- [Elizabeth] Jessamyn West is a librarian
and community technologist.
She writes a column for Computers in
Library magazine. And is the author
of the book Without A Net: Librarians
for Community Advocacy for the
University of Hawaii's Library School.
She was a research fellow at Harvard
University Library Innovation Lab for 2016
and '17 and serves on the Advisory Board
to the Wikimedia Foundation.
She works with small libraries and
businesses in Central Vermont to help them
use technology to solve problems.
Let's give a big welcome
for Jessamyn West.
- [Jessamyn] I'm going to talk about a
bunch of different things,
and I figure, with most talks, people walk
out the door with, like, one or two things
that they're like, "Oh, I'd really like to
know more about that one thing."
The web address up here,
librarian.net/talks/techforum, is
the slides, it's URLs to other stuff if
you want to read more about stuff
because librarian. And it's also got
slides you can use yourself,
all the pictures I'm using are Creative
Commons-licensed, you can basically take
whatever you want and use it yourself if
you want to. So getting started, I love
coming to Canada because people are
friendly, and I get to go to big cities
where technology seems more like a cool
thing you could do something with,
and useful, and less like a hostile
invader intent on undermining your way
of life. For people who don't know me,
I'm from Central Vermont,
I'm from a town of 4,500 people.
And I spend a lot of my actual work time
when I'm not doing stuff like this,
sort of getting people signed up for their
first email account,
and teaching them, you know,
basic sort of the difference between
click, double-click, and right-click,
and then we practice. So I'm
here to talk to you about digital
divide in general, and I'm basically here
to do kind of three general things.
Talk about some characteristics of
digitally divided people in 2018,
and introduce the idea of digital
readiness. As an example,
this dude up here, this is him pulling
fiber through the hills by my house three
years ago, this isn't, like,
old-timey rural electrification.
This is my life right now,
this guy is my neighbour.
And if you want to know more about the
guy, there's links on the page of links.
Fascinating story. I want to introduce you
to the work and tactics of Phil Agre,
who's the guy up in the corner,
who sort of was a technology educator
and instructor for a long time.
And he talks a lot about sort of tech
philosophy, used to, when he was sort of a
working professor, and I think most
of what he has to say is super interesting
and useful. And then just open a
conversation about the ways librarians are
uniquely positioned to try and make this
situation better maybe. Which
can also be a framework to how
to think about some of the other ideas and
issues you may sort of come
up against at this and other conferences,
where we talk about a lot of big ideas.
But then we have to go home and try and
figure out how to make them work
with actual people. So if I was doing this
talk in 45 seconds instead of 45 minutes,
I'd be like, "Hey, the digital divide is
important because technology is important
for personal and professional reasons.
Especially as the world is changing and
digitally divided people get left behind
basically. And number two, the people who
are building a lot of the technology we
use are sometimes, often, making
bad choices, because of the digital
divide, and as a result,
they don't see the people who I see
because they don't live where I live.
People look at me sometimes a little bit
and they're like, "Jessamyn, you're really
good with computers. Why do you live in a
tiny town and teach technology,
when you could make so much
more money being in a big city?"
And I'm like, "The fact that you answered
that question is the reason I have to live
in this tiny town," because people just
presume that, like, maybe everybody who
isn't optimising their financial
potential is in some ways stupid,
and they build software as if that were
the case. So moving on,
so these people don't necessarily do that
stuff on purpose, a lot of times it's just
by accident, a lot of times they really...
it doesn't occur to them that there may be
people for whom email is not a dead
technology but a new technology.
Or the paperless office was always a great
idea and never actually worked for the way
a lot of us have to do our jobs, even
though it could and it might and etc.,
But realistically, real world, we sort of
need to talk about this.
And then I'd also say, read Phil Agre's
How To Help Someone Use A Computer, was
written in 1996. I'm going to use some
quotes from it during this talk,
most of it's still true today.
And it's a lot of good advice because it's
not a lot of sort of "hold the mouse like
this," but more think about the world
like this. Which is useful for people like
us who are usually an intermediary
with people who are learning,
versus people who are building.
And we may be building stuff ourselves and
also learning stuff ourselves.
So it's sort of hard to show the digital
divide, people just give you a lot
of pictures of bridges and are like, "It's
kind of like this." And that's actually
part of the larger problem,
librarians tend to understand the issue,
because we see digitally divided people in
our populations, whether it's small-town
libraries like mine or at Toronto Public
every single day. But they can be a little
bit invisible to the people who create the
technology that digitally-divided people
have to use. So part of the divide is the
lack of overlap between tech-rich society
and tech-poor society,
and some of this can be just
literally proximity. Vermont is
not near San Francisco kind
of thing. But part of it can be
demographic, it can be age-based,
class-based, race-based, gender-based.
20-something white men in cities are
building a lot of the technology that
everyone else is using.
