With the internet now a necessity, the digital underclass is still in need
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a photo of two little girls in the parking lot of a California Taco Bell went viral. They were doing their schoolwork on laptops in that inconvenient location because the restaurant provided free Wi-Fi, which they didn’t have at home.
The girls came to symbolize the digital underclass that’s emerged since the rise of the internet. There are millions of American kids like them, says Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her analysis of what is often called the digital divide is contained in her new book, “Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass,” which she discussed with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Nicol Turner Lee: Being digitally invisible means that you live, perhaps, in a rural community where you are a farmer and you’re in need of the types of resources that larger, more advanced farming machineries have than your particular generational farm. Or you’re a young person who lives in a big city. But yet, no one understands that living in public housing, for example, has not provided you the same opportunity as if you were to live in a wealthier part of the city. We’ve been invisible, they’ve been invisible to us when it comes to their particular needs that the internet provides.
Lily Jamali: You share some examples that reflect this idea of digital invisibility. You visited Staunton, Virginia, back in 2019, where you met a young man named Joseph who is a day laborer and who depends, like so many of us, on his phone to get work. His mobile provider, though, places data caps on his service. How did that affect him?
Turner Lee: Yeah, it’s just so interesting. And I mean, he was someone that I think really struck me. He couldn’t do anything except find ways to negotiate getting online, like going to his girlfriend’s mother’s house and maybe offloading on her Wi-Fi so he can at least see if any messages came through. I wrote about him in an initial story, and someone called me, they said, “Hey, I want to give this kid a laptop, or some type of device, so he could stay connected.” Well, I returned back to his home, and his mother told me he still didn’t have access, which made me also think he wasn’t still working. For me, it’s stories like his that really resonate for me because the internet, as we have all come to learn, it’s just so much more than wires and hardware. It is really about the well-being and sustainability of people in their communities.
Jamali: Absolutely. I mean, that story stuck with me too. It was really disappointing: Someone wanting to help him, and then you’re trying to deliver that help and he’s sort of just not in a good position to accept that help.
Turner Lee: That’s right. And that’s the thing. I think across the country — and, of course, the pandemic really amplified this — there are so many people that are not necessarily in the places where they would like to be. And there are some people who are just not in a good place overall. And part of the book was to give voice to that, from the perspective that, not that technology is not good for everybody and it’s a democracy killer and all the things that we want to say about it — which could have relevance in certain cases — but to share with the American people and global readers that this is not an issue that we have solved, and we have the ability to solve it. So many people sit in this space of invisibility, and they’re not sitting there lax, not desiring to make something happen for them differently.
Jamali: So what did that story, and the many other places that you visited across the country, teach you about the importance of thinking community-first when you’re designing solutions to this big problem of equitable access to the internet?
Turner Lee: What resonated for me in the book is that when I was working in this space back in the ’90s, pretty much when former President [Bill] Clinton had become what I call the digital divide president — and Vice President [Al] Gore, the digital divide vice president — technology was very important to them. What I realized [is] that we haven’t made as much progress as we think. I started the book with a story about a young lady named Kiana who was in my computer lab, when as a graduate student I was just looking for stuff to do and found myself in an affordable-housing complex being the computer lab instructor and teacher and mentor. And then, you fast-forward today and I met a woman in Syracuse, New York, just a couple years ago, who was like me, still hoping and wishing. I mean, the only difference is her circumstance of being in the senior assisted housing, looking at a highway that is essentially going to dictate whether or not her building stays or goes, is her reality.
What resonated for me is that we, as a society, know that this is important. It’s not just important because we want the kids to be able to learn better or have a laptop in every backpack, as people like Nicholas Negroponte said years ago. This is because we are now going into the age of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies that require — can I say that again? — require these skills. We are now interacting with services that require us to go online to look up our test results or require us to interact with our health providers in ways that we’ve never done before. As a country, and really as a world, because I do talk about this globally, it is important that we really contextualize the need for this type of universal access to communication. People are what drive our democracy, and they cannot be fully engaged if they’re disconnected. And I think that’s something that there’s a body of people that have been working on this for a long time like myself. But I think we keep applying the same solutions to a problem that has dramatically changed. Technology doesn’t look like it looked like when I was growing up, with 386 [microprocessor] computers and CD-ROMs. It is totally different. And I talk about that in the book — we’re still doing the same thing.
Jamali: Dollars from the federal government have started to flow under the [Joe] Biden administration, the federal government has set up a digital equity program. So Nevada is the first state in the nation to get funding from that program — $9 million. How do these kinds of awards help close the digital divide?
Turner Lee: Clearly, the type of financial investment that the Biden-Harris administration has placed into broadband is just going to be exemplary, tremendous. It’s the most money that I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’ve done this for more than 30 years. And the way that it’s been done, and I talked about this in the book, a lot of the funds of the infrastructure bill went to infrastructure in terms of fiber deployments, etc. And then, a somewhat nominal amount, but very significant, went towards these digital equity programs, which Nevada is the first state to be able to roll out their program. Listen, I think any money that goes to states to help us solve some of the most pressing concerns of the digitally invisible are going to be worth the wait. In no way are we not going to see Nevada make any tremendous gains to ensure that their citizens have some level of equity when it comes to how broadband is not just deployed or built, but the programs in which they’re able to use it.
Jamali: You’ve been involved in researching the broadband space for years now. In your book, you say that “before the pandemic, studying the digital divide was like being at a high school prom where no one asked you to dance. Because of the global pandemic, I have suddenly become the life of the party.” Did you ever think that would be the case?
Turner Lee: Never. I mean, for people who know me, I am an introvert-extrovert, but I didn’t have a prom date, OK? I really felt that way. I felt like for those of us who had been working on this issue for decades, coming out of the community technology movement, working alongside digital equity, so many great people out there. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance, Angela Siefer is a good friend. People that I know, like Harold Feld. There’s so many people I can name — Wanda Davis, who’s sitting in Cleveland — who have been working in these spaces. And I call many of these people out by name in the book. And here we were knocking on the doors of people, sharing this. And even the Hon. Jessica Rosenworcel, who is the current chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, she was talking about the homework gap before it became something in her administrative duty as a regulator.
And then the pandemic hit. And it really put the reality of not just the attack that we were going to have to overcome from a global virus, but more so that we could not get to people and communicate to them. And that’s why I’m just so honored to be talking about this, because this was a personal book for me. It was one in which like many other people, not only did I go out and study communities before the pandemic, but I too was like most of people getting online for funerals or school parent meetings or figuring out how I was working while the kids were downstairs. People needed to be connected because that was the time that the internet really mattered. And so we’re happy to be at the party. Trust me, I now rewore my prom dress again, figuratively, in my mind, OK? But I still think even today, if I may, in about three weeks young people are going back to school, and they’re often, in some instances, going back without pandemic relief support, so they may not have the money to be able to repurchase those laptops. Or they may not have the money to upgrade their bandwidth. We’re gonna see the same thing happen again. And that’s why I wrote the book the way I did. No one wants to read a book with a Debbie Downer story. Trust me, it’s not. You will see yourself in there. You will see your community, you will see it. And, actually, you saw it, Lily. This is about the aspirations, hopes and dreams of a community that wants to be part of this digital ecosystem.
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