My Thoughts About the Digital Divide

This unit in class was about the Digital Divide. The Digital Divide is the gap that there is between people that have access and are able to use technology and the people who don’t. My main interaction with people on the other side of the divide then me are from my workplace (technology retail). Most of these people that I talk to don’t understand how to use technology and they refuse to learn it instead taking it to people like me to “make it work” after they ended up breaking it in some way. These are the people that I dislike and really have no problem leaving on one side of the divide if they have no desire to learn. But the people that I do interact with, that actually listen and learn from the advice that I give them I really enjoy talking to and teaching them. Unfortunately, they are the people that don’t come back in because they have learned how to do things themselves. But the videos that we watched for this lesson really opened my eyes to how much the digital divide actually covers from Youngmoo Kim talking about diversity in the field of computing, Philip DeFranco talking about how there were kids that had to use Taco bell’s wi-fi to do homework, and Elizabeth Lindsey talking about how it’s almost imposable to get a job at most places if you can’t get online in some way. This is a problem that our society can fix in my opinion by treating internet like water and electricity like how Lukas Pietrzak talks about in his TED talk. We have been at the point where we’re keeping internet in the hands of companies is a detriment and only succeeds in keeping poor people poor and rich people rich.