And I know that that's not completely true
and it's always exciting for me to see
more women coding more stuff, etc.,
but it's still not enough to sort
of change the fact that that sentence is
more or less true. So I've taken to just
telling stories about the people
that I work with. This is Janet,
these are from my Twitter, you can click
through and read about them if you
want to. Every Tuesday I do a drop-in
time, I sit in a room, people come in
with their questions, it's free to them,
we answer whatever their questions are.
This week, I was there for 2 and a half
hours, we had 11 people with their
random questions. And then I write them
all up on Twitter and everybody's like, "I
had no idea people like this existed," and
I'm like, "Well, it's just me
doing my job."
And so these stories are every day for me,
but they play big on Twitter where the
tech people are. And, you know,
I like to think this is helping.
So I met Janet through drop-in time,
and it's through a tech high school.
Do you guys have, like, tech education? So
it's like 11th and 12th grade for kids who
are more sort of trade-based and less sort
of college prep. So they learn diesel
engine mechanics and natural resource
management, they build houses,
it's actually pretty cool.
So I've been doing this for 10 years
I guess. Janet is a square dancer who
maintains a spreadsheet of the people who
come to the square dancing camping trip,
that she puts together. It's amazing,
it's so interesting. I learn so much from
Janet. But someone in her church was using
WordPerfect and sending these
documents that Janet can't open,
and Janet doesn't know that that's because
Janet doesn't have WordPerfect.
Because why would she know?
Because who still uses Word Perfect?
The lady from Janet's church,
so it's real for Janet and...
So I showed her how to do
Open With from within Microsoft Word,
so you double-click on the file and
nothing happens, the computer is just
like, "I don't care."
But if you go inside of Microsoft
Word and click Open With or you
right-click, but right-clicking is a
little tricky, suddenly, presto, your
computer does the things the television
tells you it's supposed to.
So we'll start here, this is a fact, more
or less, I think in the PR material
for this thing. It said 15% and I'm here
to tell you the good news, it's more
like 13%. But really basically,
I've been doing talks like this for a good
chunk of time. And this number hasn't
budged, it started at 20-ish and it's
at 30-ish and it is not budging from
13-ish, which is surprising to me
but true nonetheless. And Canada...
so this is United States' number,
but in Canada, the number is almost
exactly the same which is fascinating
to me. Because theoretically in Canada
there are more people in broadband
capable areas, as I understand it.
And I'm certainly not here to explain
Canada to Canadians, for handwavy
reasons because you have a
government and we have whatever we have.
So I just want to talk about what it
really means to be offline,
these 13%, what's their deal,
what's the outline of the digital divide.
And so the digital divide sounds like a
really easy idea, but it's a little bit
complex, because it kind of used to be
a thing. Computers are too
expensive, you don't have money,
you can't afford a computer, ergo you're
divided, the end. And, you know,
libraries and everybody else were like,
"Hey, money is actually a thing we can do
something with." And so now 97%
of the population in the U.S.,
I'm sure you guys have similar numbers, I
just don't know what they are, have...
97% of our population in the U.S.
has a public library with a free computer
plus Internet that somebody can go to use.
So that's awesome, this thing we mostly
helped deal with. I'm not saying it's
perfect, right, I'm just saying, mostly
you can't just say, "Well, digital divide,
it's just kind of a money thing,"
it's basically ameliorated
and it has remedies that work.
Secondly, there's the thing that
I like to call the usability divide.
But I don't call it the usability divide,
I call it the "where are those damn
triangles that are hiding all of my
things" divide. Because I teach a lot
of Facebook classes,
and everybody reads about Facebook
in the paper, and then they're like,
"Okay, I want to go change my stuff," and
I have to show them essentially a 6 by
8-pixel area on a 2,000-pixel screen,
and be like, "When you can click that, you
get to change your privacy settings."
That's a pain in the ass, right?
Like, that's frustrating to them.
And the message they walk away from is
Facebook doesn't actually care about me
being able to fix my privacy settings.
Which, while true, isn't the message
Facebook would be telling you it was
trying to send you, they just know it's
difficult and etc.
And this is another sort of issue,
we also have a thing...we have
in America called health care and health
insurance, which is the worst, let me
tell you. But we had healthcare.gov,
which was during the Obama administration,
hey, you can get health care but you need
to go through basically a website
to get it. And it turned out the website
wasn't very good, and I knew it wasn't
very good because I know what a good
website looks like. For a lot of people
who had to get online and they'd only ever
used whatever, like, Facebook and their
Yahoo email, and suddenly they're
confronted with this website,
and that's where they have to go to get
health insurance, it was very maddening,
very frustrating.
A lot of people walked away
from that experience thinking, "I guess
computers are hard," because they don't
know the difference between them being bad
at using a website and that website being
bad. That level of sort of discretion is
an important part of kind of what we can
bring to the table. And it's sad on so
many levels because it's avoidable, right?
That could have been an amazing website
that at the end of it you click through
it, and maybe it took a while,
but then there's some, like, happy
panda going like, "Way to go,
you can get a check-up." And instead,
you just got a whole bunch of fail, fail,
die, die, die which is how people felt the
government felt about them which is bad.
So basically a lot of times people who are
having what they perceive as trouble
with computers are actually having trouble
with interfaces, only they don't know what
an interface is, and so they don't know
that that is the problem that they
are having. And so we can help with
this, we librarians, but also kind
of tech-forward, tech people, and
anybody else who wants to be on board,
with advocacy and our own good practices,
building our own good, usable,
tested websites. I worked for Wikipedia
briefly on the 1Lib1Ref program
at the beginning of this year,
like, "Whoo, add citations to Wikipedia."
And we wrote it all up for the Wikipedia
blog, and you know them, they're all
like, "Oh, so open, everything is
open, it's all free, it's amazing."
But the code that runs their blog doesn't
include alt text for print-disabled people
to be able to know what the pictures are,
because they didn't get around to building
that with their open-source crew of trusty
volunteers. So, on the one hand,
I agree that they are amazing in
a lot of ways, on the other hand,
if we leave things like accessibility up
to somebody being able to get
around to it, I don't think that's a good
look for us. Being like, "Well, we never
got a volunteer so,
sorry, print-disabled."
So demanding stuff like
that from our own
vendors, simple stuff like alt text,
simple stuff like secure login,
simple stuff like please don't store the
password in plain text in the database
because it's embarrassing in 2018,
Polaris. Would be really a good idea for
us and advocacy is a thing we can do
because we're upbeat, right? I don't have
to holler at people, I'm just saying it'd
be nice if... One of the things...
it's not in this talk but is in a
different talk that I do,
is talk about working on my vocabulary.
So I used to spend a lot of time as a
hothead just out of library school talking
about how everything sucks,
which many things do.
But I found that when I moved from the
short sort of word "sucks" to the longer
smarter-sounding word "sub-optimal,"
people are more interested and may be
more able to sort of get on board.
And so then there's the last part of the
divide what I call the empowerment divide.
Offline people, so people who are just
basically not using the Internet,
look at these ads with these grinning
white people all ignoring each other
wrapped up in their own devices,
and they say, "I don't want that,
why would somebody think I want that?"
And they feel more secure in their own
decision to not engage, because
they see this as a place that they
didn't want, or they wouldn't want.
And so a lot of people who aren't fully
online have what I would consider
concerns. So I used to moderate a giant
Internet community called MetaFilter,
anybody in the room heard of it?
I suspected. And I basically kept Internet
people from fighting with each other,
and it was a place where a lot of people
interacted online. And one of the things I
found about heavy online users, people
who really hang out in the forums a lot,
is, a lot of times they have a reason,
whatever that reason is, right,
they're online for a reason.
Maybe they have a disabled family member
they're caring for, maybe they are that
disabled family member,
maybe they're time-shifted. You know,
they work sort of for another country and
they're up at night when other people are
sleeping. Maybe they're agoraphobic and
they don't like leaving the house,
maybe they're an ex-pat,
maybe they have a weird hobby,
maybe they have a kink and they live in a
small town and it's really
hard to find people to relate to.
Whatever the thing is, doesn't matter,
but understanding their lives can help you
understand how to work with them when
they're struggling. And I think the same
is true for offline people.
A lot of times people are anxious,
people are worried especially about money,
they don't understand the risks, they just
know that there are some other sort of
dying media likes to tell scary stories
about new media to sort of keep their
brand intact. I mean, we've got a weekly
paper in my town and I get to open it up
and read about my neighbours,
and it's amazing. But they're not super
pro-forward about the Internet,
and that's not super surprising, they
exist in slightly different areas.
And so thinking about offline people, they
might have physical challenges,
they might also have mental challenges,
they might have lack of energy
for learning a new thing.
Because a lot of this stuff can be
challenging and often very frustrating.
And they're looking for, you know,
a welcome mat, a happy panda or something,
and a little bit less of a, "Hey, have you
tried Ubuntu for that?" Answer.
And the reason I mention "hey, have you
tried Ubuntu for that,"
not that there's anything wrong
with Ubuntu, in fact, it's amazing.
But that's what somebody told me I should
tell Janet and I thought maybe, you
know, I say that for a laugh, right.
But Janet's sort of trying to figure out
something on her Windows computer,
and well-meaning gentleman whose
name I've removed just because, you know,
this is normal for the Internet, he's not
being super weird, was like "Hey, you
know, why Windows?" And he's not wrong.
But we also kind of say he's not even
wrong, you know, because he's got the
right solution but for the wrong problem.
Which is not unusual in the tech world,
but we as sort of librarians or library
adjacent people can be compassionate
towards this gentleman. I see your point,
sir, while also still not installing
Ubuntu on Janet's laptop unless her
problem to solve is, "You know,
I've got too much free time and a desire
to learn a new operating system in my
80s," in which case, go, Janet.
And so empowerment can also be inclusion
or equity, depending on how you feel
about these. I teach a class on community
engagement, we argue a little bit
about inclusion and equity as topics,
but they're different aspects of a
similar issue. Often people who are
computer people, to use Phil Agre's
parlance, are looking for a scalable
solution. We hear it over, and over,
and over again. And sometimes they can
oversimplify the complexities of humanity
into something that you can fit into a
database or a checkbox.
So letting people freeform fill in a
gender field, let's just say,
is preferable from a human standpoint,
where people may have many different
things to write in that box especially
depending on why you're asking.
But from a database standpoint,
it's a mess. And from a market research
standpoint where you've a client who's
telling you, "We need to split up these
sales numbers by gender," and you're not
deputised to be the one who explains
gender fluidity to them, you sometimes can
be stuck. But how do you explain that same
thing to the digitally divided transgender
kid who is faced with this choice,
and that kid may feel 1% or maybe 25%
less likely to want to engage online,
because they don't feel included,
they don't feel like it's in it for them.
So I talk a lot, you could probably tell,
about social justice issues and
inequality issues, and I try to be
tactical as well as truthful.
And so one of the messages that I try to
get across is the idea that a lot
of institutionalised issues,
issues that are kind of entrenched, right?
The digital divide isn't fixed by giving
everybody a computer as much as that would
be awesome. Institutionalise issues like
poverty, racism, ableism, majorism,
homophobia, transphobia, that kind of
thing. They hurt everybody not just,
of course, the people who are the targets
or the victims of prejudice,
or intolerance. So from a personal
perspective, I talk about this in terms
of feminism, right?
I'm female, this is what works
for me. It can make a pragmatic
sense to talk about it to a wider audience
when feminism isn't just a thing
for women, but a thing for anybody who
kind of wants to be on board.
Because the idea of the Patriarchy,
the idea of normative gender stereotypes,
the idea of toxic masculinity, or
people just pressured to fit into a gender
role, that's just bad for everybody,
right? Like, it's hard to feel constrained
no matter where you come from or where
you're going. And so talking about sort
of feminism as something that works for
that I find has utility and can maybe
help make it become a genuine option for
somebody who maybe didn't think it was
for them. So my message about the digital
divide is, it hurts everyone and working
on it helps everyone. And so
sometimes people talk about the
digital divide starting from rural
electrification, the path we took to get
citizens hooked up to the electrical
grid, and rural electrification
incentive programs, which you have in
Canada and we have in the United States.
So Horseshoe Falls was making power for
Calgary in 1912, actually I think that's
underneath, you can imagine what it looks
like. Rural electrification was completed
in Ontario in, you know, about
the early '50s, not as much in the
other provinces. So 87% of rural Alberta,
for example, had access to electricity
by 1961, so, you know,
we're looking at a 10-year gap,
and that's just access which I'll get to
in a second. There's another 13% who were
still divided, very similar number, right,
to what we're seeing now.
So part of the answer to "why are people
still offline" is they got a late start.
Some of the reasons we forget or might not
know that part of the process of rural
electrification was selling people the
idea of electricity. Like, you need this,
this is going to fix your life,
this is going to improve things.
And, you know, getting electricity and
an electric bill, electric stuff,
electric companies would do little
displays, like, "Hey, check this all out,
you can use a mixer, you can, you know..."
Your drudgery is nearly over, basically.
They weren't just saying, "Hey,
this is available in case
you're interested," they were actively
saying, "This will help you, get it,
try it, it's for everyone." And if it
really is for everyone, that's
actually kind of an inclusion empowerment
move which is awesome,
but if not true, it makes offline people
or people not attached to the grid at that
point even less likely to trust whatever
you say next. So electricity, this guy
with lightning eyebrows, was advertised,
promoted, pushed. And this is why when
they talk about rural electrification in
Canada you see sentences like "87% of
rural Alberta had access to electricity."
Meaning we're ready to come to your house,
but you got to say thumbs up,
which is sort of true what we have now.
So having access to it wasn't the same
thing as using it. And it's interesting
for me because like the last person to get
an actual electric wire attached to their
actual house who wanted one in Vermont was
1962. So pretty similar and that's recent
memory for a lot of my librarian...
or living memory for a lot of my librarian
cohort in a town called Victory.
And that's still true with broadband and
the digital divide, only we don't have a
government mandate. A little
different here, but not entirely different
here. And a different sort of advertising,
it's mostly Internet service providers
advertising as they try to undermine
net neutrality, that's a different message
than just, "This is going to solve a
problem for you, we're going to
eliminate your drudgery."
What people see instead is,
"We're going to let predators
come directly to your home
instead of you having to meet
them in the mall like the olden days."
