Book details of 'High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology'

Title	High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology
Author(s)	Donald A. Schön, Bish Sanyal, William J. Mitchell
ISBN	026269199X
Language	English
Published	October 1998
Publisher	MIT Press

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
In the spring of 1996, MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning held a colloquium to look at potential and actual effects of information technology on (generally low income) inner city urban areas. This was prompted by eagerness to use computer models for urban planning, concern on the part of the technology community about access inequities, and increased interest in providing technology access and training to enhance opportunity for those in low income situations. In addition, there was a concern about large numbers of people from all backgrounds who considered technology irrelevant to poverty and vice versa. These are the colloquium papers: transcripts of the sessions themselves can be found at http://sap.mit.edu/projects/colloquium/. The papers come from a variety of sources and viewpoints but are overall a disappointing lot, stating that technology is changing society, technology is making new opportunities, technology is widening disparities, computers have problems, computers can be fun, and we all need more education. In chapter one, Manuel Castells makes an important point that social and economic disadvantage is also arranged spatially within cities, and that barriers of space and distance are added to the others. Technophiles, of course, would immediately dispute this, saying the net breaks down space. While Castells' point can be made applicable to technology, he does not do so in his paper. Peter Hall certainly disagrees, in chapter two, but his own reading of statistics makes him admit that cities are not in decline. Using his own illustration of the Model T it is easy to see why: there is a much greater need for someone to fix the machines when they fail than there is for "theoretical abstract intelligence" tied to urban centres. Some slight knowledge of the technology might be more helpful to his analysis than his constant references to an army of social scientists. The questions and statistics presented by Julian Wolpert show plenty of poverty but few answers in chapter three. (Very little relation to technology, either.) William Mitchell reiterates his "need for design" thesis from "City of Bits" (see reviews) in chapter four, but the most telling statement is his assertion that "Nobody really knows what the digital revolution will ultimately mean for towns and cities." (In a change of pace, this paper says even less about poverty than it does about technology.) From a historical perspective, Leo Marx finds the rise of information technology irrelevant, in chapter five. Viewing the more recent claims for the educational value of television, and the hideously ironic quality of offerings on the "500 channel universe" of today, I find it hard to disagree. William Mitchell starts off part two, in chapter six, with a principled statement against the kind of asymmetric information flow involved in cable modems and ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), thus using a democratic ideal to negate the need to analyze the type of information flow needed in work situations today. The rest of his chapter is a fairly superficial overview of the Web. Joseph Ferreira got me all excited by promising to address "the prospective benefits for service providers and service recipients of decentralized access to information about populations and their needs, service systems, and operations" which sounds useful and right on target until you realize that neither providers nor recipients are going to be defined and that the chapter is spent formulating SQL queries to find variant spellings on title deeds. For no apparent reason. Various types of community "nets" and educational technologies used for collaborative planning are cited by Michael Shiffer in chapter eight. This comes closest to addressing the issues raised by the title, with two provisos. One is that the experiences cited are anecdotal. The other is that while the community systems are said to be accessible with a low cost PC and a modem, the collaborative programs illustrated require reasonably high end graphical machines with sound capability. Chapter nine is even better, where Amsden and Clark do a first rate job of exploding the myth that a few computers in the inner city would catapult the "disadvantaged" population to the heights of software entrepreneurship. Jeanne Bamberger's piece in chapter ten is interesting to an old teacher, but seems to have neither a point (other than that some kids learn kinesthetically) nor a relation to the book. Chapter eleven tells some stories from the Computer Clubhouse project. These are apposite, but have few details that might allow a successful transfer to another location. A more detailed account of the Community Computer Street Library Project is given in chapter twelve. A look at community nets in chapter thirteen is limited by its singular account of the Multi-User Sessions In Community program. Sherry Turkle says something about personal empowerment through learning and understanding, but not much about low income in chapter fourteen. Anne Beamish, in chapter fifteen, looks briefly at a number of models for getting computers and computer access into low income communities. Again, details are sketchy, but references, mostly online, are provided. Chapter sixteen concludes by noting that there was much agreement between participants in the colloquium, but has to admit that the agreement was only "implicit" in the discussions. A number of motherhood statements are made in regard to public policy on technology access. While one cannot doubt the sincerity, intentions, and (within their fields) scholarship of the authors, it is dismaying to look in vain for a solid understanding of the technology that might have informed some possible answers to problems, or even an insightful analysis of the problems themselves. While raising some issues for debate, few of the papers do more than that. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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Book description:

How will low-income communities be affected by the waves of social, economic, political, and cultural change that surround the new information technologies? How can we influence the outcome? This action-oriented book identifies the key issues, explores the evidence, and suggests some answers. Avoiding both utopianism and despair, the book presents the voices of technology enthusiasts and skeptics, as well as social activists. The book is organized into three parts. Part I examines the issues in their socio-technical, economic, and historical contexts. Part II--the core of the book--proposes five initiatives for using computers and electronic communications to benefit low-income urban communities: to provide access to the new technologies in ways that enable low-income people to become active producers rather than passive users; to use the new technologies to improve the dialogue between public agencies and low-income neighborhoods; to help low-income youth to exploit the entrepreneurial potential of information technologies; to develop approaches to education that take advantage of the educational capabilities of the computer; to promote the community computer: applications of computers and communications technology that foster community development. Part III presents a synthesis of the various topics. Its main questions are, What are the prospects and problems of initiatives to enable the poor to benefit from the new technologies? and What federal, state, and municipal policies would enhance the prospects for success? Contributors: Alice Amsden, Jeanne Bamberger, Anne Beamish, Manuel Castells, Joseph Ferreira, Peter Hall, Leo Marx, William J. Mitchell, Mitchel Resnick, Bish Sanyal, Donald A. Schön, Alan and Michelle Shaw, Michael Shiffer, Bruno Tardieu, Sherry Turkle, Julian Wolpert