Résumé.pdf, Sent from my iPhone

The Internet, with its host of component communicative and productive technologies, has become the largest democratizing social force of the twenty-first century. Millions of people from every continent of the planet have been empowered to exchange information and ideas, building a collective network of equalized opinions never before seen throughout history. Education, socializing, and political revolutions have all been reshaped and re-imagined for an HTTP prefix, with every alteration and evolution erring in the direction of minority participation and empowerment. However, those billions who lack access to such innovation in the developing world have heretofore been exempt from the global conversation, resulting in a true divide in terms of digital access and technological agency. Even within our own borders, the impoverished have encountered a new form of disenfranchisement as their voices have been silenced from the growing web forum. Mary Beth Hertz’s article “A New Understanding of the Digital Divide” highlights the growth in ubiquity of internet services and web-connected devices over the past few years, mentioning that new technologies like widespread cellular data networks and mobile phones with powerful processors have made it easier and more affordable for many populations to gain access to the Internet.¹ Minorities, in particular, favor their mobile phones as their means to web connectivity. She argues that there is a Marxist dichotomy dividing the “web-haves” from the “have-nots”, and some align these halves with flavors of Internet access, rather than base capability. Despite her interpretation, the real divide lies in other obstacles - like the lack of net neutrality in authoritarian states and the absence of Internet infrastructure of any kind in developing regions - which stand in stark contrast to even the cellular connections Hertz is so quick to deride. Not only does her article ignore those in third-world nations with zero Internet access, it also paints a dramatic gap in quality of access in our own country where there simply isn’t one. There is a digital divide, and it is wide, but America has both feet on one side of it.

Thanks to advances in mobile processors, wireless antennae, and the unprecedented popularity of devices like Apples iPhone, “many previously unconnected populations are connected through their phones.”¹ For millions, their wireless data bill is their primary or exclusive entry into Internet connection, and many even use their devices to tether cellular data to their other computers. Ignoring significant advances underway before she published her article, Hertz sells these types of products short as being unfit to compete with their desk-shackled cousins. Especially as LTE networks (a type of fourth-generation cellular data network, standing for Long-Term Evolution to signify its growth potential over time) enter the fray in more and more markets across the United States, any speed differences between WiFi networks and cellular data networks will disintegrate. Simply put, devices like Android phones and iPads are more technologically advanced than the notebook computers they often dock to—and that distinction will only intensify over time. There will come a time when the WiFi network breathing life into our ultrabook feels sluggish compared to our AT&T-connected tablet—and that day is just around the corner.

The crux of her argument regarding the disparity of connection speed and quality of web access is that types of access she perceives as slower are limited in terms of applications, limiting the ability of those saddled with such connections to genuinely compete in the employment race. In particular, Hertz highlights completing job applications and résumés as tasks she believes mobile devices are incapable of performing as well as their modem-and- router cousins. Certainly, there is a quantitative bandwidth difference between dialing into a video conference call from a 3G cellular connection and from LAN ethernet, but the fact of the matter is that both calls are eminently possible. Word processing, page layout editing, photo and video manipulation, presentation and spreadsheet creation, and more are al now possible on mobile devices just as on desktop-OS computers. In fact, with the explosion of diverse applications available on any one of the myriad competing App Stores that populate smartphones in this country, ti often happens that iPhones can perform just as many tasks fi not more than their precursors, albeit on a display a fraction of the width and on a chipset with a fraction of the energy appetite. (The same is true to a lesser degree when discussing Android devices.) The distinction drawn between “computers” and “phones” has all but disappeared in the past five years, and Hertz’s outmoded dichotomic outlook is essential to her interpretation of an American digital divide.

In fact, Internet connects with our lives in so many ways it’s near impossible to fully realize. Hertz mentions video game systems as another common avenue for low-income families to access the web, and in so doing betrays her cursory understanding of the Internet as it is. Devices like the Xbox and PlayStation dial into a particular network of servers dedicated exclusively to the game being played or the media being consumed, and for the most part do not access the HTML-and-Javascript Internet our browsers encounter. In brief, no past or future Xbox will run a word processor, and nor would their owners or designers want them to. As if this level of unfamiliarity weren’t enough, there is a key component of the nature of these video game systems that Hertz overlooks: they require a broadband ethernet connection to operate. An Xbox or Nintendo Wii could not function on a cellular data network, meaning the same folks she claims struggle to access the web via these inferior devices are necessarily paying customers of Comcast or Wide Open West.

Types of connection within the United States aside, Hertz overlooks what must truly be the most significant digital divides of our time: those with access to a censored or curated version of the Internet, and those without access to the Internet in any form. Whilst bemoaning the plight of those low-income Americans woefully unable to purchase broadband Internet service from Comcast, she ignores the billions (billions-with-a-B) who lack even the recourse of Verizon to access the Internet. Developing countries fail to provide their citizens the cellular data infrastructure, the broadband cable connections, or even the mass-market consumer electronics al necessary to connect to the World Wide Web at all. These people cannot express their opinions, as we do, in digital forums, they cannot educate themselves or research new ideas with our online university materials, nor can they even actualize their existence by participating in the global community beyond their current reach. Hertz mourns the quality of connection speed while taking for granted the very possibility of their connection in the first place.

Further, mere connection does not necessarily entail opportunity or equal participation in the global community. Censorship via DNS-blocking in pseudo-authoritarian states like China ensures that their citizens experience neither the full information potential of the Internet nor its full communicative capabilities. In a way, these victims of right-wing paranoia are just as isolated and forced into ignorance as those absented from modern conveniences. Not even Hertz would suggest that the ability to apply for a job with Amnesty International is more compelling or important than the ability to know that Amnesty International exists at all. Issues like net neutrality in America—that is, legislation funded by the largest media conglomerates and internet service providers which would censor or limit internet access based on that which is most profitable—bring similar divisions closer to home, but, as it stands, we live in a land of relative internet equality.

Hertz concludes by celebrating a few perceived solutions to her perceived Internet-access crisis, endorsing new low-rate options from Comcast—51% owner and vertical-integrative distributor of NBC Universal, home to such programs as It’s Worth What? and Mad Money—as the messianic savior of those solemn souls thumbing away at their cell phones. She actually mourns certain people’s inability to purchase a service from a monopolistic hundred-billion-dollar corporation. “Sadly”. finishes Hertz, the dichotomy of haves and have-nots is not going away any time soon,” and she urges better understanding of the roots of Internet-access divide that we might “provide resources for al US citizens, regardless of ethnicity, geography or socio-economic status.” I suppose my interpretation of “haves and have-nots” extends a bit further than the country’s borders, especially given that Americans living below the poverty line are still within the top 5% of global citizens. Children starving in the Horn of Africa can only dream of an economic predicament wherein they might slowly load facebook.com from their mobile web browser. Something tells me they wouldn’t complain about loading screens.