And the people are like, "I don't
understand why this solves a problem for
me." And so I think of it a little bit
like driving. Driving is a thing you can
do, driving is a thing probably most
people do. Some people can't drive for
various reasons, and there's workarounds
for them, public transportation, etc.
Some people just make a decision like,
"I'm not really on board, I don't have
a reason. I just don't want to,"
and those same workarounds will work for
them also. But nearly everyone who makes a
choice to be a non-driver understands the
social costs of not driving. So again,
I live in, you know, Vermont, aging
population, there's a nice old man who
lived in my town, Chris. Chris, you know,
moved up here from New York back when the
train could take you up to Vermont for the
weekend, and one weekend he just never
went home. Never got a car because you
never have one in New York so who cares,
and he has, like, a team of older women
who drive him around because
he's delightful. But everybody knows
he exists basically because of the
kindness of older women who enjoy driving
him around, and if Chris were less
charming, Chris would get fewer rides to
the store, right. Everybody understands
sort of the parlay there.
And it's not the same often, I find,
for people not using computers.
The costs of remaining offline are often
hidden or at least they are right up until
your town floods, and the only remaining
way to interact with the government's
management agency is through a website.
I kind of love this, this is
FEMA, our Federal Emergency
Management Agency, we have two
ways to apply, online and also online.
But it's your phone so, like, it's
different. And we did have, like, a big
flood when Hurricane Irene came through
Vermont, and there were people who
literally the only way they could connect
to our Emergency Management Agency was
through Facebook, because
the Federal Emergency
Management Agency's
computers were in the
ground floor of a building that was in a
flood plain. And I don't know how they got
those jobs but... So, you know,
they worked it out, they got on Facebook
and started communicating with people.
But, man, you were a happier person if you
were already on Facebook
before your house flooded,
than if you had to both figure out
Facebook and apply for disaster relief
after your house flooded in the dark,
right, it's crappy. So we see this in the
library because we see a lot of people who
show up at the library saying, "I have
an urgent need because something terrible
happened to me, I lost my job,
somebody died, I need health insurance,
help me figure out the mouse thing."
And, you know, that is challenging. So
in the U.S., you can get a social worker
to help you apply for food stamps which is
good, but you can't get a social worker
to help you fill out an online dating
application. And when you think
about what's more important to your
well-being, those may both be
actually fairly similar just in terms
of what you need to be human, right?
You need companionship, you need a place
to live, you need food, you need
cat videos.
I don't know what you personally need,
but it's important that we just don't
do people's information needs in the
library, we also do people's
information desires.
And so people's lack of connectivity,
whether it's a choice or not a choice,
can be isolating for them.
And so realistically, I assume everyone in
this room, you view a computer as a
tool, right? Digitally divided users
view computers as obstacles.
And let's look at what else we know about,
sort of, this 13%, the non-adopters.
And some of these statistics are old
because as the digital divide has shrunk,
we are counting digitally divided people
less because it's hit some threshold
of, like, and a rounding error.
But that's hard when you fall in that
rounding error because things are still
important to you. So like I said,
these are slightly older numbers,
but the ratios are about the same even
as the bars get taller. So in 2011,
which I know is, like, a long time
in Internet years, but 2011, people with
disabilities were 27% less likely to use
the Internet, 28% less likely to have
broadband at home. Even though the
Internet is accessible in many
ways to people with disabilities.
Same thing with people who prefer to speak
Spanish at home, similar gaps,
even though there is an entire Internet in
Spanish as well as in English,
this should not be the case except that it
is the case. So when we look
at the numbers...and like I said,
fewer people are counting these numbers
because they kind of don't like the story,
it's awkward, like, "We gave them all
computers, why don't they have the thing?"
We realise the people who are getting left
behind are the people with all the other
challenges. The economic challenges,
the education challenges, maybe
they have mental health challenges,
maybe they have physical health
challenges. And if we know that, isn't
that our responsibility to make sure they
can have the world of cat videos and
food stamps or food stamps and cat videos
as well. So the hardest to serve have
always been the hardest to serve,
but they're society's responsibility.
This is a thing that's less of a thing you
have to sell in Canada, but in America,
you're just like, "No,
seriously, they're
everybody's responsibility."
And when you look at what they need, this
is a different survey. Pew looks
at offline populations and asks
them what they would need to get online,
and so there's a, you know,
I don't know what I would need,
I don't really want to start using
the Internet, 17% could go online
on their own, which I thought was
pretty interesting, but literally choose
not to. But then, like, 63%,
I would need someone to help me,
and who would that person be?
Because another thing we know about
institutionalised racism and
institutionalised poverty and etc., etc.,
is it's not just you don't have 20 bucks
so you're poor, it's that everybody in
your cultural area is themselves also
grappling with poverty or multiple things.
