Media
This morning, Jim Romenesko offers his readers an interesting snapshot of what it looks like to be online in the fall of 2009. In his first post of the day, the veteran media guru shared a Howard Kurz column that, as the headline noted, offered details about how the “[c]ountry’s growing hunger for information is ‘being met unequally.’” The basics? Vast swathes of the poor and rural sections of the United States exist sans Internet, and, thanks to that fact, they are robbed of access to what has become the otherwise most convenient method of personal news gathering. Then, just above that snippet, Romenesko clips an L.A. Times recap of a “Google exec’s talk at the UC Berkeley Digital Media Summit,” which included the sentiment, he writes, that “[c]onsumers might be drowning in media, e-mail and ‘the social stream’.” Put together, this reads something like: Now, even as U.S. citizens of any real means may have access to too much media, their have-notted counterparts have access to none at all. Anyone else see a nifty parallel here? Maybe one that has something to do with the widening gap between U.S. rich and U.S. poor?
What does this say about the thing’s prospects as the ultimate democratizer?
So today, we here at Unfit would like to try an experiment. We realize that this will probably offer something of a small-sample-sized, totally unscientific look at things. But, we’re curious: Is the Internet for rich people? We’d like you, loyal readers to help us figure this out. Please tell us a bit about yourselves (broad strokes here, people — we’re not data-mining), and your feelings on the subject.
If this doesn’t work, we promise that we won’t ask you a question ever again.
Comments
7 Comments
I’ll start: I’m a thirty-something duder of moderate means, who spends a buttload of time online. I live in an Urban area with regular access to the internets. Most of my pals share most of those characteristics.
[Robert Stack voice] Coincidence? [/Robert Stack voice]
20 something liberal minded pseudo-intellectual southern fried white girl with baccalaureate seeks macintosh products to word process, peruse pics of primates, visit renovation/design sites, research social networking etiquette, and read bbc news. oh ya, and flash compatibility a must for watching streaming vids of HBO shows (having cable is soooo bourgeois) and shopping at urbanoutfitters.com
Fem; 30; design freelancer; my day is spent in front of the computer; I look up everything online, read the news, look up recipes, shop for clothes I can’t buy, read blogs about the newest textile designer, learn XPath, and sometimes my cats sit next to me for the fascinating search; living in a Urban internet friendly city among my like-minded peers, and a few old ladies too.
This has always been a concern in this country — now it’s a tech issue. The richest white guys (still guys) are threatened by any gains by the prols (I count myself as a prol, even though I’m very electronically connected and my hubbie is ’succsssful’)… of course, and the masses are less malleable if they have access to information. Ya wanna know my age? I was anti-corporation/ anti-greed in the Viet Nam era.
I am a semi-retired ex-techie who needs to work PT to supplement meager nest egg. Big drop in stock market was not good for the retirement dream. Having fun finding ways to earn extra income online without a “real job”.
I agree that everyone needs access to the internet these days.
I’ve lived for the last five years in and around a small town of 3000 people, Mt. Shasta, in Siskiyou County, CA. A lot of people outside of town can’t even get high-speed with a phone line, a satellite, or any other way. I’ve spent a lot of time working at 24.6 (K!) in the last five years, and in wet weather even 14.4 (K!).
Do you have any idea how hard it is to shop your wares at 24.6K ;-( ? Remote, rural, and poor sectors are falling off the turnip truck when it comes to being able to make a living via the Internet (in addition to missing out on information gathering and social networking).
This county is so poor that 80% of the residents are available for public assistance. But now Monique Dixon (sp?) a go-getter working for a local non-profit donor, Great Northern, is pursuing a $20M grant to make DSL wi-fi available for the whole county, using the California Highway Patrol towers. Go, Monique!
Since there are already many (a 1000-ish) entrepreneurs assisted in business building by the county micro-enterprise development org (JEDI – Jefferson Economic Development Institute) I expect that having DSL available in the whole county will help a lot more people to aquire sustainable part-time or full-time income by reaching a broader, distant, and Paying customer base.
I say some of those other folks need their own Monique. The Internet is not ‘for the rich’. It’s just like all advances, we need to make sure it’s made available to everyone over time, just like indoor plumbing, drinkable water, and other amenities which took a while to reach (almost) everyone in the US.
Thanks for asking.
I live in the rural south and most everyone here makes less than 30K per year. There is a small number of college educated people living amongst us and yet a majority of families have internet access. The internet hasn’t been “just for the rich” for a very long time, but I can see that in some of the more remote areas of the U.S. there would be less incentive to make it available due to the smaller populations residing there. To add further perspective on our community, our town is made of of around 58 percent caucasian, 32 percent black and the remaining is a mix of legal and illegal hispanic immigrants, with a few Pakistanis and Indians thrown in for good measure. Interracial dating and marriages are common and there are very few who have any issue with it. If they do, they’re too polite to vocalize it. Besides, when you live and work elbow to elbow, most people care about the character not the color of a person. Amazingly enough, though most everyone in America believes differently, you don’t hear of hate crimes here, most of us live in blended communities, but of course there are some areas that are still primarily black people. In those instances, they’ve owned the homes in those areas for so long, often passing them from one generation to the next. For the most part, unless we move away, we generally stay put. Most people here, due to the low salaries earned, never move- if they’re lucky enough to buy a home, they keep it.
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