Systematic and automatic is the attitude.
The human is like a little piece (on a mechanism)
Who can find the truth, when all of us are confronted?
This is the way to serve to preachers of lies.
Human tool.
Some
of you heavy metal/Goth fans may recognize these lyrics from the song “Human
Tool” by the Argentinean band Vampiria.
You can hear it here.
I
thought of this when I read a story in the New
York Times about how homeless people had been deployed as human Internet
hotspots at a technology conference in Austin, Texas. You can read about it here. The gist of it is that a marketing
company equipped homeless people with mobile Wi-Fi devices that offered
conference-goers Internet access in exchange for donations by the users. The homeless people were paid $20 per day and
given business cards and T-shirts. They were also allowed to keep donations. It
was part of a larger “Homeless Hotspot” project that the company hoped to offer
in other areas where heavy demand on cellular networks caused problems with access.
Most striking is a photo of a 50-something black man wearing a T-shirt that
reads “I’m Clarence, a 4G hotspot” along with instructions for how to SMS
Clarence for access.
It
is not news that there is a national and global digital divide wherein there
are inequalities in access to, use of and/or knowledge of the diverse and
proliferating resources of the digital world. As much research suggests, these
inequalities are often heavily influenced by economic status, race, gender,
nationality and culture. Economic and social outsiders often find themselves
with little or no access, and even when they do have access, there may be divides
in the purpose for use of Internet resources, such as entertainment versus
research, for example, and in the sophistication of use, such as retrieval and
passive consumption versus interactivity and contribution to media. Perhaps one of the most commonly
conceived of divides is the divide in access to the digital world and the corresponding
divide in the means and nature of use.
This is often expressed in discussions of connecting or not connecting
because of differential access to equipment or service. This also has to do with the place of
access such as at work or in public spaces versus connecting at home, or connecting
via dial up (yes, believe it or not) versus using high-speed services. This all raises the related discussion
of a term that gained prominence back in the 1990’s: the information
superhighway. The information
superhighway referred in its most fundamental sense to the physical route for
the transfer of data, such as fiber optic cables and other hardwares that were going to
connect businesses and households to the Internet. The information superhighway
also had more metaphoric import as the transport mechanism for ideas and
information. Whether in its
literal or figurative sense, the information superhighway was touted as an
amazing new way to bring together people as both consumers and providers of
information.
It
is becoming quickly apparent, however, that just as in the case of the
development of physical superhighways, there are casualties of the construction
of information superhighways. Physical superhighways often displaced poor and
racial minority neighborhoods even as wealthy and white neighborhoods, often the
prime users of the superhighways, were able to preserve their own
neighborhoods. Superhighway
entrances and exits were often strategically placed to benefit business centers
and wealthier neighborhoods. Superhighways also displaced public transit in some
communities. Take Los Angeles, my
hometown (please. I couldn’t
resist the joke. Really, I love
L.A.). We used to laugh sadly
about how even though the highway ran right thorough some neighborhoods we had
to practically stand on our heads to get on or off of it anywhere near the
neighborhood. My grandmother and mother used to wax nostalgic about the public transit “red cars” of their youth, a network of rail lines and electric streetcars that connected L.A and
nearby communities. These were
just memories by the 1960’s and 70’s when major highways were built. The poor
and other people without cars were all but stranded by the new highway transit
system that depended on driving.
As a poor child living in L.A. in a household that didn’t have a car for
many years, I was going, perhaps both literally and figuratively, nowhere. The superhighways availed me nothing.
Like the
physical superhighways, the information superhighway is going right by and
right over some people and some neighborhoods. Homeless people as Internet
hotspots makes the point in a weird, cynical, dystopic way. It sort of reminds me of the old, old
pre-digital days when people sometimes had to hold the television antenna in
order to insure reception for everyone else watching. You only hoped that you would get a turn watching and not
holding. But with the digital
divide being what it is, the homeless people featured in the article are little
more than human tools—I don’t know that they are going to get a turn as users
of the services they are providing for others. They are collectively, in this
regard, maybe more like Atlas holding up the heavens.
