Problematizing the digital divide: Cultural and social reproduction in a community technology initiative.

摘要

To promote greater access to information technology, community technology centers have emerged across the US. However, the relationships between increased citizen participation in technology-rich environments and improved life chances are not well understood. Given the situated nature of the problem, ethnographic methods are employed to develop conceptual structures around these relationships. I do so by examining a community technology initiative in a historically underserved neighborhood in an urban municipality.; As access diffuses to communities that were initially excluded, we tend to assume that information technology will naturally improve the life chances of citizens. However it is prudent to challenge this assumption, and examine unintentional effects. Emerging patterns of inequality that incited the community technology movement reflect not only differences in the structure of access (i.e. the digital divide), but also the crucial ways in which such differences matter (i.e. digital inequality). Informed by Bourdieu's theory of reproduction, I examine the critical dimensions of digital inequality, which include information technology, as well as cultural, social, economic, and institutional forces.; The findings suggest that community technology centers are endowed with the institutional authority to deliver basic access and training. However, because information technology engenders a monolithic culture that reproduces and privileges American middle-class competencies and ideologies, it is relatively more foreign to the native culture of the target communities. Consequently, those with the greatest training needs receive the least exposure to the technology.; Light training is a strategy of assimilation that delivers digital skills, but the social quality of this training leaves upon its subjects the stigmata of catching up. It is conspicuous consumption of training in which life chances tend to be structured by the cultural distance between the information technology and the user. Any effort to redress the digital divide must delve into the absence of hope, the relative economic and educational deprivation, the depression and the social despair that inhabit our inner cities.