The Real Digital Divide

I was recently invited to lunch at an elite club in New York for work. When I made the mistake, unbeknownst to me, of pulling my dumb phone out of my pocket, I was promptly scolded by a doorman, who commanded me to “put it away.” “No phones allowed, sir,” he said. I couldn’t help but notice the relish with which he meted out the discipline, but my embarrassment soon passed. My envy, however, did not. This rarified stratum of American life had retained the power to stigmatize ill-mannered uses of tech. If only the rest of us had such freedom—if only it extended to the poor, working-class, and middle-class, too.

But our fates have been different. A few years ago, the New York Times published a number of exposés about Silicon Valley elites sending their kids to phone-free schools; meanwhile, the rest of us were sending our kids to schools where the imperative was to “overcome the digital divide,” which made access to electronic devices a matter of social justice. This clever marketing strategy, cooked up by Silicon Valley PR, put a kindly face on efforts by companies like Google and Microsoft to co-opt classroom instruction and re-route it through their products, turning the school day into just one more source of data harvesting.

Continues...