This essay is written in response to an Editorial which appeared in the News-Gazette (10/20/1997, "Overemphasizing computers", referred to here as "the Editorial") and a corresponding Letter to the Editor (10/27/97, "Giveaway program sends wrong message", referred to here as "the Letter"). The Editorial suggested that the Community-Wide Networking project, led by Champaign-Urbana's Prairienet (referred to here as "the project"), is not a wise use of taxpayer dollars and that it only serves to cover up larger problems facing education in our society. The Letter further suggested that this project is a "grand scheme by the liberal socialists" which will ultimately lead to a decay of work ethic in the communities it affects.
These evaluations of the project do not take into account the context in which this project is being executed. The project is not seen by anyone to be a stand alone turn-key solution for all educational or social problems in the community. The project does not seek to replace schooling and parenting but rather to provide parallel support for both. The project does not deny fundamental skills and values, it adds to them and supports them. Further the project is not simply directed at helping children but also adults. The project is not funded strictly from tax dollars but also largely from corporate donations and volunteer effort.
Information is universally important. Information empowers businesses and people; information provides individual entities with an understanding of their environment; it is only with information that people and businesses can have power within their environment. We call our time the Information Age, not because information is more important but because it is more available, more widely distributed, and more widely used. Information technology helps people and businesses get more information faster, and in this Age we are learning how to use that information more effectively to understand our environment.
But who is this we? Business people, technology people, the press, and the rest of the people who are already benefiting from the Information are the ones who spend the most time talking about how empowering it is; these people have been empowered. The people who do not have access to Information are not even acknowledged as part of the collective second person in the Information Age, they have been shut out of our community simply because they have no access to it. It is easy for the technologically empowered to forget that there is any other state of being. Only those with information access would ever call that access a luxury; those with access do not know what it means to live without.
If we seek to truly empower all parts of our community then we must address the power gap; we must create means of access to information for all members of our community. "We" must be inclusive rather than exclusive.
Society exists to serve its members, communities exist because humans can not survive alone. Communities form governments and pay taxes in order to organize themselves, so that they will function effectively for all their members. The Community-Wide Networking project should serve as a model answer to the fundamental question of the Information Age: Will Information be an agent of elitism and class division or will it be an agent of freedom?
The Editorial suggests that putting computers in low-income homes will serve as a poor "substitute for two devoted parents." The Editorial says "[a computer] doesn't replace the time, attention and loving discipline parents must provide if children are to thrive."
These statements are vacuous; what impact do the Editors think that a computer will have on the values of parents. Parents do need to devote time and attention to their children, a computer can be a tool with which they can do that. If there were a program to provide books to low income households, would the Editors be outraged at that? A parent uses many tools to help teach their child about the world. A child uses many tools to explore and discover the world around them. Why should a computer not be one such tool?
There are good and bad uses for every technology. Television is the source of much mindless activity, but it is also the source of tremendous educational material (typically from Public Television). It is not the fault of the television itself that some people choose not to use the educational material. Although some may use computers for gaming or mindless Internet surfing, those are not the only uses for computers. The project has this fact in mind, and specifically intends not to simply provide the computers and allow families to chose their usage habits unaided, but rather to provide the computers and the training necessary to use the computers for educational purposes.
The project creates educational opportunities on several levels, integrating education into its very framework. On the implementation level the project will be receiving many older computer donated from corporations, many of these computers may be only partially functional. The project will sponsor a program to teach teenagers from the areas served how to diagnose and repair basic computer problems. This program will use the defunct computer from the donations as teaching aids, and as a result the project will produce both working computers and skilled support resources.
Having teenagers in the same neighborhood as the computers will increase the success of the program and decrease its overall cost because grass roots technical support will be available. Grassroots technical support is something many people with access to information technology take for granted (they walk down the hall or call a friend when trouble arises) but this support network must be built up in places where no information technology currently exists.
This technical knowledge will also translate into real job skills. The teenagers which have been provided with very basic training (mostly by volunteers) at very low cost, will be able to enter the job market with a higher level of expertise. There is a large market for people with basic technical skills. This will serve to bring more money and expertise into the community, and with it greater empowerment.
The ability to use a computer is becoming fundamental at every level of the job market. The project will expose many people to computers for the first time. Our rapidly changing economy, with all its down-sizing and restructuring, requires rapid training of not only children but also adults. We can not rely only on the next generation to have computer skills, we must teach the current generation these skills in order to help keep people employed.
Most importantly of all the project will teach people how to use computers as a tool for learning in general. The project is not fundamentally about teaching people about computers, but about empowering people with information. The project will teach both adults and children how to use computers to learn about any subject they wish. The project will even put parents in touch with information on parenting and teaching, fostering parental devotion rather than harming it. The project will teach valuable learning skills that extend beyond the realm of computers.
In the last several decades the notion of community has diminished at the same time that the notion of isolated neighborhoods has increased. Poverty has become more and more focused into isolated neighborhoods but community support and understanding has decreased. Building a sense of community that is larger than neighborhoods can not help but benefit people from all parts of the community. It is with community awareness and support that we can escape the cycle of class prejudice and gain strength from each other.
In order for an individual to be a member of her community she must have knowledge about that community. An individual does not have the ability to interact with a community if he doesn't know what the community does, what the parameters of the community are. There are infinite options, but only to those who know what the options are.
Governments have a responsibility to provide large amounts of public information. Many governments are turning to computer networks to provide this information. This would be a very efficient, very cost effective, method of distributing information to the community if it were to replace traditional methods of distribution. But this would not be possible without universal access to information technology.
Computer networks provide an ability to organize and distribute community information that does not exist in any other medium. A computer network can provide timely, organized, distributed, easily accessible information about an infinite variety of events. A network can provide local knowledge to community members (such as legal information, business information, community announcements, educational information, etc). Prairienet has already shown the extreme effectiveness of community networking, Prairienet has provided a gateway to the Information Age for many members of the Champaign-Urbana area. But this is not enough, if Prairienet only serve certain portions of the local population then it is not fulfilling its mission; instead of decreasing the power gap between community members it is widening that gap between the users and the non-users.
Most communities in America today have a recycling program. These programs are often subsidized or entirely funded from tax payer dollars. The justification is that a small amount of tax money is used to organize an effort (collection of recyclable materials) that in the long run will be profitable for the citizens (lower price of goods produced from recyclables, lower cost of regular garbage collection, cleaner environment leading to lower health care costs and better standard of living, among other things). This is the tax system at its best, spending a small amount of government money to create a large amount of social and economic benefit.
The project is another example of taxes used well. The raw materials for the project will be donated corporate equipment. This is equipment that is too out of date for companies to use competitively but which is still perfectly useful for a family. The equipment, which would typically be thrown away as useless, is essentially recycled. The donation program is a tax write-off for the corporations and it provides free raw materials for the project and the communities served. These raw materials would be completely worthless without the actually monetary funds drawn from tax dollars which are necessary in order to coordinate the project.
This project requires a relatively small amount of actual money compared to the value it produces. The project is one of the first of its kinds and is receiving federal funds because it will serve as a model for future projects in other communities. The successful completion of this project will lead to even lower costs for other communities who wish to create similar programs.