For Intro to Civic Media this week, we talked about and created a model for digital inequality. My group came up with a cute representation of digital inequality using a tree, where its roots represent components that add to digital equality, the leaves represent the fruit of digital equality, and falling fruit represents the idea that digital equality can fuel itself, just like a real ecosystem.
Before heading east to Cambridge, Massachusetts to come to MIT, I had never moved before — I hadn’t even moved out of the house I grew up in. I grew up in the fifth largest city in Iowa — Iowa City, a “metropolitan” college town with a population of just under 69,000.
Because Iowa City is a college town, it is one of the more racially and culturally diverse cities in Iowa. According to the Census Bureau, Iowa City is 82.5% white (the state as a whole is 91.3% white), and almost 10% are foreign born persons (only 4.1% of Iowa as a whole is a foreign-born person). 12.4% speak a language other than English at home, while only 6.8% in the state of Iowa as a whole fall into the same category.
A higher percentage of residents in Iowa City are high school and college graduates than in the state as a whole. Sixty percent of Iowa City residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, whereas only 24.5% of the state has a bachelor’s degree or higher — just for context, only 27.9% in the U.S. as a whole can claim the same thing.
Even though Iowa City seemed to be better off than many other areas of Iowa, I still saw aspects of digital inequality. Although the university and city strived to provide access to all things digital to everyone, not everyone had the same level of access.
For example, there were times in junior high when we needed to use a laptop outside of classes. Since not everyone at my public school could afford a laptop, my school purchased small cheap laptops that could be checked out overnight. The laptops were very used, slow, and only had the Microsoft Office Suite and a USB port to transfer files. While having the option to check out a laptop tries to make digital access more equal and available, there is still a disparity in the quality and level of access.
Digital equality isn’t just about providing groups of people who have lower digital access a way to access a product or technology, such as providing internet access at a library. Like in one of the papers we read for the week, we learned that even the ease of accessing a product or technology is a factor in digital equality. Unless we start passing out a “digital toolkit” to every family, digital equality will probably never happen — given the heated debates of universal healthcare, I don’t think a universal digital technology initiative is in the works.