The Digital Divide Is Worse Than We Thoughtful

Unfortunately, major social media corporations have discovered that anger and insecurity keep people glued to their screens. As long as profit is more important than people, digital life will only grow more destructive.Kate Thomas

Rather than marking an improvement, there were signs in the Trump administration data that the funding gap between rich and poor had worsened during the Great Recession if you had compared the figures apples to apples, either including or excluding federal funds. In a follow-up report issued in 2019, the Trump administration documented that the funding gap between rich and poor schools had increased slightly to $473 per student between the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years.

The digital divide is worse than we thoughtful

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Thanks to Jill Barshay for the excellent column reminding us that there is much more to the rich/poor divide in our public schools than just the availability of digital devices and wi-fi. The real problem with equity in education is the lack of equity in school funding, which is an issue both of inequity in society and the ways in which public schools are funded (i.e., primarily local tax revenues).

While mapping the digital divide in this way helps illustrate the inequities between countries, it obscures barriers to access within countries. For example, globally women are 23 percent less likely to have internet access than men. This divide exists even in countries with high internet penetration. In Iraq, 98 percent of men can connect to the internet, but only 53 percent of women are able to.

Your second question there was, what am I seeing? So what we're seeing is the following. Every week in March was worse than the prior week on consumer spending across the world. Every week. Because we were going through what I call the containment phase of this crisis, meaning you're shutting down things all the time. They're shutting down stores, they're shutting down borders, offices, everything. When we got into the stabilization phase, which is the first couple of weeks, three weeks through April, things kind of bottomed out. There was nothing more shut first of all, and people had begun focusing on e-commerce for their, you know, their goods of toilet paper, groceries, and the like. And you'd kind of reached the bottom

But, I do worry that those who are less digitally clued in even before the crisis will be even more left behind coming out of the crisis if we don't make real efforts to bridge this digital divide the right way coming out of this. You know, inequality is now staring us in the face in the United States, even more so. And in fact, the new circumstances, this thing on racial tensions. The racial issue is not a new one. It's been a simmering issue in our country for a long time, but its reflection is clearly exacerbated by what people have been through over the last three, four months.

But here's the problem. If you're excluded, if you don't have an identity, if you don't have an account, then the Internet of Everything will not be the Internet of everyone. Yes, that's a problem, that's a real problem. In fact, the digital divide will increase, not reduce. In fact, the Internet of Everything will get used an instrument to make it harder for you to get into the system. That's a really bad place to be.

Others think that this will be irreversible, that this is a real transition. I think it's somewhere between a transition and a transitory phenomenon as Michael Spence would say. And so somewhere in the middle of that is where we will be, and I don't know the answers, but I think you've got to prepare for it being different from where we were, but not where we are today because human beings are social animals. And human beings thrive on interaction, and it's not digital interaction alone. It's also our creativity, our innovation, come through some physical interaction as well. And I think when you when you want to look forward, you know, there will be some reversal to the mean. And so, my view is that we need to be thoughtful about both the future of work and the future of entertainment and the future of travel. I don't believe people will be satisfied with a 3D version of going to the Galapagos. I just don't think so.

The first step in any reasonable plan to reopen schools starts with robust, rapid-result testing and contact tracing to contain the spread of the virus. There is no path for safe in-person schooling without it. That is step one, and the President has not taken that step yet. A comprehensive plan for schools would also stabilize State and local budgets, ensure equity and access to technology and broadband, enhance nutrition services, and provide support for our broader educational ecosystem, including afterschool programs, museums, and libraries. For example, without a robust investment in our public libraries, we will continue to struggle to close the digital divide and the homework gap. Many, many, many, many school systems today are beginning their classes on a remote basis.

Social media and other digital technologies like email, texting, FaceTime, etc., have been indispensable in helping us stay informed and remain connected. This pandemic would be even worse if people could not connect digitally, and indeed it is much worse for those who cannot easily do so.

As always, it is important to balance the digital with the physical. Put the phone to the side a little more often than you want to. Get some fresh air, even if it just means standing by an open window for 15 minutes. Make sure that your media diet includes something other than the news. We are going to need to be as strong and balanced as possible, physically and mentally, when we get to the other side of this.

Physically, we are more distant from one another than most of us have ever been before. However, as we check in with one another digitally, interpersonal closeness can be sustained, even at a very high level. Many of us are even becoming closer to people whom we did not previously know well, as we try to help one another cope. We are renewing and strengthening ties with those who matter most to us.

In my research, I have found that people use social digital technology to prompt face-to-face interaction, which strengthens their connections. For example, people who use digital technology are more likely to see their friends face-to-face than those who do not, and, in fact, that is typically how people plan get-togethers with one another. While planning in-person interactions is nearly impossible now, we can prepare for those times when it will not be.

