The New Digital Underclass How technology has become a barrier to social mobility.

The New Digital Underclass
Trevor
Butterworth,
How technology has become a barrier to social mobility.

Once upon a time, literacy and numeracy were the paths to social mobility in its broadest sense; now, technology appears to have raised rather than lowered the barrier. Even something so apparently trivial and ubiquitous as social networking is a shock to kids who have lived life off the virtual grid, and who then make it to a college environment that is now, in large part, a virtual experience.

Even more disturbing, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both professors of economics at Harvard, have noted in their compelling study of the race between technology and education that future
economic progress in the U.S. will not simply depend on mastering basic
digital skills. If your job can be replaced by a computer
program, chances are, it will. In fact, Goldin and Katz suggest
that prosperity and equality in the U.S. will need a workforce that has
more of the mental agility of a Leibniz or a Kircher in order to adapt
to rapid technological change.

Technology has both aggravated these anxieties (Twitter) and offered itself as an antidote (The Information Superhighway); while the spat between the New Yorker's George Packer and The New York Times' Nick Bilton has become
emblematic of the cultural stakes: We're losing more than we're gaining
and techno-evangelism is killing Tolstoy! It's easy to fall into this
camp: There is a sense that devoting oneself to reading a book over 200
pages has become a major and possibly insuperable commitment in a way
that it possibly wasn't 10 or 20 years ago; there's a sense that
technology has become a toy you never grow out of rather than a too
that you put to specific productive uses; there's even an argument that
the constant upgrading of technologies and software accounts for a huge
chunk of what is thought of as economic productivity.

As the Washington Post noted recently, one Georgetown University Law School professor, David Cole, has just banned laptops from his classroom. "This is like putting on
every student's desk, when you walk into class, five different
magazines, several television
shows, some shopping opportunities and a phone, and saying, 'Look,
if your mind wanders, feel free to pick any of these up and go with it,'
" Cole told Post reporter, Daniel de Vise. He had a point--95%
of his students had admitted to not using their laptops for
note-taking. If the laptop and the Internet, golden keys to the
information superhighway, were now bellwethers for educational
regression at Ivy League-caliber institutions, what must it be doing
further down the educational scale?

This is, perhaps, the more interesting question, and it's one I put to Tiffany DeJaynes, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia's Teachers' College, who is writing her dissertation on blogging in a low socio-economic status classroom in New
York City. The picture that emerges, confirmed by other teachers in
similar schools, is that this is the wrong question.

This makes the real informational anxiety about new technology not whether it will destroy reading or newspapers, or journalism--for these are, in many respects, parochial concerns (plus, there will always be a highly literate future for the highly literate). Rather, it is whether
digital exclusion and its corollaries of social and economic inequality
can be reversed--or whether, given flagging educational attainment, the
ranks of the excluded are set to rapidly expand.

via Forbes