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At last week’s Gov 2.0 gathering—dedicated to exploring the ways that the Internet can improve public policy—Silicon Valley and Washington came together to discuss biometric security, open-source policymaking, geo-targeting and other breakthrough technologies. Roaming the halls? Internet luminaries like Google vice president Vint Cerf, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Vivek Kundra, chief information officer of the U.S. government.
Yet of the hundreds of attendees, less than a dozen were African-American. “I would have expected more,” says Darwyn Harris, director of research and development at 21st Century Cloud Computing. “I was actually very surprised.”
The Internet age has spawned remarkable advancements: enhanced communications, instant connectivities, and more and better ways to solve political problems. The election of Barack Obama was the prime example of smart technology paired with progressive politics in a way that attracted millions of Americans of all races. But when it comes to race and culture, does the Internet liberate the country from social categories—or does it reinforce them?
Danah Boyd, a researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, believes that social-networking Web sites demonstrate the same kinds of self-segregation of real life. Boyd, who is white, presented her controversial work on “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online” on June 30 at the Personal Democracy Forum, another popular conference on technology and politics in New York. Conventional wisdom has it that the Internet is a classless, colorless democracy, but Boyd’s findings suggest the opposite.
“I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment,” she told the majority-white audience, “and think about issues of inequality and social stratification with me. I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available, or equally transformative.”
Boyd could well have been discussing the so-called “digital divide” between groups of differing socioeconomic status. According to a report from Internet for Everyone, even in some of the most functional, tech-savvy cities, in the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, “many urban residents are locked out, unable to participate fully in the digital era.” This means many inner-city dwellers can’t easily apply for jobs online; or telecommute; they can’t easily take online courses, or even finish their homework. Some urban areas have been “redlined” by Internet service providers that don’t see a financial payoff to wiring poorer communities. Nationwide, only 38 percent of black urban households are connected to broadband, compared with 60 percent of non-Hispanic white homes. In Washington, D.C., which is roughly 55 percent African-American, only half the homes are connected.
But Boyd’s point is larger even, than that—she says blacks and whites use Internet technology differently, and in ways that send a troubling message about supposedly post-racial America. “Social media does not magically eradicate inequality,” she says. “Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible.” As evidence, Boyd compared two popular social-networking giants: Facebook and MySpace. She found that whites, the educated, the rich and the tech-savvy were “more likely to leave—or choose—Facebook.” Teenagers used words like “ghetto,” “barely educated,” “obnoxious” and “lower class” to describe users of MySpace. This division may have its roots in the Ivy League-origins of Facebook, and in the entertainment-focused nature of MySpace. Or in the way that euphemisms for blackness are often used to mean variations on the idea of “not good.” But it amounts to what Boyd terms “modern day ‘white flight.’”
The other gap is about careers. “In the technology space, there are just fewer of us,” says Ryan Robertson, a principal strategy consultant for Synteractive, a sponsor of Gov 2.0. “Our music’s here,” he quips—referring to the James Brown pumping through the conference hall during a break. “But like everything else, we have a low market penetration in the leadership space.”
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Prior to the 1970's or so, it was difficult for blacks to enter professional fields requiring math, due to discrimination. But subsequent to the '70s the public schools became heavily unionized, and math education, even more than other fields, went downhill. So while white communities had a chance to establish themselves education-wise prior to the unionization, black communities didn't. By the time they got a chance to get in the game, it was too late, whereas whites still had the educational base that had been built up in the pre-unionization era.
Discriminating between black and white ones and black people still exclude those who have committed crimes on behalf of human social life, everyone's equal right to education job it has to respect.
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You have described the educational path of virtually every person I know regardless of career path. It take time and money and thats the way it is! The payback is security and income.
Mark T
Thanks for your comments. Yes rich kids get more stuff than poor kids. I had to live with yard sale clothes and hand me downs up until high school, when I upgraded to WalMart (lol). I do understand the pull to have nice stuff. But education should be at the top of a parent's priority list over the prada shoes, and that really isn't the subject of this article as I understood it.
