Book Review: Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, by Virginia Eubanks.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 232 pp. $28.00 / £19.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-262-01498-4

1. PhD Candidate, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Indianapolis, United States. Email: dnemer@indiana.edu

Conventional western and white rhetoric suggests that the simple power of science and technology promotes broad-based economic and social equality, and equally nurtures transparency and accountability in democratic governance. Virginia Eubanks energetically challenges this claim, calling it magical thinking - the belief that merely thinking about an event can cause it to happen. She proposes a realistic and alternative approach for fighting social injustice by shifting the focus away from the technology to the perspective of those in unprivileged social locations.

In Digital Dead End, Eubanks disputes the term "digital divide" since it carries with it a technological deterministic package. According to her, the relationship between inequality and ICTs is far more complex than any picture simply portraying "haves" and "have-nots" can represent. The real divide is actually a result of pre-existing social structures and institutionalized inequalities that are amplified by the information age (39).

She advocates for the inception of "critical technological citizenship education based on the insights of broadly participatory" democracy (104) in order to forge links between people's knowledge, experience and the social and political realities that shape their understandings. She provides several insightful critiques: (1) policies aimed to bridge the digital divide are often "trapped in a distributive paradigm that sees all high-tech equity issues as distributive issues" (xix), they envision equity and justice solely in terms of resources; (2) technology is not approached as a broad concept encompassing cultural and social aspects and the processes around it; and (3) there is a lack of attention to social location - "studying social location and everyday life makes the complex inequalities of the information age visible" (25).

By interacting and collaborating with working-class women at the YWCA of Troy-Cohoes, NY, Eubanks realized that rather than being "technology poor," those women had a lot of experience and an intimate relationship with information technology (IT). They used these in their high-tech occupations such as data entry and call centers and when dealing with the social service and welfare systems.

Accessing IT was not giving these women the empowerment hoped for by Eubanks. Instead, it was disenfranchising them and enforcing the oppression and exploitation already suffered by them. For example, she shows how government services that have become automated and digitized in a number of ways remove human interaction (and therefore sometimes social worker intersession) or gather personal data that the women fear can be used against them in new ways that was not possible before.

Although the experiences presented by Eubanks concerning the women from the YWCA community in the Information Age can be disheartening, her book is a love story (21). It is not a very romantic one, but it tells stories about women sustaining relationships, conquering fear, building alliances and speaking their deepest truth. The book also shows that IT, when approached properly, can be a tool of liberation.

Eubanks describes her practical and activist approach to developing "a broadly and empowering "technology for people," popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement" (cover).

Popular technology privileges the perspective and participation of everyday experts. It is an opportunity for scholars, activists and policymakers to help address issues of inequality by including people to become more empowered, politically engaged and socially and critically involved in making appropriate changes in their communities. Thus, the people in unprivileged social locations can engage and develop strategies to improve their education and political awareness. Technology itself can be one the factors in this strategy, but it is not a necessary element. Such human-centered argument calls for a shift in political focus from promoting IT solutions to lifting up the boats of everyone to a "a model of high-tech equity based on resisting oppression, acknowledging difference as a resource, and fostering democratic and participatory decision making" (27).

Eubanks concludes by offering an agenda for creating equity in the information age (157): (1) protect workers in the lower tier of the high-tech economy since they are subject to losing "their power to bargain for fair wages, workplace safety, robust pensions, and job security" (158); (2) take high-tech industries off welfare since the incentive and tax breaks provided to them would be more than enough to pay public assistance and social services; (3) respect and reward the work of care, "the burden of combining parenting with the expanded work requirements falls mostly on women, single fathers are increasingly feeling its negative impacts as well… we must provide destigmatized, adequate support for those who bear an unequal share of the burdens of its risk and vulnerability." (162); (4) raise the floor by "raising the minimum wage and building a good jobs economy should do much to raise the floor for America's poorest workers." (163); (5) revive a vibrant democratic culture and expand cognitive justice by promoting critical technological citizens; (6) spread community technology centers (CTCs) around: though access-based solutions to inequality, such as CTCs, can only tackle a few high-tech equity issues, they nevertheless fulfill important community needs and may act as "centers of gravity" for citizen engagement and political organizing." (165); (7) protect our right to the city: "create and maintain livable communities, secure the benefits of economic change for the communities where development is undertaken, and protect the cultural rights of existing residents in areas undergoing rapid change." (165); (8) clean up after yourselves: promote electronic trash collecting and recycling in the community; and (9) everyone is equally precious in the process of creating a more just information age, because they contribute with their own expertise and experience of the real world of IT, rooted in their social location.

Digital Dead End offers a methodological guide for performing participatory action research within community groups; the appendices detail the process of developing popular technology programs. It is an accessible and enjoyable read for undergraduate and graduate students. Eubanks' strong tone is an eye-opening opportunity for scholars, policymakers and activists to approach IT through the perspectives of the ones that suffer the most from oppression and social injustice.

By adopting an inter-sectional approach which brings together different theories ranging from feminist scholarship to science and technology studies she reminds us that social location is an incredibly important factor in any analysis of agency in socio-technical systems. This book renders oppressive aspects of IT visible while maintaining hope for the future of an Information Society where people should be always considered at the center.