Digital Divide- Update

An update from my previous post about the digital divide:

First, I should disclose that I am now blogging from a laptop made in the CURRENT CALENDAR YEAR with the Windows 8 and everything. I can't tell you what a difference it makes to be able to run two programs simultaneously, to not have a half hour boot-up time, or to be able to open iTunes without crashing the whole works.

This makes me only more adamant in my witness of the digital divide. Yes, technology is awesome -- I totally get that. But it is simply not accessible to everyone. A friend moved about a half an hour outside of town, and though the neighbors one block over have cable TV and Internet, the cable just doesn't cross the street. The good people at Time Warner Cable said they'd be happy to run a cable out to her house for the low-low price of $20,000. She now waits until she drives into town to check her e-mail at the bookstore cafe on her laptop.  Now imagine that you can't afford a laptop and so you are one of the millions of Americans who can only access the Internet in half hour increments at the public library. Doesn't it make you want to lobby your elected officials for a "Rural Internet Act" in the spirit of the "Rural Electrification Act" that brought the electric light to rural America in the late 1930s? Perhaps some kind of governmental computer upgrade program so that not only would every home have a computer, but one that us up-to-date enough to run the current version of, let's say, iTunes?

Second, I am disturbed by the fundamental misunderstanding of why the technological divide exists. On the Colbert Report last spring, Google's Eric Schmidt said "In the next few years years 5 Billion people are going to join the 2 billion of us who are already on it." [this is around 3 minutes into the video] He says tht these are the 5 billion people, [like me], who are currently using "dumb phones" in places like "Africa, Asia and the poor parts of America."  Apparently we are all going to be converted to smart phones. But Mr. Schmidt does not explain how all of these folks [like me] are going to pay for their data plans. Nor does he explain how we are going to extend cell phone coverage to all those currently un-covered areas [like my friend's house] that are too sparsely populated to seem worth covering by for-profit corporations.

I also recommend that Mr. Schmidt check his math --  there are only a total of 7 billion people in the world today, and though in fact 6 million of us do have a cell phone of some kind, Mr. Schmidt's math is off by a billion people who have no cell phone of any kind. I don't think we can assume they are all going to be part of the internet comunity "in the next few years."

It reminds me of the green revolution back in the 70s. We were going to radically change our agricultural practices so that we could fight hunger around the globe. Recently a World Bank report showed that it is actually not a lack of food that creates global hunger, but a lack of money to pay for said food. According to the United Nations, there are 870 million chronically hungry people in the world today. 2.5 billion people lack access to proper sanitation. If we can't even get food and clean water to all 7 billion people in the world, how on earth do we think we are going to get each and every one of them a smart phone? It feels a little like Marie Antoinette's admonition to "let them eat cake."