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Be Careful What You Ask For:

Paradoxes About the “Digital Divide”

Thomas A. Callister, Jr.

Whitman College

Nicholas C. Burbules

University of Illinois

In October 2000, the U.S. Commerce Department published a report on the so-called “digital divide,” cleverly entitled “Falling Through the Net.”[1] An introduction to the Report, available for a while (ironically) only on the Web, neatly divides people into two groups: those who have “the best information technology that society has to offer” and those who do not. Those who do not are described as “the less fortunate.” They have, according to the introduction, “less opportunity to take part in the education, training, shopping, entertainment and communications opportunities that are available on line.” They are, we are told, at a “growing disadvantage.” It is only logical, the introduction continues, that “raising the level of digital access by increasing the number of Americans using the technology tools of the digital age is a vitally important national goal.”

In the introduction to their special issue on technology and “The New Divides,” the editors of Education Week presented the notion of a “digital divide” as slightly more complex than simply contrasting those who have access with those who do not.[2] As they state it, “what the nation’s schools are grappling with is more a set of divides” [emphasis ours] — divides they describe not only in terms of who has Internet access, but also such concerns as the acquisition of hardware and software, adequate financial and technical support, and programmatic concerns. Elsewhere in the article, the director of the Center for Children and Technology (CCT) in New York City says that having computers in a school is not sufficient. Many schools use computers in ways that “do little to close the digital divide or enhance student learning.” “The bottom line,” she says, is that “you don’t just put technology into schools and expect miracles to happen. The technology is only as good as the program that surrounds it.” We would call this a difference in quality of access and not only quantity of access, and it ends up looking more like a continuum, and less like a dichotomous divide of haves and have-nots.

Yet, regardless of these subtleties, the larger issue is nonetheless framed in terms of inequalities of access to something presumably beneficial, if not essential, for larger educational and occupational opportunities. Here, we want to complicate that picture a bit.

II.

All of these discussions of the digital divide rely on the instrumental metaphor of the computer as a tool. The problem is conceived as some having access to the tool, or learning how to use the tool, while others do not. The “solutions” to this problem, therefore, are always conceived in terms of getting this tool into more hands, so that they can learn to use it too.

While there is clearly something to this way of thinking (for certain purposes a computer is a tool and there are some things you simply can’t do without it), we have argued at length elsewhere that this technocratic conception limits our ability to see the complex relations, and problems, that are implicated once one does have access to modern information and communication technologies.[3] This network of larger contingencies brings in a host of other consequences, not all of which are educationally beneficial — and if we do not understand and anticipate these, we may find that many students are worse off educationally once we have ameliorated the “digital divide.”

The conventional technocratic mindset is inadequate for addressing a host of important considerations needed for thinking about what educationally productive access to technology might entail. In what follows, we will trace the inadequacies of this conventional view and argue for a post-technocratic way of thinking about information and communication technologies, one that makes the issues of access and the digital divide more complex than simply a matter of those who have access and those who do not.

Conventional thinking about the educational applications of information and communication technologies is often framed in a number of related ways. One of these is an exaggerated argument between the boosters who believe technology embodies some sort of “silver bullet” or panacea that will cure many educational ills, and those who excoriate the educational use of technology as overpriced, inappropriate, and ineffective. Although we suppose the latter might applaud the digital divide — pleased that some students escape the tyranny of computers — those critics tend not to talk much about the issue of unequal access. It is primarily from the boosters that we are warned of this dangerous divide. Their perspective is simple; access is good, more access is better. On the other hand, when one looks beneath the rhetoric of the rejectionists, one sees that they often end up being more sympathetic to technology than they seem: for example, Clifford Stoll’s book, High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don’t Belong in Classrooms, actually says, when you read it, that computers do have an appropriate place in classrooms after all.[4] Putting the provocative subtitle on the cover may have sold more copies (and it was removed for the paperback edition, incidentally), but it did not reflect Stoll’s actual views — namely, that one doesn’t do students any favors educationally by denying them access to these technologies entirely.

Another view takes the perspective that information and communication technologies are neutral — merely tools to be used or misused by the direction of the user. This view is typified in the CCT quotation above: the computer is only as good as the program that directs it. But this is a flawed perspective as well. Tools are not neutral; their use seldom represents a straightforward one-way relation between usage and purpose. The use of a tool does more than accomplish some purpose; it creates new purposes, new needs, and new expectations. It allows for new possibilities and new ways of doing things, which in turn suggest new things to be done. This is the relational aspect to the use of tools — in using tools to effect change, we ourselves are changed. The use of information and communication technologies is no different. To think of them as neutral tools ignores the collateral effects that using them will have on students — effects that are most certainly not always positive. Such effects are often unknown, unpredictable, and as Edward Tenner explains, sometimes make situations worse.[5] For example, as we will discuss below, an increased use of computers in schools may well also bring about an increased loss of privacy for students and teachers.

