This week in New Medias New Literacies, we began reading
some very thought provoking works by Kazys Varnelis, Networked Publics, and by Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education
for the 21st Century. These readings are covering a wide application of
concepts, theory, and issues that relate to digital literacy. One in particular
that stood out to me was the “participation gap” described by Jenkins in
chapter four, Why We Should Teach Media
Literacy: Three Core Problems. The entire chapter is devoted to Jenkins belief,
as I absolutely agree, that digital literacy is not something we should let
children and young adults develop on their own, and that it takes deliberate
structured intervention and infrastructure to ensure it happens properly. In
regards to the participation gap, Jenkins points out numerous examples of the
disadvantage, both in short term and long term, to those without affordable or
accessible high speed Internet or without access to high capacity computers. My
attention really perked when he specifically pointed to the advantage of having
unrestricted high speed Internet access at home, instead of relying on a
library’s connection or within a school system.
“What a person can accomplish with
an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and
no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what person
can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high
bandwidth, and continuous connectivity.” (Jenkins, 2006, p.13)
I have personal experience related to this subject that
thankfully is now a part of my history and no longer the present. After taking
my teaching position in 1998, I moved to Schoharie County and was fortunate to
rent two different houses over the course of eight years, both with high speed
Internet access (DSL and Cable). After I married my wife, we purchased a home
that was somewhat located in a rural area, although only several miles from a
densely populated area with high speed Internet access. The area also resembled
more of a residential neighborhood than a sparse farm area. Unfortunately the
only Internet access available was dial up, extremely slow, or satellite,
extremely expensive. The house was nice though, and quite affordable, so we
went ahead and purchased it with the thought that as broadband access was
spreading, we would certainly be one of the first to be connected. Well, it
happened, but it took three years before we saw it. After high speed internet
had become a norm in my life, having to rely on my college’s access was
extremely debilitating for those three years. I lost social connections to
friends and family, I spent more time at my office than with my family, and my
desire to pursue knowledge diminished significantly.
Today I no longer have that problem as I am now connected
through DSL, I have re-established social relationships with distant friends
and relatives, I am spending more time at home introducing my daughter to the
wonderful resources on the world wide web, and albeit slow, am redeveloping an
eagerness to search and sift the vast amounts of information available. That
must be the case with everyone, right? Not exactly. In Networked Publics, we are shown that the United States
significantly trails many other countries in terms of high speed internet
access, and points to a few different reasons, including the fact that the US
is not a densely populated (Varnelis, 2008, ch.4, speed bumps on the road
toward ubiquitous broadband, para. 5). Furthermore, the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) estimated in 2010 that there were still approximately 14
million residents of the United States who were not being served by broadband Internet
(FCC, 2010, p.17).
My assumption is that anybody, or at least the majority of
people, reading this blog has access to high speed Internet at their home.
However, as educators, both in and out of formal educational institutions, we
have an obligation to champion this cause, and to encourage our politicians
from our local communities to the White House to continue the work to make
broadband access, either through hard wire or wireless, accessible to and
affordable for all American households.
REFERENCES
Federal Communications Commission. (2010). The broadband
availability gap. Retrieved from http://download.broadband.gov/plan/the-broadband-availability-gap-obi-technical-paper-no-1.pdf
Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media
education for the 21st century. The
MIT Press. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/jenkins_white_paper.pdf
Varnelis, K. (2008). Networked
publics. London, England: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
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