As the World Wide Web turns 30 years old, a whole slew of articles and books have emerged to analyze what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost through the internet.
The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. Knowledge was no longer quarantined in libraries or in families that could afford the entire A-Z Encyclopedia Britannica set. It wasn’t exclusively for people in First World countries.
The ability to get online meant everyone had access to the same information: free encyclopedias like Wikipedia; free digital books through Google; free marketplaces like Craigslist and eBay. Kahn Academy and Coursera offered high-quality, free instruction. People could network and find jobs through sites like LinkedIn and Monster.com.
If anyone could book their own travel, look up their own information and even get a college degree without stepping outside the house, barriers between rich and poor, educated and uneducated would loosen and fall away like shackles.
While there is some evidence, especially in developing countries, that technology can pull people out of poverty, in the United States, the knowledge gap has only widened. Why is this so?
For one, while it may seem that everyone has a smartphone, broadband continues to be an exclusive right for those in urban areas. Lack of broadband acts then like a time-warp in more rural areas. According to Katie Peek of The New York Times, “As of 2018, 40 percent of rural America still lacks broadband.”
As the internet continually tries to monetize its resources, there is talk that in the future people will experience two different internets, one for those who can afford it, and one for those who can’t.
Writes Kevin Roose in a piece for The New York Times: “The image of the internet as an egalitarian free-for-all — a place where no amount of money could buy you a superior experience, and where no lack of money could condemn you to an inferior one — persisted for years. Unlike the rest of consumer culture, the internet seemed immune to class division. Bill Gates used the same apps, visited the same websites and logged into the same social networks as the guy who mowed Bill Gates’s lawn — at least in theory, anyway.”
This has changed with the rise of paywalls and subscriptions. If you’ve maxed out your 10 free articles per month on The New York Times, you either need to pay up or wait until the new month rolls around. Quality content comes with a price affixed. Free content, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, comes at its own price, chiefly the mining of our searches, photos and private exchanges for advertising purposes. Very little on the internet is actually free, no strings attached.
As Roose writes, this tale of two internets is only going to increase.
“Today’s internet is full of premium subscriptions, walled gardens and virtual V.I.P. rooms, all of which promise a cleaner, more pleasant experience than their free counterparts … Hundreds of millions of people shell out for Netflix accounts, Patreon podcasts, Twitch streams, Spotify and news subscriptions. The average American spent more than $1,300 on digital media last year.”
The third reason that the internet has not been a great equalizer is simply this: knowledge builds upon knowledge. In thinking about the role of the internet in our family’s life, I started looking deeply at how we’ve cultivated a certain internet culture in our home.
For example, we are constantly training our children to take advantage of the internet in productive ways. We point our children toward interesting podcasts. We link them to stories from reputable news outlets. Our kids have taken advantage of Kahn Academy videos and open courses like Coursera and MIT OpenCourseWare.
We have our fair share of YouTube and Netflix in our house, make no mistake. But we are trying to teach our children that the internet is a tool for learning. We have a mantra that we beat into our children constantly, to be creators and not consumers. We have the benefit of living and working in the knowledge community, and we harness the internet to that end.
The same type of parent who encourages their kids to watch Ted Talks over slime videos on YouTube is the same type of parent who would have flipped off the TV and handed their kids a book just a generation ago.
Without knowledgeable and educated supervision to, in essence, curate the internet for the next generation, most children and teens fall prey to the dumbing-down culture available online: makeup tutorials, bloopers and unboxing videos.
So who wins the internet? In essence, it’s those with fast-as-lightning access who know when to turn it on, and for what purpose, and when to turn it off. The front-runners of the next generation will be those who can afford to sift through the miasma of content and pluck out the jewels, those who can mine for quality information while being extremely cautious about the data mining happening to them.
Tiffany Gee Lewis is a freelance journalist and children’s book author. Based in the Pacific Northwest, she and her family are on a year-long sabbatical in Oxford, England.