tiredI'll start with the clinical: according to the dictionary (and Wikipedia), poverty is "the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions." So if you don't have as much as everyone around you, you're poor.
I'll move on to the personal. Poverty is the state of waking up freezing in the middle of the night because it's a waste of money to run the heat when everyone is sleeping anyway, and you need that money to buy lunch meat from the "eat it tomorrow or it will kill you" clearance bin. Poverty is the state of making that lunch meat last a week and a half, even after the edges have started turning green. Poverty is sending your little sisters to beg staples off the people in the crap-ass apartments surrounding yours, because everyone is poor, and everyone is hungry, and cute little girls stand a better chance of success than anybody else. That's poverty.
The U.S. Census Bureau said that 43.6 million (14.3%) Americans were living in absolute poverty in 2009. According to the report they released this past Tuesday, the national poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010...and we still don't know what 2011 is going to look like.
This is the "official" poverty level, by the way; there are a lot of sociologists who think that the actual poverty level is much higher, since we calculate using a "socially acceptable miniumum standard of living" that was last updated in 1955. To quote Wikipedia again: "The current poverty line only takes goods into account that were common more than 50 years ago, updating their cost using the Consumer Price Index. Mollie Orshansky, who devised the original goods basket and methodology to measure poverty, used by the U.S. government, in 1963-65, updated the goods basket in 2000, finding that the actual poverty threshold, i.e. the point where a person is excluded from the nation's prevailing consumption patterns, is at roughly 170% of the official poverty threshold."
Things that did not exist in 1955: home computers. The internet. Ebook readers.
It is sometimes difficult for me to truly articulate my reaction to people saying that print is dead. I don't want to be labeled a luddite, or anti-ebook; I love my computer, I love my smartphone, and I love the fact that I have the internet in my pocket. The existence of ebooks means that people who can't store physical books can have more to read. It means that hard-to-find and out of print material is becoming accessible again. I means that people who have arthritis, or weak wrists, or other physical disabilities that make reading physical books difficult, can read again, without worrying about physical pain. I love that ebooks exist.
This doesn't change the part where, every time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to "Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier," what I hear, however unintentionally, is "Poor people don't deserve to read."
I don't think this is malicious, and I don't think it's something we're doing on purpose. I just think it's difficult for us, on this side of the digital divide, to remember that there are people standing on the other side of what can seem like an impassable gorge, wondering if they're going to be left behind. Right now, more than 20% of Americans do not have access to the internet. In case that seems like a low number, consider this: That's one person in five. One person in five doesn't have access to the internet. Of those who do have access, many have it via shared computers, or via public places like libraries, which allow public use of their machines. Not all of these people are living below the poverty line; some have voluntarily simplified their lives, and don't see the need to add internet into the mix. But those people are not likely to be the majority.
Now. How many of these people do you think have access to an ebook reader?
I grew up so far below the poverty line that you couldn't see it from my window, no matter how clear the day was. My bedroom was an ocean of books. Almost all of them were acquired second-hand, through used bookstores, garage sales, flea markets, and library booksales, which I viewed as being just this side of Heaven itself. There are still used book dealers in the Bay Area who remember me patiently paying off a tattered paperback a nickel at a time, because that was what I could afford. If books had required having access to a piece of technology—even a "cheap" piece of technology—I would never have been able to get them. That up-front cost would have put them out of my reach forever.
Some people have proposed a free reader program aimed at low-income families, to try to get the technology out there. Unfortunately, this doesn't account for the secondary costs. Can you guarantee reliable internet? Can you find a way to let people afford what will always be, essentially, brand new books, rather that second- or even third-hand books, reduced in price after being worn to the point of nearly falling apart? And can you find a way to completely destroy—I mean, destroy—the resale market for those devices?
Do I sound pessimistic? That's because I am. When I was a kid with nothing, any nice thing I had the audacity to have would be quickly stolen, either by people just as poor as I was, or by richer kids who wanted me to know that I wasn't allowed to put on airs like that. If my books had been virtual, then those people would have been stealing my entire world. They would have been stealing my exit. And I don't think I would have survived.
