Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
Marc Arsenault
Out now from the fab and kinky people at MIT press is this tome from our old and dear friend Virginia Eubanks. Digital Dead End is described as: “The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through boom and bust. Today we are told that broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families.”
Virginia Eubanks is the co-founder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots anti-poverty and welfare rights organization, and teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She edited the cyberfeminist ‘zine Brillo and was active in the community technology center movements in the San Francisco Bay Area and Troy, NY.
Reviews:
“If we’re to move forward as a society we’ll need to abandon many of the platitudes and utopian musings that characterize computerization and actually start doing the work that needs doing. This is what Virginia Eubanks lays out in Digital Dead End. Is she the Jane Addams of the digital age?”
—Douglas Schuler, author of Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution
“By presenting the experiences of a population of predominately working-class women whose perspectives are largely ignored in the debates about the impact of technology on our world, Digital Dead End argues that equity-based responses to the ‘digital divide’ are often misguided themselves. Any person who is working for social justice in the world of technology would benefit from reading this book.”
—Jane Margolis, Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and author, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing
“Eubanks offers a path-breaking work that challenges the redistributive paradigm associated with many digital divide initiatives. She gets at the heart of how technology contributes to social stratification and how technological designs that are attentive to issues of social relations and power are necessary to enable and empower economically challenged groups. This is a book that all those caught up in digital advocacy should read, in order to better understand the socio-technical dynamics in which they operate.”
—Atsushi Akera, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute