iobhan Stevenson wouldn’t be one to shush you in a library.In fact,the public-librarian-turned-academic would be more likely to quietly spark a revolution among the stacks. It was a decade as a public librarian that inspired her to begin studying what’s often called the digital divide.
Conventional wisdom holds that the digital divide is a problem of access to technology. People without access to computers or the Internet,the argument goes,are hindered. The problem suggests an obvious policy solution:provide access—perhaps in public libraries—and the divide closes.
Stevenson isn’t buying it.
Today a professor in the Faculty of Information,she says that the digital divide is not a straightforward problem of access to technology.“It’s a problem of not having jobs. The digital divide is really a new term to deal with poverty and classinequality.The people we’re talking about aren’t digitally divided,they’re unemployed or under-employed and they are poor. I want to know what social forces are keeping them that way.”
Whether we’re talking about entire countries or pockets of poverty in our own society,Stevenson argues that without thinking about the wider socioeconomic and political context that creates uneven access to technology,we’re missing the point.
She also wants us to think about why people need access in the first place.“Do you need it so you can buy more stuff? Do you need it to improve your quality of life as measured by the ease with which you can consume? I am concerned about access being conflated with consumption.” Instead,Stevenson wants technology to help people do productive work and lead meaningful lives.
She uses her old stomping grounds as a way to think about some of these broad issues. She believes that libraries function almost as mirrors of our wider culture.“I use libraries as an object of analysis to unpack contemporary social relations of production and reproduction.”
When it comes to policy solutions,she’s skeptical of much of the dominant rhetoric. Charitable foundations,for example,are heavily involved in providing access to technology. They often donate hardware and software to communities in need—or to public libraries—but they then create a dependency on a certain suite of products that must be bought.“I heard this analogy:we’ll give you the razor for free but then you have to buy the blades.”
On the other hand,she says,the developing world is “moving more toward free and open-source software.This is an important ingredient in bridging the digital divide if we think of the divide as a problem of access to productivity tools and to creating solutions inside communities.”
alk to Rodolphe el-Khoury and you’ll soon realize that architecture isn’t just about the look of a building.It is about everything that has to do with a place and,ultimately,how that place is interwoven with your experience. And new media technology is a tool that can enhance that experience,often in remarkable ways.
Imagine this,he says:you are in the hospital,confined to bed. Your discomfort is heightened because you are not at home,you are in unfamiliar surroundings. These negative feelings will likely hamper your recovery.
Now imagine this:you look at the window,and instead of there being a window,there is a large LCD television. On the screen is a live feed from your living room at home.You see and hear your family.Or you could choose another live feed,from,say,a favourite beach. You choose the view—and your senses are emboldened and your stay in the hospital doesn’t seem so bad. Subconsciously,you start to get better,a little faster.
This is just one example of how new media technology can comfort us by way of our senses from the fertile imagination of el-Khoury,Canada Research Chair in Architecture and Urban Theory and Design and professor in UofT’s John H.Daniels Faculty of Architecture,Landscape and Design.
“The hospital scenario is an example of how new media can supplement or overlay the architecture with virtual reality which,in this case,collapses the distance between the patient and his or her home.In cases like health care,these enhancements become important because they have been demonstrated to actually help with recovery and rehabilitation.”
There are several other applications and possibilities for embedded digital media and technology in architecture.He points to a student in one of his courses who designed vertical blinds “controlled by video-trackers so they can constantly react to the person in the room. Wherever you are moving,they are constantly shifting.You have an unobstructed view of the scene outside the window,but the blinds are also keeping the sun out of the room.”
It is important to address all the senses,says el-Khoury.He notes that in late 18th-century Paris,citizens suddenly complained about the smell of the city.“For no evident reason,it became intolerable to them. But the point here is that it was their senses communicating differently .It was not the city but the way people smelled it—sensation itself—that changed. Architects and planners had to transform the city to appease the discontented nose.”
Could this happen again? He suggests that our threshold of tolerance for noise may be similarly lowered,to the point where the city would become intolerably loud and we would need to deal with noise pollution. While we continue to build condos in greater density and quantity,“can we also develop media technologies to dampen the noise we are creating and make cities more livable?”
Can digital noise dampeners and vertical blinds with sensors be new media? “Of course. They are technology addressing your senses. When I say new media,I don’t think of gadgets or gimmicks. I think of how we use information technology to enhance our experience with our surroundings.”