workingwriter reviewed Technologies of citizenship by Virginia Eubanks
Review of 'Technologies of citizenship' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is a really important book for those concerned with the digital divide, and with the broader questions of how technology can help empower poor and working people often left out of the decision making process in the United States.
Virginia Eubanks is an academic with web design skills. The book focuses on a group of women living in a YWCA shelter in Troy, New York that Eubanks worked with. A left turn by local YWCA administration in 2002 led to the organizing of WYMSM, Women at the YWCA Making Social Movement, a group which facilitated a community technology lab, several workshops on poverty, welfare, and minimum wage issues, and a web-based local Women's Resource Directory. The group voluntarily disbanded in the summer of 2003. When reading between the lines, the reader suspects that a new executive director was less enthusiastic about the technology program.
Eubanks notes that poor folks …
This is a really important book for those concerned with the digital divide, and with the broader questions of how technology can help empower poor and working people often left out of the decision making process in the United States.
Virginia Eubanks is an academic with web design skills. The book focuses on a group of women living in a YWCA shelter in Troy, New York that Eubanks worked with. A left turn by local YWCA administration in 2002 led to the organizing of WYMSM, Women at the YWCA Making Social Movement, a group which facilitated a community technology lab, several workshops on poverty, welfare, and minimum wage issues, and a web-based local Women's Resource Directory. The group voluntarily disbanded in the summer of 2003. When reading between the lines, the reader suspects that a new executive director was less enthusiastic about the technology program.
Eubanks notes that poor folks are not lacking computers and other technology in their lives. The people who perform data entry tasks are not lacking in computer skills, and the women on the receiving end of the social welfare system sometimes feel their whole lives are managed and dominated by all-powerful computer screens owned by their case workers: "Sorry, the system won't allow that."
Eubanks tells a terrific story. One of the first things the new YWCA technology program did was teach residents about the inner workings of a computer. Using dated equipment donated to the facility, participants gleefully ripped these machines apart, asking what this wire did and what the modem card's purpose was. Learning how computers worked was genuinely empowering.
The descriptions and interviews included in Digital Dead End are useful and instructional, and the overall structure of the book is enlightening. Where Eubanks falters is in her concluding 9-point High-Tech Equity Agenda, that is, what to do next. It's fine as far as it goes, but doesn't really address the question of making poor and working people more powerful.
Nonetheless, Digital Dead End is a critical book for those interested in this subject.