Rainbow Unit: Networks Big and Small
3B: A Person-Centered Network Information System Adventure
Technical Overview
My philosophy is very simple: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to stand up, you have to say something, you have to do something.
My mother told me over and over again when I went off to school not to get into trouble, but I told her that I got into a good trouble, necessary trouble. Even today I tell people, “We need to get in good trouble.”
John Lewis, interviewed by Valerie Jackson for StoryCorps[1]
We began this session considering the codifications of the digital divide and beginning a process of decodification of this and related terms. We explored some examples specifically related to NDIA’s first element of digital inclusion, “affordable, robust broadband internet service.” Digital inclusion, equity, and literacy, as brought forward by NDIA, ALA, and others, give a more formal definition that can serve as a framework to move on from the magical thinking that is pervasive within current neoliberal understandings of sociotechnical networked information systems. But this is an ongoing work of community inquiry and action-reflection.
As we move forward in our professional practices, we each will likely make use of a range of sociotechnical digital tools within our daily activities, which, together in work with others, include works towards advancing digital inclusion and equity goals. But in practice, information science professionals have encountered limits and constraints to the social justice parameters given their permitted roles, and given how certain socially structured fabrics and certain community values are placed above others, particularly in light of dependencies on public funding that gives greater power to the middle-class, white population.[2]
As an introductory text, A Person-Centered Guide to Demystifying Technology has worked to open up the closed box of digital technologies sufficiently so that we can explore ways in which we can innovate-in-use our everyday technologies so that our choice, [re]design, and use of digital technologies better serve the diverse community knowledge and cultural wealth within the fabric of communities. It is an introductory text seeking to help us see better those aspects of digital technology that are “not right, not fair, not just,” to quote John Lewis. As noted throughout the Rainbow Unit, there have been an extraordinary growth in digital computing and communications over the last 50 years. The community networking and community FabLab movements are but two of the many examples of ways digital bits and physical atoms have been brought together with the objective of advancing the real-world goals of local people to address the situations limiting them from being more fully human as active members within civil discourse as part of a community forum, life-long learning, and information access and use. But there have also been key influences and i