So you don't necessarily just have a
neighbourhood kid who when they come home
from college can help you with the thing
because they're struggling in the exact
same way. So as the digital divide has
been shrinking, this piece of the pie "I
would need help" gets bigger and, you
know, we library people are the people
who are the helpers. So when I was
in library school, my favourite thing was
helping people learn computers, right,
and this was in the '90s.
I lived in Seattle which was kind of a
hotbed of technology stuff back
when portals were a big thing,
not like "Portal" the video game,
but we're going to do a portal so you can
buy things from three different stores on
one web page. And I helped people get
email accounts using RocketMail,
and, like, Mail Excite,
and I figured I would do that for a few
years, and then everyone would have email.
And then we could deal with more
sophisticated topics like online privacy,
for instance, which is still a thing,
or what to do when Equifax gets hacked and
loses the data of most of the grown-ups in
your country. And I kind of laugh at how
naive that was of me at the time like,
"Oh, right, back when everybody was going
to get email in a few years," it's
2018, I still sign people up for email
accounts all the time. Usually,
because they need it to do another thing,
like apply for a job, dating site,
who even knows what the thing is, FEMA
website, apply for disaster relief.
And so people move at their own pace and
you can only try and make their online
experience good, so they might want
to have another one. Because
this is what we can work on, right?
Your primary goal is to help them
get one more step down the road
to being deputised, to solve their own
problems, not to be the person, obviously,
who, "Oh, my computer's got a
problem. Jessamyn, blah, blah, blah." I
mean, every time I tell my landlady, who's
93, she got one eye, but she does all her
own email, when I tell her I'm leaving
town, that's when she's like, "Oh, hey,
my email's been broken for six days,
can you...?" And I'm like, "How's it been
broken for six days?" Like, six
minutes my email is broken and
I'm just losing my mind going to the
library. But, like, she doesn't use it
that often, it's not that big a deal to
her, but me not being there makes it
occur to her that it is a thing she
needs and would like to have access to.
But she doesn't necessarily know
a lot of people to help her fix it,
and she's not digitally divided, she's
kind of a wealthy older lady.
But she's a little crabby and the people
at the library are a little sick of her,
and so she'd like to deal with me first.
It's a phenomenon I like to call the
light is better over here,
like, "Why are you looking for your keys
over here when you lost them over there?"
"Well, the light's better over here."
People go where they're
comfortable and familiar. Good news,
bad news but it's bad news for my landlady
when I'm not the person who can sort
of help her with the thing.
So other things, just some quick examples
of other kind of problem things people
deal with, none of these are going to be
totally novel to you, but I do
like to kind of run down them.
Helping people learn to use a computer all
the time, digitally divided people have
trouble with things like shopping.
They have a tendency to pay more because
they buy local which is fine, in fact,
it's great for a number of reasons.
But if you need toner, I can make a
good argument that you should save 20
bucks buying toner on the Internet,
and just buying more socks from your local
department store. Buying local is great
but you spend more money and you can't buy
things like airline tickets local,
used to be back in the day, etc.
You can't comparison-shop local.
Comparison shopping is
useful. You're more at risk
buying stuff locally in Vermont because
getting in your car is more dangerous
than getting on Amazon, ethical issues not
withstanding. This is one of the things I
tell people who are worried about identity
theft and using online banking,
is that online banking is safer than your
shower. I mean, it's weird to think
about but it really is except for the
Equifax problem. But in a general,
personal "how is this going to affect me"
safer, etc., and fewer choices.
Job applications even for offline jobs are
often online or at least require a resume
to upload, uploading, confusing.
Digitally divided people, the difference
between uploading and downloading,
completely mysterious.
The cloud, who even knows what the
cloud is, right? I'm just like, "No,
it's somebody else's computer."
"Well, whose computer?"
"Well, Google's computer."
"Well, where is it?" "Finland." "Why?"
"Because electricity is cheap there."
"Why?" "Because they have fewer
environmental regulations in, you know,
these other countries." "Why?"
"Forget it, let's just get your resume."
You know, we have a lot of people who used
to be loggers or carpenters trying to get
a job at Home Depot,
and what Home Depot requires,
is that you upload your resume,
even if you're going to be working
with lumber. So you can see these people
in your libraries all the time getting
them up for it is an important part of
what we do. Meeting people,
dating people has moved online in a lot of
ways, not really true for where I live,
but in general, it's true for larger
places. And if you're primarily
an offline person, it's possible you might
be looking for an offline person,
nothing wrong with that.
But a lot of social opportunities and
networking opportunities happened in
Facebook events and Eventbrite Meetups
and etc. It's important when we talk about
these online engagement opportunities
to use language that explains that not
only is this kind of stuff happening,
it's kind of normative now.
And it's fine if it's not your thing,
but other people aren't weird because they
meet somebody on the Internet anymore and
maybe they never were actually.
So setting expectations is a useful part
of it and civics. I'm also an elected
justice of the peace in my town which is
super fun, I get to marry people
and count votes on Election Day.
