Welcome to Hump Day afternoon. There are a smattering of boats in Streeterville Bay. There are a smattering of clouds in an otherwise blue sky. Swimmers, runners, and bikers are all training for their upcoming competitions in their chosen sports, and drivers are anxiously fighting the traffic on their assorted ways home. The Streeterville Weather Service tells us that it is 77 degrees under partly cloudy skies this afternoon.
As I sit here in my perch on the 14th floor, I am acutely aware of the fact that I am wired into the grid that connects the planet. I keep in touch with family, friends, work colleagues, and assorted miscellaneous sorts via the electronic medium called the internet. We're all just a keystroke away from one another. We seem to be connected more than at any other time in my life.
Most of us in the adult world were initially introduced to the internet via the work world. We had to master some aspect of it in order to do our jobs. Then more and more of us got wired at home. We began using it for keeping in touch, for shopping, for searching for stuff, for amusing ourselves. It became an integral part of our lives, to the point that if the internet service was down, we didn't quite know what to do with ourselves. (How much time do you spend on Facebook?)
I work in a school and the kids I teach have grown up with the internet. It is now and has always been an integral part of their lives. They can't imagine life without it. Yet, I read just yesterday in an article in the Chicago Sun-Times that one-fourth of all Chicagoans never use the internet. Who are these people who don't use the internet? How do they function?
Well obviously these people are not you. You are reading an online publication by an obscure Chicago teacher, blogger, writer. You are one of the wired, as am I. The unwired? They are sometimes older persons who simply have not digitalized themselves. My 88 year old mother-in-law rejected her PC and internet service to return to writing letters on an electric typewriter.
As it turns out, most of us who are wired (75% of us) live a comfortable existence, that is we live above the poverty line. We are especially prone to being wired if we are college-educated and qualify as middle-class or above. The reciprocal of that is that poor people are less likely to have access to the internet. They don't make much money. They can't afford to spend good money on internet service. They do without.
Having noted the income barrier, I should note that this means minorities with high levels of poverty are less likely to log onto the internet. Yes, white people are wired in larger numbers and percentages than are black people and Latinos. Black people and Latinos are more often poor, ergo....Duh! It's a simple step then to find out which neighborhoods are more wired than others. Rich people=wired. Poor people=not.
I can't say with any certainty that those who aren't wired live lives that are any poorer culturally. I cannot say with any certainty that they are at any disadvantage economically or psychologically by not having the internet. Would my own life be any less rich if I had to find some other way to spend my time, than being wired and online? Probably not. Just a little different.
However, there is one aspect of the internet that I can address with certainty. Children from homes without the internet are at a disadvantage in school. They only begin to develop internet, computer, and keyboard skills after they enter school. They do not have access to a world of knowledge that is just a keystroke, a click and a drag away from those kids who do have internet access. As regards education, I personally completed an Educational Administration graduate program without ever setting foot in the library of Loyola University. I had access to the internet.
This simply points out the possibilities and the disparities. As we progress further into the 21st century, those who have not entered the digital age are doomed to be left behind in the low-tech world and it should be noted that the upper strata of society, the high-paying jobs, the lives we all want to live, are most assuredly wired, and not low-tech. Is there a way to get every child the computers, the internet access they need? There damned well better be, or we are dooming a chunk of them (Say 25%) to a world with no promise of advancement.
Didn't mean to go on a rant again about class stuff, but I did didn't I? And I went on way too long. What say tomorrow we talk about cell phones?
No comments:
Post a Comment