The New Digital Underclass

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.<p>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.

On this:<p>"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."<p>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.

So this article really touches on a hundred different topics but I wanted to point this out:<p>"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."<p>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).<p>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?<p>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?

&#62;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<p>Sigh. The worst form of anxiety is anecdotal anxiety.

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.<p>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.

<i>"Academic research in these areas is almost redundant by the time it is published given the pace of technological change ... "</i><p>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.<p>For me, it's hard to ignore the premise of the singularity proponents.

I guess he's talking about kids in developing countries...<p>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.<p>TB

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

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