Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (review)

One of the longest and most enduring tropes of those who are interested in the intersection of community literacy and technology is the concept of the “digital divide.” Going back for at least the last fifteen years and in a variety of contexts, the idea that certain US citizens are systematically denied economic and literate “opportunity” by being denied access to networked writing technology has influenced education policy makers as well as critical theorists. And while there has been quite a bit of research into both the cause and nature of this divide as well as how community is experienced differently in online networked settings, there has been relatively little research on how communities are affected by networked technologies and the impact of those technologies in people’s off-line lives.

Enter Virginia Eubanks’s Digital Dead End, a book that problematizes the notion that technological distribution or skills are the fundamental issues of the digital divide. Eubanks questions the very assumption that those who are on the “have not” end of the divide do not experience information technology daily in their lives. Eubanks’s project arises from her work in community organizing and adult education at a YWCA in Troy, New York. Her project brought her into contact with a diverse population of working poor women in efforts to address experiences with larger social-justice issues that involved information technology. These women’s interactions with technology revolve around everything from classes in PC repair to the role that information technology plays in high-stakes social-service benefits monitoring.

Chapter 1 starts the project off from four points of departure. Eubanks begins the book in a manner similar to other ethnographic research projects with some quick background and reference for herself and a slice of personal background. The section moves quickly to the main point of the book, that poor and working-class women have a tremendous amount of interaction with information technology as participants in low-wage data-entry workforces and as participants in social-service systems. Such women, Eubanks argues, actually live in a sea of technological ubiquity that seeks to monitor and police their behavior in some way, a view very different from the skills or material “deficiency” model that dominates digital-divide conversations. Eubanks ends the chapter by grounding the technological in her research subjects’ lives as “ambivalence not absence” (10). She recalls participant stories of engaging in IT training optimistically but with cynicism about the training’s likeliness to improve their economic situation.

Both chapters 2 and 3 begin by joining a recent chorus of academic voices that critique the premise of a digital divide itself. Eubanks positions her project in terms of technology citizenship and social justice, spending most of the chapter explaining what her project is not. Most useful here is when Eubanks introduces her conceptual model for “Popular Technology” (32), positioning technology not as deficit in either skills or technology but an issue of influence, power, and ubiquity. Most interesting in these two chapters is Eubanks’s presentation of her participants’ construction of the problem of the digital divide through visualization. Eubanks creates a small cartoon of the digital divide and then asks her participants to revise the image based on their experiences. She prints many of these revisions and they are particularly interesting both in terms of how participants decide to label groups (one participant in particular labels technological “have nots” as “survivors”) and in terms of how the participants locate and draw the divide as a social rather than technological problem.

Chapter 4 takes on the familiar economic argument that technological or IT jobs are new economies that can replace the loss of manufacturing for towns like Troy, New York. Eubanks is at her best here when focused on providing proof that information-based economies are often volatile and transitory. Perhaps less successful are the many pages of economic argument and tables that stand in stark contrast to all...