Mind the Digital Gap – Lab 072

I feel like there was such a push to everything digital in COVID, and now that things are kind of opening up. Even though the numbers continue to go up, it seems like we're getting more and more and more digital. I thought things would go back. People are saying, no more menus, that's over QR codes only.

Exactly, you got a QR code on your table. And you know what's funny, Jimmy he doesn't have a smart phone, so when he goes to restaurants, he's out of luck because if they don't have menus to pass out, he has to hope somebody with him will let him use their phone to be able to look at the menu.

It also reminds me of when people were saying we don't take cash because of COVID. But I'm like, all right, y'all are in here allowing people to die maskless, but still saying you don't take cash. If you're trying to go all digital and you're trying to get rid of the cash and coins, just say that right, no have zis.

Yeah.

But all of those things I think are just indicators of this widening digital divide. Absolutely, and I think maybe in more places than we really lives and we really ought to talk about it. I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify. This is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs.

A weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy doser friendship.

This week, we're talking all about the state of internet access in the United States and how a lack of internet access affects different areas of our lives.

So let's get into the recitation, all right, So what do we know?

Well, I think we know many of us are using the internet every day in our work lives, but definitely also in our personal lives.

Right, And I feel like everyone is online, like everyone has to be online because of the way that our culture is set up.

And what we know from my episode with Christina Morillo is that there is a lot of data about us online.

So true, So what do we want to know?

I think we want to know who has Internet access and who doesn't. Even though it feels like everybody's online and that you have to be online, I'm sure there is not one hundred percent online participation across the United States.

Right, And I want to know about the pitfalls with the internet. Everything's moving to be online. Every application. You know, you're applying for a loan, you're applying for a house, anything, you have to do it online. And so I'm wondering, because all of these things are man made, are there any biases that they have found with algorithms and just the Internet in general and how it plays a role in our day to day lives.

I think we're ready. Let's jump into the dissection.

Our guest for today's lab is doctor Nicole Turner Lee.

I'm a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and I'm also the director of the Center for Technology Innovation, and I have a forthcoming buck which is on the US Digital Divide entitled Digitally Invisible. How the Internet is creating the new Underclass.

It feels like so much of life is happening online, between social media, working from home, telehealth, which was booming after the pandemic. I think it's easy for a lot of us to take Internet access for granted. I don't care where you are now, they're not making menus anymore. It's a QR code for everything code.

Yeah.

The thing we have to remember is not everyone has access to the Internet, and even if they do, not all internet access is the same. Doctor Turner calls this gap and access the digital divide.

We have had this divide way before the pandemic, right, there were always people who on the wrong side of digital opportunity. There was no Facebook when I was growing up, no Instagram, five to FI. So when I started in this space, I was a digital activist working in City Chicago, really training people on how to set up email accounts. And what we found during the process is that more jobs were going online. As a results of that, more people had to figure out ways to create a resume

Doctor Turner Lee says that while innovation around some of these technologies and digital systems has been fast, not everyone is using or has access to the technology, and all of this was exacerbated by COVID.

The pandemic revealed that if you were not connected, you could not make an appointment for vaccinations, you could not work, you could not learn, you couldn't even memorialize your friends and family members who were lost as a result of this pandemic.

This is so important, right, and I think we saw this with a lot of older folks. You know, I can remember this, and this disparity, even though it's digital, is.

Having very real effects on right day to day lives. I remember when the pandemic hit and there were a lot of kids that were, you know, trying to do virtual school and they didn't have internet at home, and so their parents would have to find a place where they could get internet so that they could log in and have virtual school. So there were some kids that were having virtual school in their parents' car, in a library,

Yeah, Doctor Turnerlee shared even more info about how the digital divide played out in education.

So at March when we had the beginnings of the pandemic, and if you all remember, around March through April, we were at peak numbers. We had to send fifty million school aged kids home from one hundred and ninety five thousand school districts across the US. And we thought it was going to be easy. We figured, hey, these are young people, they're resilient. We'll put them online and we'll make sure we give them laptops and figure that out.

We realized that K.

Through twelve students who were in public schools did not have access to Internet enabled devices as.

Part of their school ecosystem.

Generally, there was no budget right before the pandemic.

Not only could we not give kids.

Tablets, we also found that we did not have broadband service in the home.

