Concluding the Divide

Having come full round on the subject of Digital Divide from aspects of the past, present, and future with the overarching question of “Why does the overcoming the Digital Divide matter?” as illustrated by technological issues in The Grapes of Wrath mirroring Digital Age issues today, I realize that the phenomenon of societal development in relation to technology is not a clear cut issue. However, while I have emphasized the benefits of new technology in my ongoing discussion, I also believe that the risks of new technology merit mention. As Steinbeck posits in the novel,

Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. (The Grapes of Wrath page 151)

Apparently, technology can be used for ill or for good, yet the determining factor depends on who is in control and to what ends they are motivated. More specifically, Information Technology is a power, not in and of itself, but because it presents a viable and competitive means by which an individual or group may accomplish their aims with greater efficiency through greater access to knowledge and ability to contribute to and influence the data pool that others access.

Undoubtedly I.T. has a lot of potential to drive humanity towards a more commutative and enlightened future, even though the process of reaching that level of progress can result in an arduous upheaval or displacement which “turns us off the land” like in The Grapes of Wrath.  Yet, the power of technology can work in favor of the common people as well as was the case in Egypt in a recent counterstrike against the minimum wage set by the government of which I blogged some time ago.

Risks from Evolving Medias
Interesting to note is that Steinbeck makes the progression of technology a point of warning in comparing the tractor of technology to a tank. Unless the digital natives of society take care to watch out and provide for the naivete of the digital immigrants, the natives risks doing harm to themselves in exploiting or disregarding the value the immigrants can potentially bring to the global exchange if properly educated. Therefore a responsibility lies on the industrial nations to help ease the developing nations transition into the digital age.

As of last month, computer literacy programs have been instated in Saudi Arabia for curbing their national unemployment. Contrast that with the One Laptop per Child initiative in Africa and consider to what extent these reforms best assist resolving the most pressing needs of the digital immigrants, and that is where the Digital Natives should invest their efforts.  Both are steps towards closing the Digital Divide, but those in charge of these movements need to constantly evaluate whether these reforms are really helping the collective “us” Steinbeck stresses or just the “we” on the privileged side of the Divide. Steinbeck is right. He showed us the “them” on the other side of the Divide in The Grapes of Wrath and the situations we may unknowingly cause. We must think about this. Technological unbalance is a pivotal issue, and local, national, and global relations depend on how the scales even out. A coordinated movement is necessary, but first the world needs to get online and get involved, and “we” are in the position to make “us” happen by supporting, participating, and investing, and organizing movements that enable this digital manifesto to occur.

Modern Instances of Digital Divide

Every night a world created, complete with furniture—friends made and enemies established . . . Every night, relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus.

At first the families were timid in the building and tumbling worlds, but gradually the technique of building worlds became their technique. Then leaders emerged, then laws were made, then codes came into being. And as the worlds moved westward they were more complete and better furnished, for their builders were more experienced in building them. (Grapes of Wrath page 194)

This passage, through illustrating the journey of the migrant farmers displaced by the technology of the farm tractor in The Grapes of Wrath, reiterates the process by which people come to relate to and adapt within a new environment when driven out of familiar territory. This situation from the novel is applicable to the same situation digital immigrants must contend in the process of adapting to the continually changing cyberscape of Internet and new media technologies.

Like the migrating farmers of the 1930s, digital immigrants too must discover their relationship with the constantly changing environment in which they find themselves. At first, the alien unpredictability surroundings causes voyagers to proceed with caution in crossing the transient new land. Then, as the nomads of these spaces become more adept at identifying patterns, they are better able to set up and settle into temporary outposts as the process of constant movement and change becomes routine and confidence in adaptation improves.

The Record Label Evolution
My English professor, Dr. Gideon Burton, suggested that song artists of the entertainment industry have found themselves caught in the transverse between the swiftly changing lands of the music industry over the course of the Digital evolution as their way of selling music has been displaced by technology of the Internet. Many popular recording artists have, within the past decade, been compelled to bridge the growing Digital Divide between the technologies of CD and MP3 in order to remain in business. Additionally, many have had to deal with copyrighted music leaking onto the Internet.

