Networked Counterpublics, Access to Broadband Internet, and Public Libraries in the U.S.

I think a “networked counterpublic” is a networked space where marginalized or minority members of a society can create discourse. I think the concept of networked counterpublics is a useful concept and important to understand. By putting information on the web marginalized or minority groups or individuals can make their views and discourses available to countless people.

I think the primary purpose of these networked spaces is discourse, but the counterpublic does create the opportunity to attempt to reform the dominant public sphere. A counterpublic does not have to be well organized or create political change, like Catherine Squires argues. Yochai Benkler defines “tools of networked communication” in his work The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom as E-mail, the World Wide Web, Blogs, and “larger-scale, collaborative-content production systems” such as Wikipedia and MoveOn.org.

Examples of networked counterpublics:
1. Internal discourse blog with the potential for political action: http://www.qwocboston.org/category/featured-blogs/
“Queer Women of Color and Friends (QWOC+ Boston) is a volunteer-run, grassroots organization dedicated to creating and sustaining a truly diverse social space for LGBTQ women of color in the Greater Boston area.”
2. Political action blog: http://blog.com.np/
From the About section of the website, “United We Blog! was born because we wanted to share something we can’t share in newspapers! United We Blog! is the forum for professional journalists in Nepal to express whatsoever they think blog-able and whatsoever they think should make to the virtual world of Internet and WWW.”
3. Collaborative-content production systems: http://news.cs.cmu.edu/article.php?a=192
This is a news release about the program (I’m not sure whether it still exists) but Peekaboom.org/phetch worked to caption unlabeled web images so that blind users with text reading applications could access them better. This category of “collaborative content production systems” is a bit harder to find for counterpublic networks, but easier for public sphere/ dominant networks.

In the article Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres by Catherine R. Squires she quotes Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which we also read for this week. She says “an “imagined community” and participation in debates via shared information and opinions can be realized across space and time with the mobility of mass media (Anderson, 1992)” (Squires, 461). I think this sharing of information and opinions of the marginalized is perhaps the most important function networked counterpublics serve.

Last Wednesday’s readings focused on Digital Inequalities. Eszter Hargittai’s piece “The Digital Reproduction of Inequality” discussed several points that made me think of issues in my hometown, Topeka, KS. The points Hargittai discussed in relation to digital inequalities were of course the obvious: gender, race, income, education, and age. However she cited more structural problems, like quality of technology equipment, the number of people using machines, individual user skills, geographic proximity to equipment, and the freedom of use on machines.

Topeka’s main source of free Internet access is the public library. It’s a fantastic facility, with classes that teach seniors computer basics and other helpful information. Here’s a list of their classes if anyone is interested: http://www.tscpl.org/computer-classes/. I’ve often used the library when without Internet connection. From (distant) observation, the majority of people who use these public computers are adults who are searching for jobs, updating their resumes, checking e-mail, paying bills, and checking government information. I think better access to public computer centers, whether facilitated through the public library system or not, is extremely important for the future of the US in decreasing digital inequalities.

Last week’s in-class small group exercise had us generate potential models for the resolving some basic digital inequalities, including better access to libraries. Here’s what my group came up with: http://yfrog.com/z/ny8uclj

After this exercise I decided to look at what resources were available in researching broadband availability in Kansas. I found a great map of underserved houses by census block from connectkansas.org. Here’s the link to that map: ftp://ftp.connectkansas.org/CKSPublic/Connect_Kansas_Mapping/Statewide_M…
I also found a feature that discussed the impact of broadband connection on Kansas businesses. That data is available here:

Right before class met Wednesday afternoon I was reading the NYT and came across an article about underserved households, but in the state of Idaho, not Kansas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/downloads-are-slowest-in-idaho-stud…
It discussed why Idaho has the slowest Internet speeds in the nation. What struck me most about the article wasn’t that their Internet is slow, but that a whopping 28 percent of the state does not have access to Internet. The article discussed reasons for slowness in terms of geography, income, and the distribution of population. But what I found most interesting about this article was the connection between slow service (and in some cases complete lack of services) and loss of economic opportunities the state and its people. Author Katharine Seele says
“It is not clear how many households throughout this state still have no Internet, but nationally, the figure is 28 percent — most of them in rural areas. The United States as a whole lags in speed, coming in 25th behind South Korea, which has the fastest speeds in the world. Even Romania clocks in ahead.”

While it is very interesting that 28 percent of the state does not have access to the Internet, as is the US’s 25th ranking, I would have liked to see less of a focus on the economic competitiveness of Idaho and the US in this article and instead a breakdown of who exactly the 28 percent of underserved Idahoans are.
One thing the Modarres and Pitkin study (http://www.patbrowninstitute.org/documents/publications/CTF_Report.pdf) helped me to see is that although an area, such as Los Angeles, may look homogenous in coverage, specific groups of the population may be losing out. In Los Angeles, broadband companies have many customers, as there is high purchasing power from certain neighborhoods of the city. However, according to Modarres and Pitkin the spread of the Internet has followed “traditional patterns of social and economic isolation,” meaning Latinos and African Americans, geographic areas dependent on public transportation, inner city and rural areas, non-English speakers, individuals with low education levels, and low household income individuals are disadvantaged in broadband access.

Is this same pattern happening in Idaho? The article didn’t make this clear. What the article did focus on was the prospect of job loss due to outsourcing to other countries like India due to “skill biased technological change” as Eszter Hargittai states (p. 942).

Perhaps the problems that Modarres and Pitkin discuss about Los Angeles do not occur in Idaho. In Modarres and Pitkin, they try to debunk the idea that Internet use is universal. Perhaps in Idaho, the roots of problems are different: companies have no incentive to build connections there due to sparse population. I think that perhaps in Idaho, the use of the Internet is not yet so widespread that the “traditional patterns of social and economic isolation” have become an issue. Of course without seeing socio-economic data on Idaho I can’t know for sure, but I predict the data would reflect my hypotheses.