So let's talk about that.

Fifty million schools ledged kids sent home fifteen to sixteen million of them without internet access in the home, nine million without internet access or a device.

That's so important because just because you have a device doesn't mean you have access. And I don't know if you remember the days of trying to do dial up and somebody is using the phone. Similarly, if you don't have really high speed internet access, multiple people are multiple devices trying to log on at the same time is no good.

And then when you think about the impact that that has on a student, these kids were being set back, you know, in their education. So then what does that mean At the end of the school year, are they promoted to the next grade? And if so, are they behind their friends that have had access to high speed internet with no problems.

And now the impact is we lost so many kids. I share the story about this fifteen year old girl in Detroit, Michigan who did not log in.

Her case manager came and they put her.

In juvenile detention because she failed to lock into school.

It's a true story.

That is terrible.

You know, it's pretty it's sick. Yes, in the middle of a pandemic.

And when we look at this type of stuff at a bigger scale, not just you know, one off cases, we find that the disparities in the Internet access are having disproportionate effects in minoritized communities.

What we're seeing now with K through twelve students in public schools, particularly black and Latino students and tribal students, is that we're seeing that they're going to be two to three years behind when it comes to learning proficiencies. Some of those kids that couldn't get online, it was because thirty five percent of those households were sharing one device among multiple siblings. Some of those kids didn't get online because their parents were serving us Wendy's and Burger

Yeah, it's bigger than who has the new iPad exactly camera resolution? Right, I think people are not thinking about what can you do with this device? What does this mean for your portal to education access opportunity.

I mean you can do a little experiment, turn your phone off for twenty four hours and see how hard things get. You know, when you want to communicate with somebody, If you needed to call a taxi, how are you doing that? If you wanted to just get information, Everything that you do is connected to the Internet, and so when it's inequitable, you can see how it can have a major impact on somebody's day to day life. We're not talking about, oh I can't get on Instagram. We're

And this is something that's changed over time because when we were in elementary school and middle school, internet access wasn't a huge part of school. Like there were the computers. I wanted to play May this Beacon, teach us typing. I wanted to play Oregon Trail, but that was just supplemental, you know what I mean. Now, having a computer setup,

During the pandemic, communities came together to increase access for those in need. Libraries, churches, small businesses, and emergency funding allowed some schools to access hotspots. But even with hotspots, there are still challenges, especially in rural communities.

The hotspots have to have internet access or some type of robust network to work. And there are still pockets digital deserts with that exist within rural communities where we're not able to bring the type of hot speed connectivity or broadband as we commonly define it. Listen, telecom company is not common for you with high speed internet if they've only served five hundred to three thousand residents, because at the end of the day, the Internet was built

But once you see on.

The highway that say Merge left, they actually pulled a few of those construction signs and they were able to put technology access up.

It's great that some communities were able to come up with makeshift solutions to improve internet access. But doctor Turner Lee shared that black and brown communities were often left out of these local efforts. Doctor Turner Lee is now working on a project to interview about twenty five hundred residents of the Deep South about their internet access generally and specifically during the pandemic.

Some of the early findings that we're getting is that people in the rural South, the Black, Latino Indigenous South, they went to hotels to get their access. And for me, that's a problem because what it suggests is that we have more work to do when it comes to deployment, but we also have more work in urban areas.

We have over one million units of public.

Housing here in the United States where K through twelve students lived, but yet we didn't have open Wi Fi access in much of our federally assisted housing here in the United States. So we had many missed opportunities to do the type of work to accelerate broadband adoption.

And I think now we're still struggling through.

That, even though we've had a two year lesson on the fact that we have disparate access among students and locations, particularly among the most vulnerable.

Hearing about how the digital divide is having the most impact on black and brown communities, Native communities and rural places and public housing. It's really sad, but it's also not surprising to see the intersection of systemic inequality and technology. The people who need Internet access the most are the ones facing the biggest barriers to access and are paying the price exactly.

And people that are growing up in the age of fiber don't understand that not all Internet is created equal. Baby. Do you remember dial up? When you had the phone line.

To use the Internet, and when somebody would call, it would knock you off the internet, or.

You could hear them talking the neighbors, sound and robotic coming through the computer. Absolutely, and that Internet was so slow.