As this crisis has laid bare, the digital divide truly needs to be a societal priority. Even the most impoverished and least connected among us must have media and technology access, skills and literacy to participate in a global digital society. It will require a large-scale integrated effort of government, education, and business, and it cannot wait.

Because this transition to virtual activities has gone well for some, it is easy to overlook the so-called digital divide that separates Canadians. However, the longer that policies are in place to require or encourage individuals to work, study, shop, and access services at a physical distance from one another the deeper the divide will become, unless policymakers act to close it.

Unsurprisingly, much of the emphasis in the months since COVID-19 has been on closing the digital divide by providing more digital tools. While distributing free tablets and subsidizing Internet connections are certainly constructive steps, such policies only bridge, rather than close, the new fault lines opened as a result of the tectonic shift of activities to the home. In assuming that more, better, and faster technologies can, in and of themselves, bridge the digital divide, the current approach risks deepening and widening the divide rather than working to permanently close it.12

A solely technological solution to closing the digital divide has been and will continue to be illusory, as we have been warned.20 Webcasts for using Zoom more effectively in and of themselves will not help Canadians balance work, family, social, and civic life, and play.

As Canada moves into its first fall and winter since the coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to confront the fact that the pandemic has fundamentally restructured our lives by relocating many previously external employment, educational, and social activities to the home. Closing the digital divide can help Canada thrive throughout the pandemic and beyond, but doing so will require big picture thinking with contributions from all sectors of our society from farm associations to indigenous communities to social services organizations to labour unions. Now is the time for our policymakers to bring us together to close the gap.

