affecting how we think about thing, was a good opening for this week, and it really showed me how much the digital world is changing how we think and see things. I definitely feel that I, personally, have become more receptive to just the surface level information, not paying attention to things unless I can get the answer I want right away. I also find myself reading less books, as they mention in the article. I have conflicting feelings about this shift from a deeper reading to a more surface level approach. On one hand, I don’t like that it’s happening with people, myself included, because I feel like I can’t get as deeply involved in what I read. I have a shorter attention span, so reading something for school, for example, becomes more about finishing it rather than paying attention to it and really picking out the crucial details. I want to get back to that, to rediscover that joy and involvement of deep reading. However, looking at it from the other perspective, we can’t deny that society as a whole has become more fast paced and has encouraged our minds to be reprogrammed to find the relevant information quickly, and if you can’t do that, you can’t really properly fit in in society. The way that the digital world and the internet has developed has just forced people to focus on a different way of thinking than before. So I’d like to get deeper and more involved in what I read and do, but at the same time there is this awareness that in the fast paced world there is simply no time or room to do that properly, at least with the life that I am in right now. At least, I think it might be that way, though I can’t say I’ve tried to rediscover that deeper learning. Regardless, the fact that society has become more fast paced and centered around the internet means that it is necessary for people to adjust to that, be it through increased technology in schools or a way to educate those who aren’t as involved in the digital world, which is what the other articles look at a bit.

            In the every increasingly technological world, children need to learn how to use that technology in order to be proper functioning members in society, which is what the documentary looked at. Specifically, it looked at the difference between the schools who have the tools necessary to succeed in this initiative compared to those who don’t. What they talked about in the documentary reminded me a lot of my high school’s 1 to 1 program giving an iPad to each student to use throughout the school day. I remember the Wi-Fi being pretty bad at times, and we only had one class every week or so that taught us a bit about what the iPads could do. However, I also recall that a lot of what I learned about the iPad, I learned by just working at it myself, or hearing from other students. It could be because everyone more or less had some technological experience prior to high school, but I still think that the documentary missed a little bit with the point about teachers needing to be educated around the iPad, at least for my case. While yes, I think it’s very beneficial that teachers get some basic training about how they might use an iPad in class, I think the documentary was putting too much of an emphasis on it. I don’t think that the teachers need to be experts on how to use it, and you also can’t expect them to be able to immediately integrate the iPads into every lesson in the classroom. That just changes up the teacher’s entire teaching style, and for me, that is more detrimental than not being able to use iPads at all. At my school, the students and teachers learned together how to use the iPad and what it might be helpful for. It was more of a cooperation learning experience. And going back to a previous point, I’d say a majority of my teachers had the rule of no iPads during class, since they can be tremendous distractions from school work, and I definitely agree with that. People would always be playing games, going on twitter, or whatever it might be that wasn’t school work. In that sense, the negatives of technology were outweighing the benefits. In addition, I noticed that a lot of students in the schools in the documentary had smart phones that they were using, which was a way that they were exposed to technology. Things like iPhones are very similar to iPads, so in that way they are already getting exposed to the technologies they might be using in school, which makes me question the real benefits of it all. Anyways, I agree with the documentary about the fact that technologies should be taught in schools, but they did seem to miss a couple points, looking from my experience at least.

            Connecting to the whole unequal technologies from the documentary, the article about virtual classrooms being unequal runs somewhat along the same lines. However, to me it does make sense. First off, you can’t expect something to immediately reach the ideal that it was set out to accomplish. It takes time and work for that to be achieved. It also becomes hard to ‘fix’ the inequality of virtual classrooms because that would mean either informing everyone of the fact that they exist in addition to providing proper connectivity for people to take them, or that some classes are only for lower income people, for example, and I can’t imagine that going well. It also makes sense to me that people are more focused on getting done with school instead of looking at MOOCs, since current society values a physical school education much higher than an online certificate from some free course. For many, it’s about getting the proper education so that they can get a job first, and then later they focus on finding a course online that may peak their interests. It’s just logical from that perspective. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that the online courses are unequal, but again I think that some inequality is unavoidable in the society that we live in. We can’t really live in a capitalist country and expect everyone to get equal opportunities at everything. It’s like wanting the best of both worlds. It’s definitely sad for children born into low-income families that they don’t get the same amount of opportunities that people who go to college do, but I feel that there always will be some level of inequality in whatever we do, including online courses. There are ways to shrink the inequality, like offering the courses for free or making people aware of it, but I think ultimately it’s a problem that we will always be in the process of solving, no matter what we do.

            In connection to that, the article about the digital divide in society, with the old, rural, and uneducated not being as good at using the internet, mentions those sorts of problems again, with there being an inequality in internet usage. One of the things that the article mentioned was making government programs more efficient by getting these people online. That made me question, from a pure costs perspective, would it really be worth it to educate and connect everyone who wasn’t? There’s also the question of if people would be open and accepting to using the Internet on a daily basis. Some of them, especially the older people and those in rural areas, have likely had a way of life absent from the connectivity of the internet, and some might prefer to stay that way. I felt like the article assumed that if only larger society could educate them, it would all fall into place, and the people would easily catch on and start actively participating in the online world. In reality, I don’t think it would really happen that way. People are stubborn and often don’t want change in their lives, so we shouldn’t expect that they would be open and accepting to this new connectivity. It is of course a bit different with those in the lower income area, but it also connects to my previous point that there will always be these sorts of inequalities. As a society, I believe we can work together to minimize them by providing the tools and technologies to them, but we shouldn’t act like it’s a problem that we can 100% fix, because I think the problem will always be there, at least with the way society is set up now.

Reading 1: Google Making Us Stupid?

Reading 2: Digital Divide Documentary

Reading 3: Unequal Virtual Classrooms

Reading 4: Digital Divide