The New Digital Underclass

http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/09/technology-social-media-internet-opinions-columnists-trevor-butterworth.html?boxes=Homepagechannels

by markbnine • 16 years ago

28 23 16 years ago

forbes.com

bsaunder• 16 years ago

"Academic research in these areas is almost redundant by the time it is published given the pace of technological change ... "

This seems indicative of the rapidly increasing rate of technological change. I think we are just starting to see the effects of millions of independent blogs and the rapid, community bubbling up, of posts with interesting insight.

For me, it's hard to ignore the premise of the singularity proponents.

whatwhatwhat• 16 years ago

I guess he's talking about kids in developing countries...

The point he is making is clear, however, it doesn't take THAT long to develop some fundamental computer-related skills. I feel worse for old people.

jakemcgraw2• 16 years ago

Not so much the developing world, just take a look at the majority of students in the majority of schools across the US. Anti-intellectualism, previously relegated to a small percentage of trouble makers in each class, has blossomed, and is now the modus operandi for most non-honors students in the American school system. The days of Idiocracy are upon us!

starkfist• 16 years ago

Anti Intellectualism has never been "relegated to a small percentage of trouble makers." It's always been a popular ideology in American culture.

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Ric...

If you went to a public school in the USA where anti-intellectualism was NOT the dominant meme, consider yourself lucky...

yungchin2• 16 years ago

Actually, he's talking about children "in a low socio-economic status classroom in New York City", not old people, and not in developing countries.

I've never dealt with students who "didn't grasp the concept of keyboard shortcuts", and so I'm inclined to think the situation has been dramatised for the sake of hitting the message home. But other than that, I really do share his worries: I believe you need quite a bit more than a basic grasp of technology, if you don't want to be made redundant by a computer very soon.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

News just in: people who haven't learned how to do something can't do that thing. Film at eleven.

robryan• 16 years ago

I don't think were at the point where you must know technology well to live a good standard of life. We are heading that way but at the moment it seems you can still do everything you need to get by the old way, you can still write a check out or pay a bill at the post office, you can still get a printed version of things like the yellow pages.

I think in the future when the only way possible to do a lot of the basics is through the internet then the people left behind will really have problems.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

>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

Sigh. The worst form of anxiety is anecdotal anxiety.

yungchin2• 16 years ago

Yes. And indeed, in the rest of the article, the author points out that your quote above is a rather "parochial concern", and that "there will always be a higly literate future for the highly literate".

(I think the author would have done better skipping the bombastic "digital underclass" title; the subtitle "How technology has become a barrier to social mobility" would help swift readers to not miss his point...)

timthorn• 16 years ago

Not usually one to call out typos - but I do love the phrase "higly literate"... :)

garply• 16 years ago

Yesterday, I was sending one of my workers to go pick something up at an address she didn't recognize. I told her to look it up on Baidu Maps (better version of Google Maps for China) and I found that she had never used a computer in her life and didn't know how to. She's in her early 30s. I was pretty shocked - I thought only people of my grandparents' age couldn't use computers.

But, upon reflection, computer illiteracy is probably relatively common among people without a strong educational background, especially in developing countries. It's probably pretty hard for a taxi driver, for example, to justify spending hundreds of dollars on a laptop when he only makes a few hundred a month - plus, what would he really use it for? I wonder what the statistics look like.

GHFigs• 16 years ago

tl;dr commas good, technology bad, Enlightnment thinkers good, poor people bad

allenp• 16 years ago

So this article really touches on a hundred different topics but I wanted to point this out:

"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."

I really think this is key to understanding this "underclass." It is like a surfer riding a wave, as long as you're up front everything is ok but once you get behind (and fall off the board) it gets harder and harder to get back on. It sounds a little singularity-ish, but we really are seeing an acceleration in the rate of change of technology and culture (or cultural norms like the acceptance of technological interruption at any point).

So I think the question that comes from this is what responsibility do we as a society have to help those that can't keep up with this change? We were just talking about internet access as a human right the other day, so where does this play in?

Is there some sort of digital welfare that we need to set up? Is the fact that non-agile workers can always fall back on retail jobs good enough?

pw0ncakes4• 16 years ago

Is there some sort of digital welfare that we need to set up? Is the fact that non-agile workers can always fall back on retail jobs good enough?

First step, since we'll need to go there anyway: half of all economic growth goes into a basic income fund that everyone gets; no strings, no questions, given to rich and poor alike. Asymptotically, this means that no one will have less than a 1/2N share. Eventually, we'll be able to get rid of other entitlement programs once this basic income fund is sufficient to eliminate poverty.

We're destined for sub-20% employment* in 50-200 years. The best we'll be able to achieve is a state where most of those who are unemployed are studying up for their next career. This eliminates the "fall behind" problem. People fall behind today because they still have to work when they do, often in more taxing jobs than we work (retail sucks). So they have no energy to push forward.

Second, we'll need to improve human intelligence either through "transhuman" advancement or eugenics ^. Not to sound like a dick, but a lot of people are "falling behind" on technology because they aren't smart enough. It's not that they are lazy or disadvantaged, but that the skills required to master advanced technology weren't necessary throughout most of our evolutionary history and are therefore uncommon.

^ On "eugenics", please understand that I'm not excusing the horrors that have been given that name (a misapplication thereof) in the past. I'm not advocating harming anyone, but I think there should be strong incentives (e.g. free education) for smart people to reproduce.

coolnewtoy• 16 years ago

On "eugenics" - what if the most significant factor in differences in intelligence is social rather than genetic? What if intensive parenting practices like near-constant eye contact and talking to infants and toddlers, long hours of reading to preschoolers, and a steady stream of enriching extra-curricular activites for schoolage kids accounts for larger intelligence gains over the generations than could be explained by genetic variations alone?

anamax3• 16 years ago

> Eventually, we'll be able to get rid of other entitlement programs once this basic income fund is sufficient to eliminate poverty.

Not at all. Many entitlement programs are based on differences which an equal share simply doesn't address.

Also, as the "share" increases (in absolute terms), the number of people who say "hey, I can live on that - why work?" also goes up, which reduces the size of the pool.

I am curious - why do you think that "half of economic growth" is the right number? (And, don't you really mean "half of economic output", or rather "profit"?)

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

On this:

"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."

Where is the evidence that the barrier has been "raised," as opposed to just still existing? Why is the inability to use the internet different than the inability to use a slide rule or to understand references to Shakespeare? The evidence presented just shows that people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are also at the bottom of the technological ladder. This isn't surprising, and it doesn't seem to me to be a novel state of affairs.

The New Digital Underclass

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