Cobb

Umm . . err. . . C West is not even remotely representative of THE professoriate. He's a superstar with pay on a different scale, perks from a different menu, and with access to media and money the vast majority of the professoriate lacks. I have no idea what the state of digital divide theory is these days, but as far as I can tell the academic world has been digital for a long time -- ARPAnet was well established in the academic world before it became the internet -- and a lot of academics are cheerlfully digital, even many who are more substantial thinkers than West, if not superstars.

Thus the following statement is without foundation:

"I have come to expect and have yet to be dissuaded from the conclusion that it lies directly against the interests of the Professoriate to publish on the Internet. It doesn't pay. It competes with their lucrative positions within the academy. Why give away for free that which you get paid to talk about within the hallowed halls? I have come to accept this rationale as perfectly acceptable and I probably won't accept any other. It's all about the benjamins, baby."

That's not the academic world of work-a-day academics. There's a small circuit of superstars and that's it. To believe that they represent the whole of academia is be succumb to a lazy fantasy.

You do know that academic publication doesn't pay, don't you? Those who are required to publish -- lest they perish -- are required to "give it away for free" as you say. In some fields the journals even charge for publication, by the page, so research grants will have line items for page charges.

Are you claiming there never was a digital divide or are you claiming that the majority of the left ranks were saying the divide would never close?

You are in rare form today, Cobb. I love it!

Bill,

You have me dead to rights. It's certainly unfair of me to suggest that most academics are anything like Dr. West with regard to their economic incentives or their Luddite factor. I have bemoaned the lack of outreach by academics employing internet technology for so long that I have come to regard it as a permanent feature. Despite what the blogosphere has become, I continually see a lack of supply.

While it is true that MIT has established a full blown program which puts real college material freely available on the web, it stands alone. It is the uniqueness of this program that I had in mind while writing. It is also the more obective and technical nature of the content of that site which makes me see little interest in withholding it from the public. But I remain astonished that the Wikipedias of the world (and even dKospedias) tend to be generated outside of the aegis of higher ed. Perhaps that which exists is simply unbranded and unrecognizable as academic work, but I doubt it.

I am claiming that there never was a Digital Divide - that the computer was never more an elitist tool than the automobile and that it was destined to be a mass market consumer item long before the left proclaimed against it.

I am saying that proponents of the theory misread 'gap' statistics and ignored supply and demand. I am saying that all the blackfolks who wanted a computer made up their minds and got one and there was nothing standing in their way. All noise about the internet being a white male bastion and therefore hostile territory was defeatist.

Now the theory has run out of steam not only because it was wrong from the beginning, but because there's nobody left to fool.

It's a hodge-podge Cobb. Whenever I want to get in touch with an academic I go to the web. I can generally, but not always, find at least an email address on a departmental website. I may also find web-ified course materials and research, and perhaps down-loadeable research as well. There are lots of academic journals that make their articles available on the web under various conditions and the are a reasonable number of high-quality web-only journals that are free to all.

And then there are listserves. I'm on a very high quality one devoted to evolutionary psychology. Some of the people who post are academics, some are science journalists, and some a just curious folks with an interest. Some of the discussion threads are interesting, some suck, and so forth, just like any other listserve. What's interesting, though, is the mixture of professional academics and laity.

On the whole, the internet has made the role of public intellectual viable for anyone with computer access, a will, a brains. But then, you know that.

Thanks for the post on the NIH. If this goes thru, it will do 2 things in the research community:
1) decrease costs for libraries who will stop paying for content
2) set research back because the effective pub date will be 6 months after the actual pub date

the Public Library of Science has a better idea www.plos.org (or .net)

As someone who uses pubmed FREQUENTLY, I must admit it is the BEST thing my tax $$ have paid for (at least in my line of work), but I fear that free content will have unforseen effects...

PLOS of course. I was aware of this.

There was a short piece on NPR recently speaking about comparative history. What they teach in S. Korea about the Korean War, as well as what they teach in Canada about the War of 1812 is significantly different from what is taught here in the States.

It is curious, the extent to which there are interests vested in arbitrary interpretations of history. I wonder if this chaos is a necessary precondition of freedom. We may not get to argue what the speed of light is, but should we always argue the meaning of Westward expansion? Hmm.

