Myth #5 in "YouTube and Politics"
Mr Antonio at the Washington Post recently wrote of the political debates “televised” on YouTube. The format for the debate was people posting video questions on YouTube and Anderson Cooper selecting a set of those questions, airing them and then getting candidates’ responses. He outlined five myths about the experiment. He makes good points with good examples an all of them. Interesting to my concern was #5 …
5.”Anyone can participate in this debate.”
That quote is from David Bohrman of CNN, which tirelessly promoted the event. Truth is, not everyone can. There’s a rarely discussed digital divide in America. In Charleston, 40 to 45 percent of the population subscribes to a high-speed Internet service, about the same as the national average. In a state where half of the primary voters are black, a study released last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that broadband use among blacks, though rising, continues to lag behind whites and English-speaking Latinos. In many parts of the country, particularly rural areas and poor inner cities, access to high-speed Internet is not the norm. In fact, less than half a mile from the Citadel, the site of last week’s debate, sits the Cooper River Courts public housing project, where owning a computer and subscribing to the Internet are considered luxuries.
Source Jose Antonio Vargas (vargasj@washpost.com) The Washington Post
This Serves as another example where we must be careful that we not take the Internet for granted. As soon as we make the Internet a prerequisite for participation in society, we create a class strata. It comes back to “those who have forgetting about those who have not.”