It is no secret that education, whether it be college or certification, is expensive. But it is expensive across the board. It is much more expensive and time consuming to become a lawyer or doctor (A single law textbook alone can be hundreds of dollars), but there are higher percentages of Blacks in these fields than in IT. Accounting is another example that is similar in cost to many IT professions. So why do people choose these fields as opposed to IT? That is where interest comes in. As far as the basic training I mentioned...no, you will not learn to configure cisco routers or become a Oracle DBA for free, but you can get a feel for whether you might enjoy the field enough to commit to a college degree.
General programming knowledge is not dependent on having the latest and greatest OS, and today's computers have practically maxed out processor speeds. race conditions may get more prominent with multicore processors, but kids would learn that in college anyway. Many business are still on XP. Most programming knowledge can be found online in forums and tutorial sites. The general logic is the same, the rest is just semantics.
Once you get into the field it is another story. I am sure most grads regardless of race are unprepared for the techy skills arms race. But that is just a part of being in this field. It changes fast. One minute vendor skills are in, the next it is all open source...then homegrown...then back again.
I am not saying that blacks are not smart enough to enjoy the field (or women), just that other fields are more appealing to them in general. I can't tell you the number of articles I have read lamenting the lack of women in IT. Does that mean that they can't afford to go? No, they just wanted to do something different. Plenty of lower income East Indians come to America to go to school in IT every year. The ones I went to school with were very smart, motivated, and most importantly, loved that type of work.
I love working in IT, especially the constant learning bit, but in my opinion, the nerd stereotype alone is probably enough to keep a lot of people from checking out the field. I mean, who would want to be Urkel when you could be Obama?
So yes, there is an economic divide in education in general, but not disproportionately in IT. And fewer student loans will be piled up with an programmer degree than a doctor's.
Silvre,
You have some really good points, and I appreciate them.
But what I'd like to say is that I've worked with many black techies, some were West Indian, African, others were AA; some were male and some female. Somehow most of these people (generally) have managed to make being a tech worker look good. Let's face it: getting paid, having a nice home and vehicle to drive, having extra cash to drop on parties, clubs and lounges, affording nice clothes, suits, jewelry, smart phones and designer clothes appeals to even the most non-techie person I can think of. Being a New Yorker, I can testify to that - I live in the Bronx, and have lived in Brooklyn and Harlem.
But it cost over $2000 to get my latest programmer certification, and took 2 years of devoted studying to achieve it. I wonder if everyone has $2000 to burn on one certification that doesn't even guarantee you a job? (Did I mention that for a time period, the vendor accidentally overcharged me, leaving me without access to another $600 that was rightfully mine? The discrepancy was resolved and the money released - a few days later.) I went to college too, and that did cost thousands - companies are demanding college/university credentials right now - that costs money. I buy a new computer at least once every year and a half to stay up on the latest technologies. I have six computers and I know techies with more. You generally can't run Windows 7 on a computer from 2001, or Vista on a machine from 2004. How would a young person stay up to date with technology changes if they never had access to the latest?
Vendor controlled technology products rule right now, and it costs money to get access to them. You can't learn to be a Cisco router admin at home for free (lol), you can't learn to be an Oracle admin at home for free, and you can't learn Windows Server administration at home for free. There are technology manuals and books to acquire; I recently purchased a book called "Effective Java Programming" - nearly $50 (not very expensive.) But I know some families that don't even have $50 to spare for anything right now.
Kids who have parents with cash can afford to go to good universities, have the latest XBox *and* the latest Mac laptop running Snow Leopard, have Prada sneakers *and* money for IT certification test prep books, have the Blu-Ray players *and* high speed Internet connections that will allow you to download "free" 3GB Linux distributions. Kids in poor neighborhoods go to schools where other kids don't have the latest technology resources and so don't know anything about them; kids in rich neighborhoods have techie expert friends with the latest Apple technology, so they can learn and practice that new OpenCL language implementation with a buddy!
So with all of the young black people I know and have tutored in IT, please don't tell me the digital divide is really due to lack of interest. That's a cop out. People are generally not stupid, even if disenfranchised. They generally will not choose to waste resources on something they cannot afford to follow through with.