There is also a slightly more sophisticated technocratic perspective. To its credit, this view understands the non-neutrality of the computer as tool argument. It understands that there are no panaceas or easy fixes. It understands that with new technologies come consequences both positive and negative, and it acknowledges that some of those consequences may well be unintended and impossible to foresee. Yet this third view remains, in our minds, insufficient as a way to guide thinking about the educational use of information and communication technologies. It retains a belief that there can be a calculus of costs and benefits where positive consequences can be weighed against negative ones and the best outcome selected. But we think it’s not that simple. Even if unintended consequences can be anticipated and factored in (and if they can be accurately anticipated, they wouldn’t be unintended consequences any longer), decisions about the educational use of technology require more than a weighing of trade-offs. What this view lacks, by characterizing the choice in terms of balancing pros and cons, is an understanding of the value-laden character of identifying and distinguishing good purposes from bad purposes. Good for whom? In what circumstances? What about situations where effects are both good and bad across different populations and time frames (short term versus long term)? Who makes these decisions?

We think that the current debate over the digital divide perfectly exemplifies the inadequacy of these ways of thinking about technology. We think that these issues are better understood from what we are calling a post-technocratic perspective. A post-technocratic perspective goes beyond the means-ends instrumentalism of the “technology as tool” perspective. It understands and takes into account the interdependency of conflicting goals. It recognizes the inevitability of unintended consequences. A post-technocratic view maintains that information and communication technologies do not simply produce good or bad consequences; rather, they produce consequences that can be viewed as both good and bad, in relationships that are complex and in many cases unpredictable.

III.

We are not here today to argue against providing students in schools with computers and other information and communication technologies. Although we think the term “digital divide” is an unfortunate description that has more to do with alliteration than thoughtfulness, we are certainly not opposed to a more equitable distribution of educational resources, including technological resources. But before we try to eliminate this so-called divide we need pause and ask the necessary prior question: What exactly is it that we want to provide students access to? We want to argue that policy decisions regarding issues of access to educational computing need to be viewed from a post-technocratic perspective. Talk of closing a digital divide should first require attention to the further problems and dilemmas that closing this divide will create. Let’s consider several of these dilemmas.

First of all, there needs to be a closer consideration of what increased access to technology might bring with it. According to the Commerce Department, access opens opportunities in “education, training, shopping, entertainment and communications.” Note the priority given to shopping and entertainment (and notice that this is a Dept. of Commerce concern). But access also opens up much more: pornography, hate sites, and a plethora of digital junk and clatter only some of which could charitably be called entertainment and little of which could be considered educational. This is the first dilemma of access — to close the digital divide is to throw open the floodgates of the good, the bad, the trivial, and the harmful. The vast amount of information available to students will not come in neat packages marked “useful” or “not useful.” Students will want to make their own determinations about this — assuming that we let them. As students work and explore in this new medium, they will discover new uses, new goals and new conceptions about what it is they are trying to accomplish and learn — much of which will be difficult to predict, and some of which will be controversial. The danger of giving people access is that they will decide to use it in ways different from those authorities might intend; and the question of who is deciding what is educationally worthwhile or not gets raised to the surface.

The conventional, technocratic response to this flood of content is simply to differentiate the useless from the worthwhile. Since, from this perspective, determinations of good and bad are seen as clear and dichotomous, it should be a rather simple matter of allowing access to the “good” while restricting access to the “bad” (for example, through flawed technical intermediaries like software filters). The irony of this approach, of course, is that while we say we want to grant access, at the same time such intermediaries take it away. And this raises a second dilemma of access. The egalitarian talk of closing the digital divide, of providing access to educational opportunity for all, carries at least the implicit promise of providing students a broad horizon of opportunity, creativity, and choice. But this is not the case. Rather, access becomes restrictive and the conditions of use normalized. Students’ access is limited to what others determine to be appropriate and acceptable. Access to these technologies often comes with strings attached: censorship, filtering, and as we will discuss below, the threat of surveillance.

Guided by our propensity to think instrumentally, especially about computers and related technologies, we often think of providing access in terms of equipping students with a tool with which they can acquire information. But that’s too simplistic. Access is a two-way relationship — as students have access to others, others have access to them. And this is a third dilemma. An increase in the amount of time students have access to the Internet comes with a worrisome increase in commercialization, surveillance, and loss of privacy. For the sake of education, we potentially serve up our students to those who would exploit them commercially and sometimes personally.[6]

As we have written elsewhere, the issue of commercialization raises a host of ethical and educational problems by allowing pecuniary interests to influence educational considerations. Asking youngsters to fill out data questionnaires about themselves and their families, to require them to register to gain access to certain attractive Web sites, to track their movements across the Web — all represent an uncomfortable intrusion into young people’s personal lives. Students become fodder for the capitalist enterprise, captive audiences for messages and promotions. This is not a new phenomenon, of course. Since 1989, thousands of schools, in a complicit arrangement with Channel One, have required millions of students to watch ten minutes of news and two minutes of advertisements. Now, however, with the Internet becoming a prime source of news and information, nearly every informational transaction comes attached with an advertisement of some sort.

