Just because technology is in place doesn’t necessarily mean people will find value in it,” states Dr. Faye McNair-Knox, executive director of One East Palo Alto—an organizational member of the East Palo Alto Digital Village Program. “Working alongside groups who provide essential services to local residents has helped us to partner with individuals who have not participated to become familiar with the technology and develop their own value for it. You really have to build that whole base of value within a community for people to access technology.” Continue reading Digital Infrastructure: By the Community, For the Community by Eloise Lee→
Lisa Gray-Garcia aka Tiny, poet, poverty scholar, revolutionary journalist and lecturer is the founder and executive director of POOR Magazine/ PoorNewsNetwork (PNN), the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America. Printed courtesy of the author and PNN (Poor News Network).
The walls of the conference hall auditorium were white and tall and engulfed the humans who sat in rapt attendance. I sat quietly, in panel after panel, afraid to move or make too much noise as tech-embedded words like, White space, Bit Torrent, Net Neutrality and Blogosphere floated past my ears. They bounced off the walls and knocked up against my head like thick steel rods, knocking my fingers off their tenuous hold onto the edges of the digital ravine, which seemed to grow sharper and taller with each obtuse reference to a technology I had never had the time, privilege or the access to learn in all of my 38 years of poverty and homelessness. Continue reading The Low-Access People: Tiny Grey-Garcia’s Notes on the NCMR→