I am claiming that there never was a Digital Divide

I claim there was a Digital Divide, but it was, and is, still based on economics, not race. For example, my daughter's "inner city school" where 90% of the kids get free lunch, had a lot of kids who didn't have computers at home. (They also didn't have expensive clothes but let's not go there now).

A school that sends 95%+ of the kids to continuing education, of which 85% go to 4 year schools.

But, as I said way back when, one point on which we agree, Blacks who could afford it, found a way.

I am saying that proponents of the theory misread 'gap' statistics and ignored supply and demand.

And I said that what was ignored was the proof that a p.c. at home was worthwhile. That was proven and now look.

All noise about the internet being a white male bastion and therefore hostile territory was defeatist.

The net is a white male bastion if the stats on internet usage is correct. And let's be real, what brought down s.c.a.a.?

It is curious, the extent to which there are interests vested in arbitrary interpretations of history. I wonder if this chaos is a necessary precondition of freedom.

As much as I dislike the intellectual excesses of deconstruction and post-modernism, ideological investment in "arbitrary interpretations of history" is firmly in their intellectual target zone. Knowing that's a problem, however, doesn't give them the power either to escape the problem themselves or to figure out how the study of history can avoid the problem.

As for freedom, tyranny certainly trades freely in such arbitrary interpretation; that's part of the propganda infrastructure. Freedom allows such arbitrariness to be discovered, discussed, and decried.

What brought down SCAA was lack of control. It was not because SCAA was in the internet, it was because SCAA became the equivalent of an unpolicable waterfront dive that it failed. It attracted precisely the sort who preferred to squabble and once that got started it was impossible to stop.

One cannot underestimate the contribution of the Bard and Matt Nuenke to what SCAA became. They were as persistent in their trolling as any one of the defenders of civility. Once they established the fact that white racists could disrupt black talk, the game was over. The solution was always simple.

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The premise of the Digital Divide was racial. All the other 'disabilities' rode in on the coattails of race.

We could get into it forever about 'inner city schools' and computers.

1. Cultural aside: I'm not sure, but I'm guessing Dr. West is about my age. Back in the neolithic, typing was for secretaries. If you were proficient in typing--male or female--you ran the risk of being stuck in that sort of corral. I only became proficient because my grandfather--who was far seeing--insisted all the grandkids be quick accurate typists, as a much faster and more efficient method of producing intellectual output. (He was right but didn't live to see word processing come of age.)

2. Digital divide, I would posit, still exists, in that there is now a presupposition at the college level that a student can use a word processing program, a spread-sheet program, some kind of presentation prep program (powerpoint if you will) and can do rudimentary searches on the web, and can figure out BS from the good stuff.

THAT presupposition presupposes that such skills have been mastered in high school or middle school, which may not happen in the poorer urban districts.

It also may not happen in rural districts, but I have less info about that.

3. So I pretty much agree with Cobb on the "elitist" part of the Digital Divide argument, but disagree in the education aspect.

More comments on Donna Hoffman's Report coming...

IIRC, Donna and I were in basic agreement on this matter. I'd have to go back to Well archives for specifics. I'm sure my general high regard for her would have suffered if we disagreed fundamentally on this, and I don't get that feeling as I think back...

The premise of the Digital Divide was racial. All the other 'disabilities' rode in on the coattails of race.

I want to make clear, if it wasn't before, that I agree with that point of your entry. I questioned it from the start.

What I'm saying is, there was a strong economic component to it. The economic component did come in on the coattails when the racial component showed to be false.

From a NYTimes review of Br'er West's latest intervention into the public sphere:

Then there are West's eccentricities of tone. For the ''soul murder'' of American youth, West blames cocaine, Ecstasy, oral sex and --Weblogs. He writes, somewhat cryptically, that ''Since 9/11 we have experienced the niggerization of America.'' He seems to mean that the terrorist attacks left all Americans feeling as vulnerable and hated as blacks have felt for most of our history, but the analogy is not explored. In a catalog of ''democratic artists, activists and intellectuals,'' West includes only three filmmakers; it's wince-making that two of them are the Wachowski brothers, who cast him as ''Counselor West'' in the ''Matrix'' sequels.

Full text at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/books/review/12CRAINL.html?pagewanted=all&position=