And that's how I know a third of my
neighbours voted for Donald Trump,
and we're like, "What do we
do about this? It's crazy."
It is.
I had to apologise
to my cab driver on my way
to the hotel for everything
that's happened in America
basically since last November.
And I would also like to apologise
to everybody in this room,
I worked really hard and it wasn't
hard enough, and I'm sorry.
So when I talk to librarians in Maine,
for example, they talk about one of the
things that gets digitally divided,
like older men, especially in their
communities, motivated is the only way you
can get a moose license...that's
right, a license to shoot a moose is
by getting on the Internet.
I saw my first moose in Edmonton,
Alberta, by the way, in 1993, so cool.
And so having something that will motivate
you for something you already want is
another great way of kind of bringing
people forward and bringing people with
you. And then we get to things that aren't
necessarily problems with more, like,
opportunities, there's a ton of ways that
people can self-directedly learn stuff as
I'm sure you know. Khan Academy,
lynda.com, Universal Class,
to my favourite local pastime which I
found out was the thing for one of my
dudes at drop-in time, watching tractor
engines run on YouTube.
That's his thing and now he loves
the internet. Don't care, not
judging, we watched tractor engines run
together and I'm just there with a big
grin on my face because he didn't use a
computer and now he's stoked about them.
So, you know, learning is kind of where
things are going, I mean, how many other
people here have learned a thing by
watching a YouTube video, right?
Like, I learned to play ukulele,
I learned how to fix my car's back seat,
I learned how to do this to my hair
on YouTube. And so this last part is what
I sometimes call the last divide, that
concept of digital readiness.
I had to figure out something
with my hair, I don't have
any other long-haired friends,
Internet is going to solve my problem and
be my long-haired friend, right?
And it was but I knew that and I was
comfortable with it and I could skip all
the other garbage, and buy this and all
this stuff to find some other ladies who
were like, "I just do this thing,"
and I'm like, "Oh, it's so nice."
But that concept of digital readiness with
more and more learning opportunities
shifting online, we need to
understand what's involved, right?
So it's not just, "I can't use a
mouse," though, there is that,
or, "My vision isn't great," though, there
is that, or, "I'm not a good reader,"
though, there is that.
And those are all sort of usability
things we can take into account.
But there's the trust issue which was
fascinating to me sitting in on the
blockchain thing like, "Here's a future
where you don't have to trust
anybody ever." And that has value for what
it's trying to do. But part of what we
need to do is sort of cultivate and curate
trust in some of these tools,
which is why sometimes I'm very careful
when I talk about the blockchain with my
digitally divided users. Because
it's like, "Okay, later, you're never
going to trust anybody and your computer's
just going to do pure math to take care
of your things." But for now you've got to
trust me and YouTube to try and figure
out how we're going to fix your lawnmower
because that's probably where the answer
is. We don't have lawnmower fixing books
in the library anymore, or maybe we do,
we probably do. But in the future probably
you're going to be learning like this so
let's talk about what's necessary to help
you solve this problem for you.
And, you know, they need to trust
themselves, they need to trust the tools,
they need to be discerning to tell the
difference between what's a good YouTube
video on actual lawnmower repair,
and what somebody's trying to sell you
lawnmower...I don't know where this
sentence is going. Trying to sell you
something and this is tricky in an era of
serious bullshit which is what I call the
current era that we're involved in.
And it's no wonder that people have
trouble figuring out what to trust and how
to trust. So my job as a librarian
in 2018 is to help you be digitally ready
or help other people to help you be
digitally ready, which involves this trust
thing almost as much as it involves this
mouse thing. And so helping people trust
and teaching them to trust in their
own skills...and if you want to go read
this, it's linked in the list of links.
And their ability to discern
what's real from what's not real,
the credible from the fraudulent. The
big thing that I've been talking about,
so like Facebook, oh my God, they're
nonsense, but that lady who got run
over by the Uber car and her "human safety
driver." And depending on which article
you read, you might think this was true,
like, that she walked out in front
of the car, or if you read a different
article you might think that she was
in the bike lane, and you might not...
I mean, I would but I don't know
about other people, be confident in your
ability to figure out which of those
articles was telling the truth.
Now we're living in the panopticon and so
we can watch a video now of where that
woman was on her bicycle which I don't
want to watch because...
But otherwise, it was just people fighting
and you needing to figure out who to trust
and the outcome of how you feel about that
story is dramatically different depending
on whose version of it you believe.
Which is to me what the fake news thing is
about. I mean, manipulating elections
is terrible, but manipulating people's
feelings about technology so that they'll
make different choices about how they make
laws that govern themselves is actually
kind of a bigger deal in some ways.
And so, you know, that's the next stage
of the digital divide, is teaching
people how to figure out a
thing that they care about,
like, what was the story with that Uber
running the lady over story?