Oh my gosh, everybody spoiled. Nowadays, you type something in the Internet, you know, point zero zero, one second Google tells you they got the results for you. Back then, you had to sit back, have a snack, go to the bathroom, and by the time you got back, maybe half the page had loaded, you know.

But we were also using way too much HTML back then. Slay movies behind your myspaceet.

Our black planet was it was lit. I had these green flames. It was it was very good. I could it all that myself. We were all little coders.

Man we shouldn't have given that up. But you know, if you think that that kind of Internet is no match for what we're doing these days, Like most people don't even have landlines. Now, imagine if you had to have a landline to get on the internet. I'm out, I think too fuck.

And when doctor Nicole Turner Lee mentions broadbands, she's talking about high speed internet that is always on. Not with me as a kid. We're talking about from back in the day. And the term broadband is an abbreviation for broad bandwidth. And this type of connection uses multiple data channels to transmit large amounts of information. And there are a bunch of different types of broadband setups like cable, fiber, wireless, satellite.

All of those things. That's the kind of Internet we need if we want everybody to be able to get on and do all of the activities.

When you're not connected to the internet, you don't know what's happening online. And as a result, and this has been reserved ed, Uber may not come to your neighborhood because the algorithm knows nothing about your community, and if it does, there's not enough of you that actually use this type of technology. For the algorithm to direct itself to your neighborhood. It's a search arge for being disconnected.

You are off the.

Grid, and this provides a different context, you know, for being off the grid. A lot of times people say, oh, I'm going to be off the grid. That's my choice. I want to keep things private, but not off the grid to the extent that you don't have access to the same services that could be convenient or helpful to your life.

Mm hmmmm hm. Some people they'll be like, oh, I don't have a smartphone because I like to be plugged into what's going on around me. And I'm like, yes, that is a privilege that you have to be able to do that. That is a privilege because what you all are also saying is that I can pick and choose when I will plug myself back in. So when you need to send an email, when you need to book a flight, when you need to do very basic things, you have that opportunity.

It's not that you have no choice, right. Doctor turner Lie says technology is like a two sided coin. On the one side, it helps us stay connected, and it's been leveraged for activism, climate change, and artificial intelligence helped with our COVID vaccine development. But she says there's also another more sinister side.

Then there are those of us that go online. We watch our movies, we buy our dresses, we look for really.

Cool hair for our braids. Hello, we do all that.

We get our packages at our door, our groceries delivered. Sometimes we even find love online.

Well, guess what.

All that stuff that you're doing is connected to your digital profile.

And we talked about this kind of data in Lavity five Don't Get Hacked with Christina Morillo. The more a company learns about your online behavior, the more there algorithm can predict future behavior. And Taylor, they're marketing to fit your profile for real. It seems like they know exactly what you want when you want it, yes, and this can lead to algorithm bias.

And this type of market stall balance has lent itself to digital surveillance. And why that's important for people to know is that we know that computers do not discriminate. They just don't wake up as hardware and say hey, I'm going to be racist today. The people who are behind the programming and execution and evaluation of these technologies. First and foremost lack the rich diversity of folks that are part of the broader population of these United States

It's really a vicious cycle of the same old discrimination being reproduced and reinforced in new technology. Now, the thing we have heard about and probably experience is that, you know, for people with darker skin, you're going to put your hand under the sink to get the automatic water. Sometimes it doesn't work. You got to show this side of

You might as well just say it ain't happening, right.

It feels intentionally helpful.

It feels not good, not useful, right.

And that's what we have to be really careful in terms of the evolution of these technologies and also what we believe about what people say on these platforms. You know, twenty sixteen, foreign operatives use technology to convince us not to vote, the greatest form of voter suppression ever experienced. But the problem we had nobody to tell and no recourse because his technologies are pretty much unregulated.

This is such a good point that I feel like it's so important to remember. It's like you're either digitally invisible and paying attacks on one end, or you're hyper visible and surveilled in paying attacks on the other.

You got it. Look, I ain't gonna lie.

I like it when I get marketed my black high heel shoes, or when I get my little recommendation to go check out my local consignment shop, but I don't like it, as Latanya Sweeney at Harvard suggests, when they can identify by my name La Kwan Lakeisha Jose that I'm a person of color, and therefore I get higher interest credit card offerings or more predatory services. That's the type of trauma that these systems rely on, and that's

Okay, very very true, very very real.