The technological fads and media hyped product feeding frenziesthat we know of as the modern computer industry also have a darkside. The phenomenon known as the digital divide is the way thattechnology is creating a strong social economic division in ourculture that could influence generations. Those with access tomodern computers will have access to nearly unlimited informationand a world of training, experience and opportunity that thehave-nots will never know. The strong and disturbing evidenceis that home computers, SAT test practice programs, and accessto the internet have become prerequisites to enrollment in a goodcollege and getting a good job in the future. Those without a wayto get a foot up into the system will be forever kept out. Oneaspect of the digital divide is that computers themselves mustbe made to appear inconceivably complex and incomphrehensibleto the uninitiated.The reality of the world we live in is that if 100 people representedthe population of the world two of them would own personal computers.Owning a personal computer is much like owning an automobile andgives you bragging rights about the model and style that represents you.To the vast majority of the people in the world just owning one putsyou in an elite group of rich and affluent people whether it is aclunker or the top of the line luxury model.Marketing of computer hardware and software is pervasive throughoutthe culture. Everyone would like the most beautiful, expensive,fastest and highest quality model in an ideal world.Part of modern culture seems to be that people like to pretend,perhaps even to themselves, that they are so rich and importantthat money is of no object to them. If they can say that qualityfor value is not important to them because they only want the topquality most expensive option they get higher social status. Manypeople are therefore very arrogant about how wasteful they are withtheir computer. They are very proud of it and will tell youhow they got the latest upgrades that they really didn't need butsince it is all really cheap these days anyway etc. They willsay that they tried the latest most wasteful new software andhad to go out and buy a faster computer but didn't care becausethey are cheap. 98% of the people in the world thinkcomputers are too expensive to buy and most of the people whobuy them don't really believe they are so cheap that no one caresabout that. If you are talking about most of the limited resourcesin our culture it is not fashionable to brag about conspicuous consumption,but computers seem to thought of as an unlimited resource becauseof marketing.I was first exposed to the difference between programming andcomputer marketing almost thirty five years ago. If you havebeen a programmer perhaps you have been there too. Your managertells you, "This program you have written is too efficient. Youdon't understand the big picture. The client is spending $100,000a year now to do this manually. Based on the runtime of the programin this form this program would accumulate only $5,000 in fees foran entire year. The client is now spending $100,000 and will behappy to have it done for $50,000. Go back and rewrite this programso that it uses ten times as much computer time so that we cancharge this client ten times as much. This is a business and thebottom line is making money not writing efficient programs."The nature of business management in the US is such thatmanagers work their way up through the corporate structureby showing that they can manage larger and larger budgets.If you show an aspiring manager a way to reduce their budgetthey will know that they will be expected to live with thatreduced budget again next year by a maybe not so understandinglevel of management above them. They also know that theone of their peers with the largest budget will most likelybe the one promoted up to the next level where the budgetsto be managed are even bigger. These pressures lead middlemanagers to pad their budgets and this is one of the drivingfactors in the computer industry.IBM exploited this vacuum for years with managers being promotedfor pouring money into mainframe accounts with constant upgradesof machines and operating systems to address a constant list of bugs.When I worked for Bank of America in San Franciscoone of my managers maintained more mainframe accounts foremployees who had quit than he had for employees who werestill working for him. This allowed him to inflate hisbudget by about 20 phantom employees times $1000 a monthto IBM for their mainframe computer accounts. I had threeaccounts and they were all still active three years afterI had left the bank. My manager had given IBM $108,000for my computer use after I was no longer an employee ofthe bank. Multiply that times twenty employees each forfour thousand managers and you get the picture at the bankat the time.As time moved on it became easier to get promotions inlarge companies for wasting money on Personal Computers. WhenI was a consultant to Pacific Bell I saw countless examplesof managers spending hundreds of thousands of customersdollars on inflated budgets for computing systems to worktheir way up the corporate budget ladder. Managers werelooking for packages that came in the largest boxes, withthe most diskettes and with the largest pricetags thenthey would buy hundreds or thousands of copies that werenot needed for any conceivable reason. One example were the3270 terminals. They had many employees who used IBM 3270terminals to talk to their mainframes. They replaced themwith PC running 3270 emulation programs. This allowed themto continue to spend thousands of dollars per machine everyyear for needless hardware and software upgrades even thoughall of these users only ever ran one piece of software, 3270emulation.Whether you are talking about corporate America being marketedproducts that are intentionally puffed up for marketing purposesor individuals being marketed new computer hardware and softwareproducts based on style, status, and hype it is hard to denythat what sells are big boxes and big programs with lists offeatures that far exceed anything related to productive work.There is considerable concern both in the industry and by consumersabout the diminishing returns for our continued investment asusers in this kind of software.The marketers tell us that if cars were like computers the carswe would be buying today would be absurdly cheap and absurdlyfast, but it just isn't so. I got my first personal computerfor about $1000 in 1975. That is still what they cost. The graphicsare better. The computer is bigger and faster, and doingmore complex things, but that is what you would expect after25 years of progress. My first machine ran at about one hundredthousand instructions per second and my current machine runsat one hundred million, 1000x faster. My first machine was so slow thatit would take several seconds to boot up and would sometimes just go awaywhile executing system code on badly written programs and I could nottype for up to twenty seconds. My current PC is 1000 timesfaster, but the programs seem to be 1000 times bigger and slowerbecause it now takes about a minute to boot up and it still goesaway for about twenty seconds sometimes while the OS and GUIdo who knows what sometimes and appears dead and will not accept akeystroke for that period of time.In this world of quickly expanding computer hardware and quicklyexpand computer software there seem to be very few people concernedwith making computers efficient or getting the most value out ofthe computers we have, or the most productivity out of the programmers.It is more fashionable to claim thateveryone (who is important) is rich and doesn't care about thingslike efficiency. If a program is inefficient they can always justgo out and buy a more expensive computer to make up for anyamount of waste.In this world there are few people working on making computers simpleto understand, simple to build, and simple to program. There are fewpeople making programs that are easy to understand, easy to maintain,efficient and beautiful. One of those people is Charles Moore theinventor of the computer language Forth. Chuck Moore describes himselfas a professional who gets personal satisfaction out of seeing a jobdone well. He enjoys designing computers and writing very efficientsoftware. He has been working for nearly thirty years to come up with bettersoftware and nearly twenty years to come up with better computer hardware.His latest work involves unusually small computers both in hardware andsoftware.His ideas are very synergistic as both his hardware and softwareare as much as 1000 times smaller than conventional hardware andsoftware designs. However many of his ideas about software designand programming style are not limited to his tiny machines. Whileit is difficult to map bloated software techniques to tiny machinesit is easy to map his tight tiny software techniques to huge machines.There will always be problems bigger than our machines and therewill always be people who want to get the most out of their hardware,their software, and their own productivity.Chuck's approach to VLSI CAD is a good example of the applicationof his style of programming to a conventional computer. The approach andthe design of the code used the tiny approach to get the mostproductivity from the programmer and the highest performancefrom the software on a conventional Intel based PC. Instead ofpurchasing packages of tens of megabytes of other people's code forhundreds of thousands of dollars Chuck wrote his own code in a matterof months to make it faster, more powerful and more bug free. Hedoes the job more quickly with thousands of times less code. The size andperformance of the program are quite remarkable and the methodologybehind its design and construction involve more than a specificationof the features of his language. It involves understanding howthat language was intended by used by its inventor.Chuck has moved most of this Forth language into the hardware onhis computers leaving so little for his software to do that it isvery difficult for people to see how his software could possiblybe so small. He has refined his approach to his language untilis is difficult for people who have been extending it for twentyyears to see all he has done with so little code.There are aspects of his early experiments with CAD that haveled to great confusion about his software style. It has focusedmany people's attention on the number of keys on his keyboard orthe size or number of characters in his fonts or the hue of thecolors that he selects in CAD, the names he used for opcode anda long list of other distractions. Introduction 2ff7e9595c