A technology project in Detroit is making in-roads based on an old school philosophy that the Internet can’t solve every problem by itself.
For Leonard and for the organizers in Detroit, this is what’s missing in most discussions about the digital divide. No technology exists in a vacuum.
“My community has to be able to access data and information, and they have to be willing to accept help,” said Leonard. “But the persons who give help have to understand that you cannot just come in and ramrod my community and think that because people don’t have, you assume they are illiterate.”
“I can’t say that [Detroit Digital Justice Coalition] enhanced [us],” she added. “We were already where we are. It was just a matter of their accommodating us with what we did not have through the BTOP. They had connections.”
And it’s those connections–literal and metaphorical–that both residents and organizers are grappling to understand. The innovation of their mesh networking project is, in many ways, an old fashioned willingness to admit to the limits of technology.
“It wasn’t enough to just know that some techie or engineer could sprinkle some magic router dust around the neighborhood and they would be sharing Internet access,” says Breitbart of the Open Technology Institute. “That infrastructure needed to be made visible to people.” {read}