Neither can my father, although both are proficient readers. My sister and her family have multiple televisions, cable, a gaming system and most recently, they have acquired cell phones (the un “smart” sort), but they do not own a computer. This is not their choice. They are regular hard working people, laboring in the service sector in long-held stable, but low paying jobs. They worry about paying for a serviceable car, not the web. Typical of many working class people, they are much less connected to the world through the internet than are their wealthier and more educated peers.

In fact, they are not connected at all. I am their connection to a digital landscape they keep hearing about but have never seen themselves. They have never seen Facebook, and Google is not one of their verbs. They call me weekly, sometimes daily, for info they don’t have access to, from answers to health questions, to vender and business info, to info about my nephew’s public school, to local news in my sister’s small town, to trivia.

We are not alone in this arrangement. Like many first-generation college graduates, I oscillate between these disparate social spaces — fast enough sometimes to affect a sense of self and identity — moving forward and backward between digital and analog, the material and theoretical, filial and heretical, oral and textual traditions and cultures, though “native” to none.  Being a doctoral student associated with a university continues to digitally connect, arrange and organize me. Social stratification in access to the expansive communicative vehicles and habitats that are encompassed by the terms “social media,” “information technology,” or “digital tools” exacerbate and further entrench the other multitude of ways that I am distinguished/marked from my family of origin. Such digital resources (informational as well as tool-based) guide and color the way we think and live, shape the very way we come to understand ourselves. What are the consequences of this class-stratified access to information, knowledge and tools?

Luke has previously posted this Michael Wesch video in his discussion of the new media revolution and its promise of greater social connectivity. I think it’s worthwhile to repost Wesch’s “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” here as a dramatic accounting of the potential deprivation that digital exclusion represents.

Panic arose while viewing this video as I newly considered the degree of impoverishment faced by those of us (i.e., my family) who are absent from this “revolution,” who don’t “teach the machine,” who are not tagging, or naming, the (digital) world, who shape it by their absence from it, who become more invisible, less active social participants even as others become more productive and more participatory in our society. Indeed, “we will need to rethink a few things,” particularly equality, democracy, citizenship.

Working-class studies scholar, Denise Narcisse  details the issues and consequences surrounding the protracted and growing digital inequality faced by the poor and working class in the U.S. Both Sherry Linkon and Jane Van Galen take up this discussion in subsequent blog posts, outlining the challenges of integrating new media and digital tools at their campuses, and in their classrooms, when their student bodies disproportionately come from working class families and communities.  All of the hardships they detail for the student populations the work with are even less surmountable for those outside of a school system, with more limited access to digital technology. As a student and employee within the university setting, I have been honing my meta medium capacities for some time and on multiple levels: content, context, medium, form, speeds — most of my family are a full 5 steps back in the “meta media fluency” endorsed by Gardner Campbell.

A case in point: This summer, my father conferred with me about which laptop he should buy, now that he could afford one. I was at a complete loss of how to advise him, especially given that we live on opposite sides of the country and navigate a technological knowledge gap between us that feels even greater. He was silent at my suggestion to head to a decent retail store and trying some out. When I then suggested that he explain to the sales staff that he is a new user, he promptly cut me off and suggested to me that they would have to pick themselves up off the floor laughing. I then realized that he actually has a lot of shame around his lack of knowledge and previous inexperience, and had come to me for real help. I then dutifully identified a highly rated, moderately priced notebook, printed out the reviews and specs, and snail mailed it to him with a print out of where he could purchase it in person. Two weeks later, he was completely technologically up to date in terms of hardware — he even has a mobile hotspot.

It is fall now, and he has yet to get online, access email, see the world through the web. Despite that year of Geek Squad service he purchased, his contract with a major ISP, and at least one member of his immediate family with passable digital competencies, he is still living in a very different social world from the majority of Americans overall – though very much as many working class Americans do. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, as suggested by this recent Toyota commercial, which privileges material world pursuits over cyber ones in their efforts to sell a SUV.

Turns out, if given the choice between a new car or a new computer system, my sister would take the car, reasoning that a computer was a luxury. I say, it depends on who you ask.