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The Baltimore Sun Reality hits e-village

"FOUR YEARS ago, when modern townhouses replaced the demolished Lexington Terrace public housing high-rise project, the new mixed-income community sported a decidedly utopian twist: All tenants in 203 subsidized units were offered free computers, complete with Internet access and maintenance.

The experiment reflected President Bill Clinton's desire to close the "digital divide" between technology haves and have-nots."

This initiative got off to a rough start. It garnered national media attention, but many tenants resisted the required two-week training courses. Others had trouble with the computers."

First Monday The digital divide: Why the "don't-wants-tos" won't compute: Lessons from a New Zealand ICT project
"Why, when computing is available in a socially situated, convenient environment, at no cost, do people choose not to compute? This paper describes a community-based project that wired four computing centres (hubs) in a lower socio-economic urban area in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city. One of the hubs is situated in a city council high-rise apartment block and after six months of operation it was apparent that many of the residents were not using the free computing facilities. A survey was designed and administered to the non-users in this apartment block. Responses centered on the themes of access, awareness and factors that would encourage residents to use the hub, but the majority stated they were "not interested." Analysis explores the impact of the social context within which the hub is situated and suggests reasons why some people choose not to compute."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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