Still, according to a study called “MP3s Are Killing Home Taping: The Rise of Internet Distribution and Its Challenge to the Major Label Music Monopoly” Wilco business manager Tony Margherita considers that music leaking onto the Internet is “like the sun coming up” in the sense that “It’s an inevitable thing and not something we ever percieve as a problem” (Devenish 524). In essence, musicians have to alter their revenue strategies over time just as surely as a people must work their lives around the forces of nature. Both arise as the simple, yet unavoidable facts of life. To disregard such facts is to inconvenience oneself in the long run.

In expressing similar sentiments, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition Brian Zisk explains that “What we find historically, is that the folks who do best are those who embrace the new technologies . . . Radio was also supposed to ruin the recording industry” (524 Devenish). Instead, radio expedited the development of the recording industry because of providing mass culture greater access.

Today, several bands including Radiohead post their music for free on their websites in order to attract listeners to concerts which is where they make their greatest earning dividends. The moral of this story to modern society is that change is constant, change is incontestable, but as long as the people continue on this journey of change, they survive.

Internet Governance Forum 2010 and Another Digital Divide

Thanks to InterLibrary loan via BYU, I was able to attain a document called “Internet Governance and Development: Another Digital Divide?” and establish a clearer link between the role of government and its role in bridging digital discrepancies over the world which ties in nicely to the quickly approaching convention of the Internet Governance Forum which will be held this coming August, the third through the fifth, in the city of Quito, Ecuador.

The IGF continues an ongoing discussion involving the Digital Divide and means of bridging national and international discrepancies in technology from present and future scenarios. The following clip from YouTube showcases highlights the conference in 2005, of which the first few minutes give a good synopsis.



However, after having read the article on Government and Digital Divide, I was concerned to realize an inherent danger of such a convention. According to the article:

[T]he summit reached out far less successfully to the wider development community than many had expected. . . Very few delegations included substantial participation from the mainstream development community (from ministries of finance, health, education, etc.), or even from the ‘new’ communications industry (mobile operators, Internet service providers, firms engaged in software development, etc.). Civil society participation also came predominantly from organisations with ICT sector or information/human rights perspectives, with very little presence from mainstream development NGOs. . .This mismatch of aspirations – another ‘digital divide’, in truth – reflects a lack of common understanding of objectives, potentialities and processes between ICT and development communities (Information Polity, volume 12, [2007], David Souter, page 30-31).

Therefore it seems that the host of individuals marketing this campaign are so far personally removed from having firsthand experience with the issue that they cannot accurately relate with those to whom it is more relevant to life. This in itself promotes the risk of a highly abstract government in keeping in mind the most pressing concerns of its people, despite good intentions, especially in light of impersonal interaction of the Internet. This distant, unrelatable entity of the IGF represents a further form of digital division among the masses and its leadership and implies that a tense relationship between the layman and politicians may be heightened by international conferences in which they are not among the active participants.

For more information on this years IGF, additional coverage may be found at their current website.

Choice and Eviction: The Aged and Divisions in New Media

As I mentioned previously , relationships between people and technology in the Grapes of Wrath mirrors contemporary issues of the Digital Divide today. In examining their parallels, we become more aware of the dynamics of adaptation to technology and are able to better realize solutions to helping people find their way through this changing world. One form of Digital Divide today exists particularly among the elderly (a concept I introduced in the second paragraph of my first post). Steinbeck nicely illustrates the elderly’s resistance mentality by means of Grampa’s Joad at the prospect of leaving.

“I ain’t sayin’ for you to stay,” said Grampa. “You go right on along. Me– I’m stayin’. . . This here’s my country. I b’long here. An’ I don’t give a [goshdarn] if they’s oranges an’ grapes crowdin’ a fella outa bed even. . .


They crowded near to him. Pa said, “You can’t, Grampa. This here lan’ is goin’ under the tractors . . . you’d starve.” (Steinbeck 114)

Grampa Joad in this passage depicts the quintessential attitude of many of the old towards transitioning – not only towards a new, potentially more provident land in the literal sense but – in the figurative sense towards the unfamiliar terrain of the unknown of new technology. Even in spite of the chance to engage in current technological activities with succulent prospects of metaphorical nourishment of social and educational connectivity, the aging members of society sometimes choose not to participate and remain in the shriveled up land of the pre-Internet abandoned by most everyone else given the choice. But it’s not necessarily because of a fierce loyalty to an obviously outdated and dying system as one might first be inclined to think. Rather, this reluctance to adapt has more to do with an irrational fear of the unknown and a fixation on the comfortable and familiar methods of the past despite dwindling sustainability as depicted in a study entitled “The Elderly Consumer and Adoption of Technologies.”