Let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk more about what people are doing to make the Internet a more accessible and equitable place.

We're back, and before we get into the episode, let's talk about what's coming up next week. Next week we're celebrating National Oyster Day and talking about oysters in aquaculture with Bill Walton. You won't want to miss this one.

Let's get back to the lab. We've been talking to doctor Nicole Turner Lee about the digital divide and algorithm bias and how it can further disenfranchise marginalized communities.

So we've talked about algorithm bias in previous labs, but the algorithm bias we were talking about then was the ability to return objective information, like based on things you've searched before, what Google or Duck Duck Go or whoever sends back to you. But we're thinking about algorithm bias

I always tell people I think it's two tracks. One is the technical track.

So we definitely need people who look like the lived experiences of the subject, mirror those experiences, understand them, have empathy for them, who know what it's like to be a black woman who changes your hair, and then can put that technical cadence into the creation of facial recognition technology that we use to open our phones, because if you're not in the right light, or you changed from

Remember when your phone didn't want to unlock the other day when you looked at.

It, Yep, it's because I changed my glasses. You know, I've got like thirteen pairs of glasses. Changed my glasses, said you're a stranger. Stranger danger, wouldn't open my phone, and it happened again. There was one time where I think, when I set up my facial recognition, I have my natural hair out, and so I think it recognizes that. So when I have braids or if I have any type of anything different, it won't recognize me.

That's wild.

The second track is giving those who developed the technology compliance frameworks.

What I mean by that, it's a wild West because people feel that they can break previously litigated and.

Settled civil rights laws.

When Facebook decided that it was okay in the case where they actually committed housing discrimination to check off the boxes of people that they wanted to market to. That was a violation of the Fair Housing Act. You cannot check people off. You check people in, but you cannot

In May of this year, the EOC that's the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, released guidance on employer use of algorithms and artificial intelligence and hiring processes.

The same thing with voice assistant technology. We're seeing legislation when it comes to eighty eight compliance or being able to have the appropriate understanding of people's accents that actually go into those technologies. So on the technical side and the policy side. They really have to work hand in hand.

And this just takes us back to our lab on linguistics with doctor Bah when we talked about linguistic profiling and discrimination based on the way someone speaks.

And I get to hear this kind of discrimination in technology about whose accent or whose way of speaking is recognized and is able to be translated because when you all call us, we have a service that translates your voicemail into text so we can read it. And Baby, my Southern folks, I can't tell what y'all are saying. Okay,

Same thing, because you know, we do transcripts for each episode so that the folks of the Death or Heart Offare community can still be a part of the Dope Labs community. When it's trying to transcribe the key and I's voices, it doesn't know who's who, which I find appalling because I am not from that level of South Okay.

You're welcome.

They're complimenting, and it doesn't know what we're saying. And this is supposed to be really advanced technology. You're supposed to just plug it in and it's supposed to just trans exactly.

There's a place for policy and legislation to come in and sort of prescribe different norms.

As you said, it's a wild West. But here's the problem.

We as a community have so many issues that what's happened is these technologies intersect with voting rights, they intersect with policing, they intersect with healthcare, they intersect with education, and they intersect even with government benefits.

In the state of Florida, they.

Use facial recognition technology for the verification of unemployment benefits. I just said, it don't work well on some folks. So there are thousands of people waiting for the unemployment while they're being evicted simply because they cannot be verified by the public sector use of that technology. So we're not just talking about technologies that are standalone. We're talking about embedded systems of oppression that come with costs that

There's more to it.

Your photo is being great for something else, and something else and something else. And by the time you get to these economic and social opportunities, people know more about.

You and your distinct variables than ever before.

All these aspects of life that we're talking about are so important to feeling like you can thrive in this world. We ask doctor turnerly if she had any advice for folks about how interact with the Internet in order to protect themselves in their online presence, and how we can overcome some of these biases that are completely out of our control.

First and foremost, this is not the European Union or other places where they have strict privacy legislation that provides some federally uniformed values when it comes to what companies can collect and not collect about you. You know, my grandmother told me they ain't nothing in this world that's free.

Baby.

