Virginia Eubanks

The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital ... (more)Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. How can we ensure that technology will serve social justice? That's the challenge made by this fascinating new study. Virginia Eubanks is the cofounder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots anti-poverty and welfare rights organization, and teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She edited the cyberfeminist ‘zine Brillo and was active in the community technology center movements in the San Francisco Bay Area and Troy, NY.

In 2001 Virginia Eubanks, along with several dozen collaborators, created a technology training program for poor and working-class women at the YWCA of Troy-Cohoes. This program challenged Eubanks’ conceptions of the Digital Divide, and her experience over the next four years revolutionized her thinking ... (more)about access—or lack of access—to technology. In Digital Dead End (MIT Press / March 2011 / $27.95), Eubanks argues that information technology is not a miraculous cure-all that will pave the road to prosperity, democracy and equality. She found instead that her collaborators at the YWCA had extensive interaction with IT, but often experienced it as a tool of surveillance and oppression rather than a tool of economic and political liberation. Their stories challenged her preconceptions, overturned the central tenets of digital divide policy, and shattered the familiar delusion that low-income people are somehow information or technology poor. Despite the inequities they uncovered in the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks and the women in the YWCA community collaborated to make technology serve social justice. Digital Dead End describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering “technology for people,” popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Virginia Eubanks is the cofounder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots anti-poverty and welfare rights organization, and teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She edited the cyberfeminist ‘zine Brillo and was active in the community technology center movements in the San Francisco Bay Area and Troy, NY. WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING “If we’re to move forward as a society we’ll need to abandon many of the platitudes and utopian musings that characterize computerization and actually start doing the work that needs doing. This is what Virginia Eubanks lays out in Digital Dead End. Is she the Jane Addams of the digital age?” —Douglas Schuler, author of Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution and New Community Networks: Wired for Change FOR MORE INFORMATION htp://www.digitaldeadend.com