In an article from the Denver Post earlier this year, statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that an increasing number of the aged populace are making the move across the digital divide. “The most significant increase was with 70- to 75-year-olds, who went from 26 percent online in 2005 to 45 percent online in 2008. In the same years, [only] 10 percent more of [those] 73 years and older went online.” This data suggests that those of the older generation that have remained obstinate towards migrating into the digital age have, as a group, been dying out in the technologically archaic wasteland of the past that has since become the domain of the tractors of new media which have repossessed the land.

Grampa Joad ended up being literally bundled along into the technological vehicle of progress (ie. the new family car) by a concerned younger generation but ended up dying shortly after the journey began. Symbolically, the elderly become dead to technology when they resist its adoption. As digital media becomes essential to human interaction, those that remain stuck in a lifestyle of technological abstinence by choice become distanced from the world and risk being cut off. Therefore it’s up to the current generation of digital natives to help the older in the transition.

Already, innovations such as the Jitterbug are easing the process, but it’s important to continue to design new software that is more familiar and easier for elderly to use or else they risk losing out the knowledge and relationships which have become a central part of life in the digital age of exchange. Unless this happens, we risk losing them before they are really gone.
Yet when acceptance of technology becomes a matter of access instead of a matter of choice, the spectacle of Digital Divide changes substantially. And when the invitation to technology comes to those without but eager for access, complications ensue.  Watch for more on that to follow.

*Editor’s note: Sorry about having to scroll so much. I’ve tried to change the margins, but the rounded corners of the main-wrap stay their current size and cut a line straight down my blog when I preview the updated margins. It’s still readable, just rather an eyesore to look at. If anyone can explain how to adjust the corners so they match the wrapper, please do tell.

Investigational Reversion to Grapes of Wrath

Lately, as I’ve been researching the contemporary Digital Divide in relation to the technological/social issues in The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve been hard-pressed to figure out how to contribute to the wider academic conversation. On the one hand, I don’t want to be gratingly contrary to all of my research on the pros of Bridging the Digital Divide for the sake of having something unique to say in favor of the anti capitalistic morals of the novel. On the other hand, I’m just a little reluctant to promote the whole idea as being as hunky dory as the impression that pervades my secondary sources on the topic. I suppose the obvious solution is to make a compromise of sorts, but I wasn’t sure of what exactly until last time in my college English class at BYU, my professor Dr Burton made the useful suggestion to return to the primary text.

The Novel as a Mirror of Technology Issues Today
After skimming through the chapters of the Grapes of Wrath I thought relevant to the theme of Digital Divide, I was able to more clearly think out the link and make a connection with the Overseas Outsourcing aspect of Digital Divide. First, the Midwestern farmers were forced to leave their land by the bank because of too great a reliance on growing methods of bygone days and a loss in competitiveness with the more profitable farm technologies of tractors and dozers. Upon being replaced by technology, they invested in the technology of the automobile that had been available to the masses for a couple of decades previously but which they had never considered investing in until their circumstances necessitated adoption to adapt to the changing world.

Likewise, digital immigrants are compelled to use new technology as the vehicle to financial success in today’s employment environment where familiarity with new technologies has become mandatory to remaining employable across the globe as the Digital Divide narrows. Yet, ironically, the Joads (the main family of the Grapes of Wrath) found that their migration via the “technological vehicle to success” ultimately came to naught due to how far behind they were of everybody else who had already migrated thus suggesting a downside to digital globalization. Here the Depression era immigrants might be compared to the Indians overseas taking information technology jobs out of the US because of a willingness to work for much less than the local workforce.

Globalization of IT: Better Cooperative than Competative
To wrap up this post, here’s my thesis as it has evolved to this point: “In global efforts to close the Digital Divide, industrialized nations may be thought to be endangering their own workforce by opening up a future of potential overseas outsourcing. However, while globalization of communications technology makes for a more competitive world, the connections industrialized nations are establishing within developing nations has greater potential to foster a future of intercooperation for a more unified world.

An Overview

The Hub of Investigation
Thanks to the suggestions of Ben and Heather on my last post, I have been focusing on one aspect of The Grapes of Wrath and “researching the heck out of it.”