There's a trade off when we get these services to a certain extent for free to get into the garden. You know, it comes with our reciprocity of information. Your ability to post a few photos on a social media network or set a text message more and more we're seeing just aggressive surveillance, both from the you know, policing perspective as well as the community perspective and now the private sector perspective. When it comes to that information.

My friend says this all the time. Say Zee, if something is free.

You're the product.

Exactly you on the show You're money old?

Yes? Are you on discuntrapped to a styrofoam traye? Okay, we're paying with our data.

The bottom line is people have to understand that these inequalities exist and that you're not giving away your data for free.

I'm gonna be honest.

I have a fifteen year old.

I don't know half of the stuff that she's on because I'm not up on discord and all these other things that she'd be doing. I'm like, what are you doing? I don't know, But guess what, I need to educate myself on those things because when she shows up mything or she's involved in an inappropriate conversation, I got to know what that conversation is. So parents, we got to step up our game. Okay, we have to get on the ball about how these technologies work.

There's a lot of new technologies and internet services popping up all the time. Remember a few years ago before TikTok blew up.

I barely remember before TikTok. It feels like it's always around. BT is gonna be the new thing.

Before TikTok and after TikTok things move fast. But it's still important to stay educated on how these companies are mining and using your data. Don't just accept all the cookies when you get to a new website, because your digital profile stays with you.

And that's wild to think we're just accumulating all these I imagine. I know they're not chocolate chip cookies, but just imagine a long sail of every cookie you've ever accepted, just following you around as you browse on the internet. You know, the way I'm burning through sites, Okay, the way I'm typing in www dot into my browser. What does that mean for the future?

You know?

How will I be able to maintain any shred of privacy? We asked doctor Turnerley what her vision for the digital future looks like and what she's excited about.

We need to.

Move people from just being consumers of the technology. The greatest breakthrough of innovation has been the ability of people with a great ideas and not necessarily degrees to create new ideas that can run off of internet networks. There is a stage of technology that has lowered the barrier so that you don't have to just be in Silicon Valley. You can be in Silicon Alley getting stuff done. You

The train has left the station.

Embrace it, but don't be just consumers of it. Be folks that can look at that technology and take that idea you sat on for twenty thirty forty years and make it happen because you could do it with an Internet connection, some broadband web at home, and a hotel at your school stoop. And that's what I think is so wonderful, because I know if we write the right script around this, we'll get more people on the production side than on the consumption side.

That's such an important point as we think about access to technology and the type of financial mobility and social mobility that leveraging these networks provides. If you don't have access to the network. You don't even know how to move around on it. It's going to be very hard to think of ways to create new systems and the next wave of technology. And so not only are they missing out on being consumers, it increases the barrier to being a producer in the future.

We have to understand that the technology has come and it's here to stay. We want everybody in this country to have first class digital citizenship. That means we have to demand digital justice. Means that we have to have equitable deployment. It means that we have to have the devices. This is a civil right, all right, y'all.

It's tign for one thing.

What's our one thing this week? Tt our one.

Thing this week? We have a joint one thing. It is doctoring a cold turner Lee's book. It's called Digitally Invisible. So head over to her website. The link is in the show notes to find out where you can get it.

Okay, that's it for Lab seventy two. What is your think? Did this lab help you realize that it's deeper than just access to social media? Call us at two zero two five, six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought or give us an idea for a lab you think we should do this semester. That's two zero two five six seven seven zero.

Two eight, And don't forget that there is so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap keep for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter. Check it out at Dope Labs Podcast special thanks to today's guest expert, doctor Nicole Turner Lee.

You can find her on Twitter at Dr Turner Lee and learn more about her work at www dot d r n I c O. L Speaks dot com. That's doctor Nicole Speaks dot com.

And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Blab Podcast.

TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore T s.

H O and you can find Zakiya at z said So. Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Ownmedia Group.

Our producers are Jenny Radlimask and Lydia Smith of Wave Runner Studios.

Editing and sound design by Rob Smerciak.

Mixing by Hannes Brown.

Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Creative producers Miguel Contreras and Grace Delia. Special thanks to Shirley Ramos, Jess Borison, yasmine A Fifi, Kamu, Elolia, Till krat Key and Brian Marquis, Executive producers from Mega Own Media Group, all Right T T Show, Dia and Zekiah Wattley