We, along with others, worry about the increasing encroachment of business concerns into the realm of education. Access to the Internet will continue to blur the line between business interests and educational interests. And it must be seen that much of the advocacy for extending greater access to underserved populations is not primarily about giving them access to information, but giving public institutions and private corporations greater access to them (as prospective on-line consumers, as recipients of unsolicited advertisements and promotions — spam mail — and as more easily documented and surveyed for demographic purposes, for profiling, and even for juridical control).

These critical issues about surveillance and privacy are raised as soon as we understand access as a two-way process. This introduces a fourth dilemma. Tracking a user’s movements across the Web and collecting other information about them is used to assess buying patterns, or worse, to make determinations about their fitness to be hired, given a loan, or even allowed to buy health insurance. One of the newest “killer apps” (popular software applications) is spyware — software that spies on users: students, employees, spouses. In practices antithetical to what we would consider good educational practice, privacy violations are routinely committed by educators and parents on young people — of course, always with the rationale of protecting their best interests (but without their knowledge or consent). No adult would knowingly stand for this. Most filtering software has the capability to monitor a student’s computer activity. Student email can be, and in some places is, monitored and restricted. Student Web pages are reviewed and in some cases shut down. Students have found that they do not have freedom of speech even on their private Web pages, ones not on school or district servers. Here again, access is supposedly expanded, but only in acceptable, controlled directions. One way to put this is that more emphasis is given to increasing access to young people as consumers than as producers of information, communicative interactions, and points of view.

Finally, it must be said that public rhetoric aside a serious challenge to society is whether equalizing access to new information and communication technologies is really the priority we say it is. We have suggested here several ways in which increased access will introduce a host of new educational problems; ones that almost immediately generate the response of restricting access as soon as it has been provided. But beyond this, when we look at the groups who are most directly affected by the “digital divide,” we see that these same populations have never been all that well served by U.S. educational institutions generally: unequal funding, inferior resources, segregation, and what President Bush calls “the tyranny of low expectations” have all combined to create a larger “divide” between educational opportunities. One view, of course, is that new technologies can help remedy this situation, that they have the capacity to open up greater opportunities, that this time we will do things differently. But another view is that our society’s track record has never been very good in addressing the real costs, fiscally and socially, that would be involved in changing actual access to educational institutions and opportunities. And so we see that just as many people who can afford to do so move into neighborhoods and communities that allow them to shield their children from too much “diversity” in their schools — sometimes by moving into communities that are literally gated and closed off to intruders — so too we see the emergence of “gated communities” on-line, creating closed or semi-closed networks of interaction that facilitate access and interaction for some participants while overtly restricting it to others. Often these networks involve the sharing of significant educational, commercial, or cultural information, and so are designed to perpetuate inequalities of access even for those who do have access to the on-line environment itself. Here again the provision of “access” is seen to be much more attenuated and ambiguous than our public rhetoric suggests. Differential access to education has more typically been the goal of our social policy choices.

IV.

The digital divide is one of many divides that separate educational opportunities across the U.S. There are funding divides, facility divides, teacher divides, and curriculum divides, all of which seem to be trumped by concerns about a digital divide. From a technocratic perspective, this makes sense. If we can provide students with access to advanced information and communication technologies, they can, with this new access to a digitally accessible world, transcend their own school’s deficiencies. But as we have seen this is just the computer as panacea argument dressed up in egalitarian clothes. For all the educational promise that we believe these technologies might bring, it needs to be clear that they do not change our underlying ambivalences as a society about providing real equality. Computers will not solve such social or political problems — they simply exemplify them in a new domain. Worse, they may in fact exacerbate them.

Our other concern is that the educational promise we do see for the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies will be severely jeopardized if those who make policy decisions continue to view these technologies from a conventional, technocratic perspective. From this perspective, the focus will always be on ways to expand access, but a restrictive access — access that is standardized, normalized, and controlled. As long as decisions about the use of these technologies are framed in dichotomous terms of good effects and bad effects, good content and bad content, the greater educational potential of this medium will be squandered.

A post-technocratic view, however, presents things differently. It understands that there are no simple decisions about technology that will rectify educational inequalities or improve student learning across the board. It understands that new technologies will bring with them good effects and bad effects that are unpredictable and intertwined. It understands the folly of precise prediction and the futility of control in such a fast-moving area of technological and sociocultural change. A post-technocratic view introduces a host of different questions about the dilemmas of access. It asks not only about access, but access to what, for what purposes, and for whose purposes. It examines the passive as well as active dimensions of access as a two-way relation, and asks who is gaining access to whom, and how is that access being exploited? And finally, it asks about the tensions within the notion of access itself — that access to certain resources and avenues also already entails restrictions of access to other resources and avenues that are closed off (for certain users). These dilemmas and paradoxes are, we have argued, intrinsic to the educational environment fostered by new information and communication technologies. If we don’t acknowledge this, if we persist in thinking that these are tools, good tools or bad tools or tools that can be simply used either way, then we will not be prepared for the new educational inequalities they will engender — and we may find ourselves worse off in exacerbating new divides in the future.