The Digital Divide

 Good evening, and I hope you had a lovely week. I had a delicious weekend, full of relaxation and enjoying the company of others. But all good things must change, and that is actually this week's topic. This week we're going to cover the Digital Divide, sometimes in my field called the Homework Gap. 

The Digital Divide references the socioeconomic difference in access between the higher-earning households and the lower-earning households. This is unsurprisingly complicated by other marginalizing factors such as race and ethnicity. (source) The truth is that poorer households just can't afford to be as connected as wealthier ones - the child of a single mother working 3 jobs to keep a roof over her family's head is not going to be able to afford a high-speed internet bill, 3 cell phones, 2 tablets, a smart TV, and 2 computers. According to the PEW Research Study, 27% of adults in households earning 30k a year or less use their smartphone for all of their internet access. (source) In our society, a phone is absolutely necessary. It's necessary to get and keep a job, to interact with services, to communicate with transportation. Living without one is like walking through our society deaf and blind. 

This situation gets tougher when you're dealing with students. I learned about the Homework Gap in class last year, and the concepts are hard to imagine. Fully a quarter of students in some areas simply cannot get their homework completed due to lack of access, (source) and during COVID that number has meant that we're looking at effectively a "lost generation" of education. I truly believe we'll see this emerge and unfortunately strengthen because we as a society are so addicted to the idea of "getting back to normal" that we cannot fathom the idea that the pause we've been given can be used to craft something new and better going forward. 

My rant on COVID aside, there isn't much to say about the digital divide that isn't just fact. There may be some trying to eliminate the divide, like T-Mobile's 10Million project where they gave away hotspots to students through their schools to give them access, (source) or studies by several companies on how to get remote access to rural areas, (source) but the truth is that until we agree with the UN, that the internet should be a basic human right, we're not going to conquer this divide and until then we as teachers and we as people are just going to have to do the best we can. 

I should caveat that there is a possibility that the word "digital divide" could be applied to age, but the statistics remain fairly strongly - the more a person's family makes, the more likely they are to be connected. While numbers run low for the elderly and very high for the youth, the differences remain strongly. 

So I feel I may have let you down this week, fair reader. This is simply a thing that is, and we can contribute to trying to combat it, but there's no controversy here. And to console us both, here is a baby bunny and his grampa. I will see you next week!

I'll be in tow!



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