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 19 2011, 14:11:15 UTC 5 years ago
In my home town, which is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is no free wifi. And I am very sorry, but librarians are more helpful, and more knowledgeable, than the best Google search.
Librarians and bibliophiles can whine and scream all they want about the "stupidity" of the end of print.
In 500 comments, I have seen little to no whining or screaming.
Thank you for your thoughts.
September 19 2011, 15:28:52 UTC 5 years ago
To suggest that electronic media somehow disenfranchises the poor and keeps them in the dark when it comes to information resources is dishonest and irresponsible.
Librarians would have to work quite hard to solve many if not most of the particular riddles I pose to Google. Self-service is also the best and most enduring form of learning. Most of America's great iconoclasts frequented public libraries and taught themselves. They may have had a little help from librarians doing so-- at least getting started. But a librarian cannot possibly teach everything or know everything, any more than a teacher can.
I relate to loving what you know and loving it in the form you grew up with. I still love LPs and buy them whenever I can-- cheaply. And books and LPs will always continue to exist, and indeed still thrive as newly-available physical media as of this writing. But when technology offers the vast majority of people a better solution for their needs, it's folly to suggest to these people that what they think they want isn't really what they want based on your own preferences-- or your own vocation.
September 19 2011, 20:35:48 UTC 5 years ago
In addition, your riddles are not my riddles and I assure you that no amount of Google searching will help you all of the answers you seek. If you doubt this, I encourage you to spend an afternoon trying to translate Eino Leino, the Finnish poet. Eino has never been translated into English before. He used an older dialect of Finnish. Google translate is a joke.
Librarians aren't going to have the answer either. But librarians are great for finding those rare gems that you need. Google might get me the name of a book to help me translate. In fact, it did lead me to a few books off of Amazon that I ended up buying. But to translate? No. Librarians, on the other hand, have access to an assortment of books both in the library and outside. After an inquiry, I was able to get access to new materials to help me with my research.
September 19 2011, 22:48:21 UTC 5 years ago
Same with teaching. I won't sit here and claim that what I do is pointless, or that I didn't have a hundred life-shaping "Eureka!" moments thanks to a great teacher or ten in my past.
The future, though, is one that will find both librarians and teachers in increasingly lower demand, and/or with vastly reshaped job descriptions. This is definitely a bad thing for us smart folks who looked and worked for suitable smart-person vocations in the pre-wired era, but it's a direct repercussion of what amounts to a very good thing for information accessibility on a global level.
All of this is an aside to my original point-- which is to contest the assertion that the e-reader and online reading jeopardize the ability of the poor to access printed information.
The poor do not generally have access to scholarly books unless they live near a university library and don't mind reading on the library site itself. For that matter, most university faculty can't really afford to buy more than a handful of books in their own fields each year.
This is a situation that could, and hopefully will, change as university presses realize that new technology gives them new distribution options. Everyone would benefit from the free or incredibly cheap release of scholarly texts in electronic form. With no tiny print runs to manage, no warehouse stock to deal with, no skeleton crew at the U-press warehouse fulfilling the handful of orders, the costs now are limited to the blood / sweat / tears of the author-- who presumably is a faculty member somewhere, coughing up the work mainly with the objective of promotion and tenure.
I know quite a few published faculty. Aside from the ones who have written undergraduate textbooks in fields with thousands of enrolled students every year, none of them profits fiscally in any meaningful way from sales of their ridiculously expensive books, which are only ridiculously expensive because of the inherent problems of the printed page and the "limited audience" for these products... which is largely so limited because the books are so damned expensive that no one but university libraries will buy them.
I don't think a future where absolutely everyone can afford an e-reader is that far off. I see the potential benefits as absolutely huge, PARTICULARLY to bottom-line-challenged readers. Most of these benefits won't be realized until the hardware itself changes the nature of the medium. But to label this technology as disenfranchising means that you assume the way it is now is the way it will always be-- and it won't, not by a long shot.