Discovering my Point
In the first place, finding what the heck I am arguing about has been a long convoluted journey starting from the day I began brainstorming and then kept on brainstorming the digital issues in The Grapes of Wrath. (See my postings for May). Technological issues involving the Internet are so very connected anyway that distinguishing among them is a bit of a challenge, yet I’m hoping to be able to explore this singular issue I’ve decided on in greater depth – especially considering I’ve got more of a thesis to go off of now.

So what is my Point?
The aspect I decided upon turned out to be the concept of a Digital Divide which essentially stipulates that a boundary exists in global society that divides those that are able to make practical use of the information and services available over the internet and those that are not. Many would argue that this divide has been narrowing in the past decade due to a wider availability and affordability, but still the issue arises that increased availability does not equal greater accessability. More people, especially in the developing regions of the world – may have the means to attain this technology but are unable to make use of it in ways to better their condition due to unfamiliarity with its various uses and applications.

Novelist of the 20th Century John Steinbeck makes an applicable point in his The Grapes of Wrath concerning disparities in class and communication that might symbolically be likened to the current problem of Digital Divide today in conveying the perspective of “digital immigrants” seeking to overcome the Digital Divide through the desperate journey of the Joads. Thus Steinbeck illustrates how the less technologically advanced parts of the world are set at disadvantage to the more modern, technologically savvy nations and implicitly argues that because humanity exists in the form of a global community, their plight is ours. In this digital age of widespread connectedness, understanding and being able to implement the practicalities of the internet has become paramount to being able to function within a global society.

How Steinbeck Relates
The major conflict in The Grapes of Wrath came about of the Joad family’s inability to sustain themselves or pay the rent for the parched farm their family had lived on for generations. Eventually, the capitalistic force of the Bank determines to evict them and their neighbors wallowing in the same predicament off the land in favor of the farm tractor technology which requires fewer people to do the same amount of work. So they are forced from their land by new technology because they could not compete with the force of technological progress.

What’s Coming Next
In my following posts, I anticipate investigating some of the questions of the Digital Divide in Relation to

1. A historical perspective: How people have adapted to technology before in the context of the novel and otherwise

2. The problem as it still exists

3. Recent efforts to bridge the divide today
4. A perspective on the Future

5. Concluding thoughts as to what this all means to us

So that’s the idea. As I make my posts, I’ll be linking my ideas back here to keep everything together.

Repercussions of the Digital Divide

Currently, I’m seeing a relationship between the open spaces of the nation in The Grapes of Wrath and the great expanses, or voids, of information between intermittent communities (ideologically as well as physically) – possibly in the Internet. I’m wondering, is space necessary? If so, how much?

Further, I’m thinking the Joad’s journey is reminiscent of the development of new communication medias in modern culture. For starters, the family had to leave their farm without having a lot of outside information to go off of – significant of the early days of one way web communication. Accordingly, that one source had incredible influence on the decision the family made of where to seek employment.

It seems Midwestern Tenant farmers’ only options was to accept the new media of that time - AKA the call to California – thus suggesting an essential need to adapt or become extinct if one wishes to survive the shift in society. Both of the grandparents died because, as much of the prospect of moving on to a new level of life excited them, they didn’t want to abandon familiar territory. For that matter, no one was too thrilled at the prospect, but there wasn’t anyone specific to shoot over it, just the ephemeral threat of the Bank. They didn’t have the means of resistance and so had to leave.

As they became better able to navigate the path toward bridging the gap between a figurative digital division with the rest of society, they began to establish networks with other families and found their greatest success in one small, government-run camp where everybody looked out for everybody else. The small group of a common interest contributed to their greatest contentment despite their being fenced in from the rest of the country.

Upon leaving this camp and finding jobs in California, supply and demand for workers (or contributors to the developing media) was so disproportionate that people were not being valued enough for their contributions; their efforts became obsolete as they were easily replaceable, so lots of people died – this is significant of potential consequences to new media being developed without a proper balance of sorts.

Still, everyone suffering from the same exploitation was able to unify into a universal family without barriers. Essentially, I want to promote new media as being good but with the cautionary note that an unregulated torrent of universal consciousness can drown out the interests of minorities. How’s that sound? What could I do to strengthen the stakes I’m arguing? Any suggestions for simplifications or need for clarification? Thanks in advance for any suggestions!