We need paper books to endure. Every one of us, if we can log onto this site and look at this entry, is a "have" from the perspective of a kid living in an apartment with cockroaches in the walls and junkies in the unit beneath them. A lot of the time, the arguments about the coming ebook revolution forget that the "have nots" also exist, and that we need to take care of them, even if it means we can't force our technological advancement as fast as we might want to. I need to take care of them, because I was a little girl who only grew up to be me through the narrowest of circumstances...and most of those circumstances were words on paper.
Libraries are losing funding by the day. Schools are having their budgets slashed. Poor kids are getting poorer, and if we don't make those books available to them now, they won't know to want them tomorrow.
We cannot forget the digital divide. And we can't—we just can't—be so excited over something new and shiny that we walk away and knowingly leave people on the other side.
We can't.
September 17 2011, 17:14:04 UTC 5 years ago
I can imagine a future where computer hardware and network access are so cheap that they are accessible to everyone on the planet and where educational and information materials are available for free to anyone with internet access.
The question then is how many years will it take to achieve that? What measures will bring it about sooner? What would delay it?
Good enough Hardware is available now for about $400. This is too expensive. There is some credible projections that this price will come down to about $100. There are over a hundred manufacturers of Android phones at the moment and this is a powerful downward pressure on prices. Rapid changes in this hardware will mean that one and two year old hardware will be available for much less provided the manufacturers and sellers are not allowed to ban resale of hardware, by, for instance, having the hardware locked to particular networks. We must have the right to unlock our phones and network devices.
Public Internet access is of a number of types - Fixed wires and cable TV cables; Mobile WiFi and Cellphone. Competition has been effective in driving down prices and driving forward technology but consolidation in ownership of the networks will slow this. Oppose the ATT/T mobile merger. Whenever such a merger happens try to get a duty imposed on the netwrk to work with virtual carriers for a fair rate. That's not enough on it's own. We must fight for free wi-fi in every school and library, even if all the other library services are closed down.
Free Content is the third leg of this stool. I have volunteered for project Gutenberg and for Wikipedia since I first heard of them. Every major work of classical literature in English is now available to download for free. All of them. In a few years we will have kindergarten to undergraduate level educational content for every subject available too. I'm working with Appropedia to get all the basic technical information to operate off grid available too but that one is going slowly.
What about the interim? What happens between then and now? Well as people with money buy ereader and ebooks they will get rid of books. There will be a ton of second hand books coming on the narket over the next few months, so cheap that even the charity shops will be barely able to afford to stock them. Encourage every coffee shop, and workplace to have a book swop bookshelf where anyone can come and drop off their old books or collect books they never read before. With luck that will tide us over.
September 17 2011, 18:45:31 UTC 5 years ago
In the broadcast era, there was no way to control access to the signal once transmitted, so content providers had a vested interest in everyone being able to afford a receiver. The makers of receivers might have preferred to charge everyone top dollar, but it made more sense to sell to everyone and seek profit by varying size and quality. As technology made quality cheaper, it was often planned obsolescence or calculated withholding.
If you compare the rate of affordability for physical storage devices - records, tapes, cds - to that of digital, the drop is far slower, what counts as cheap is more costly and the difference in functionality is far greater. One might argue this is made up for by vastly cheaper content, but that only counts as long as the player and the computer are working.
I started thinking about this when Apple changed the affordable nano to have fewer features (no more clickwheel, photos or video) and durability (touch screens more prone to breakage) and cost just as much if not more.
Also when Apple and others started discussing offering budget devices which required an ad based subscription to operate. And when a friend tried to give me his old iPhone to use as a touch, and it turned out that without a cell phone account it can't be used at all.
There's money to be made in gatekeeping and even as prices drop the goal remains giving people the least amount for the most cost. And once everyone is dependent on semi-monopoly circumstances, those prices will not fall.
It's being seen in the throttling of bandwidth. The ability to own something matters a lot.
September 18 2011, 17:43:10 UTC 5 years ago
Huh? I'm using my husband's old iPhone as a touch and we haven't had any issues. However, he works for Apple and is very tech-literate, so he may have done something to it that I don't even know about. Ask around.