Digital Divides Project
Beginning the idea of creating the Sakura star, I was hoping that my previous experience with the art of origami would help me create this object. While in the actual construction, it helped me very little. I understood some of the basics that were being proposed, and remembered how to create a box and balloon, but both, had no idea where to start nor how to go about the actual steps to create the object.
As someone who grew up during the early stages of popular “technology”, I found that I did have a certain skill set that I have found is lacking in many of the young people entangled in today’s popular culture. As a young grade schooler, I had to do my research by actually going to the library and looking books that I needed. So since I was unsure about how to proceed, I went to the local library to find any books that would help me. I did end up finding a few books that were able to help me, but nothing I could find was exactly the same as the image and I had to both slightly combine different elements within similar pieces, as well as choose one that was fairly similar to the original in order to create the piece. Once I had created something, I then went through digitally to figure out how my creation and workflow compared to a set of instructions for the specific origami that was chosen, and the instruction video was very confusing and unhelpful and I felt that sometimes the digital pathway may not always be the best way to go about the information that you might choose to look for.
From this assignment, as well as my work studying digital labor under Dr. Marie Hicks, I have definitely seen how important the advancements of the digital technology that we have created really is. We have continually grown accustomed and attached to the ease of gathering information from a larger source that has any and all the answers that we could be looking for, rather than actually having to explore different trees of research outside of what is on hand and plan for having to work around other peoples and businesses time. As we have looked at in the readings (Rojas et al., 2012) and in class, there is a large divide between the minority and poorer communities in their acquisition and support of any of the common digital technologies in more affluent communities. This digital divide only supports the difficulties found by the young of the minority groups and the multiple more hoops that they must jump through to even get to the same level as other people, let alone get to a successful footing. When students are deprived of the same tools, there is a visible lack of performance and whether we agree to it or not, many times minority and poor communities tend to get the least amount of help, which helps to support the negative ideas about the communities as well as the support systems that the younger generations have in order to become successful adults.