And not what the people who are pushing
the agenda want you to, like, "Well, she
had kids when she was 15," who gives a
shit, right? But depending which stories
you read, they're going to sort of amplify
certain parts of the message and minimize
others. The New York Times called the
person behind the wheel "a human safety
driver," which is kind of a weird turn
of phrase, because that person is not the
driver, or the driver in which case
they're not the human safety driver,
they're just the driver. But enough
on this topic but it was interesting for
me to analyse what I knew about that,
and how I knew what I knew
epistemologically, and how I felt like a
neighbour or a friend would or
would not be able to do that thing.
Because I can only talk to so many
people and crab about it on Twitter,
but everybody's responsibility is to make
sure people have good information,
and yet so much of it is technologically
mediated, that becomes complicated, right?
And people's trust is shaky as it is
because the troubles.
And the good news is people who are going
to the library are people who are already
primed to use the Internet for learning.
We can use a platform to help people learn
to trust things by showing them
trustworthy stuff that exists over time,
and what not to trust may be useful,
tough sometimes. I mean, like I said,
a third of my neighbours are sort of Trump
supporters and trying to figure out how
to get messages across to them about where
to get good news is challenging.
Because, again, they have a kind of a
"light is better over here" attitude
about certain things, not that I don't.
But having a conversation with them is
very different than sort of my "left wing,
watches Amy Goodman all the time, has
strong feelings about stuff" landlady,
you know, the message is different.
And because the message is different, the
message doesn't scale the same way it
would if you could just roll out a thing
and if we all agreed from first principles
what was true and how we understood truth.
And so one of the other things research
points to us about digital readiness and
uptake...and this is true for climbing
out of a number of social problems
generally, not just sort
of Internet access. People who are just
out of prison, domestic violence victims,
people who have sort of survived trauma
generally, is that the more supportive
their entire network of people is, the
better their ability to get out of a
bad situation. Whether that bad
situation is your digital divide,
your bad situation is, you know,
you're on parole and you want to be able
to reincorporate with your community,
your bad situation is your bad
relationship maybe with your bad
president. And the lack of broadband
and connectivity is not necessarily a bad
situation the way intractable social
problem issues are. I have a sort of a
running Google search for digital divide,
and one of the things that I find is we
get a lot of stories about, you know,
indigenous kids who sit outside the
library to be able to do their homework,
because they don't have Internet where
they live. And I like those stories
because I think they highlight the
problem, but I don't like those stories
because I think they also offer a really
easy solution. Which is, "Oh, give the
kid Internet at home and that kid's going
to be exactly the same as a kid who's had
Internet at home since the kid was
born," and it's trickier than that. And
I don't mean to be like, "So don't try,"
but I do mean, like, don't just offer sort
of facile digital divide scenarios that
also happen to be the ones that you
can help basically. So it's, you know,
structural limitations on connectivity,
but also inclusion and access that we have
to be dealing with. So since, you know,
the library stopped being a room full of
books, though we're still that,
we've moved more towards being
conduits, I think, for different things.
Electronic information, obviously,
but also skill-building and
community stewardship.
How to nurture and take care
of your community, we're actually becoming
the group that kind of shows you how
to do that, especially in the
United States as more groups are more
like, "Eh, just our community," you know,
depending where you are, obviously.
And now we're in sort of the more nebulous
role of among other things...
and I find this weird to say but
incentivising participation.
So it's not just that we are trying to
sort of tell people here it is,
we want to actually bring people where we
are. We want to calm their fears,
we want to become the trusted source and
ally among the ton of people who are just
trying to sell you something.
And so it's not...and this is my
favourite Creative Commons picture of all
these. So it's not just give a person a
fish, obviously, though that's part of it,
because you can't do it without tech
and broadband. And it's not teach a person
to fish, though that's part of it because
you have to practice and you need the
skills. It's helping someone not be afraid
of the water, and it's showing them a good
spot where the fish are actually biting,
it's guiding them through their
first few fishing trips maybe.
Maybe asking them how it went afterwards
in a way that indicates you actually care
about their thing. And that's what digital
readiness as an approach to this is
actually about. I think there's a lot of
beauty in technology myself,
I mean, I love it, I love to hang
out with it, I love to play with it,
not just in a "chips are sexy" kind of
way, but in the way it can bring us
together and help us learn,
and help us become who we want to be.
So as I said earlier,
it's not just "hold the mouse
like this" anymore, those messages have
been in the ether since we've had mice
which is 1984, they're important but
they're not enough. We not only give
people access to the information that they
want and need, but we also improve and
strengthen their own access to their own
communities, and that's what helps improve
digital readiness and help people
become more like themselves.
Even my neighbours who didn't vote like I
voted have a right to become the way they
want to be for themselves.
The digital divide hurts everyone,
libraries help ease the digital divide,
libraries help everyone.
So let's go learn more ways to do more
things with tech to help more people.
Thank you.
