internetweekMar 195 min read
#TBT: Action on Access - New York City’s Diverse Approaches to Bridge the Digital Divide
With the recent decision on Net Neutrality in place, it’s exciting to look back at the Internet Week 2014 panel on Action on Access discuss the importance of equal access to Internet, especially in an area like New York City.
Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Deputy Director of US Programs at Open Society’s Foundation, as moderator, began the conversation by asking the panelists to set the context for the audience of what exactly is at stake when they discuss the issue of ‘more universal access.’ She invited Andrew Rasiej, Founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, to begin the conversation:
Information is power. That is a cliche, but it is still true. Access to the Internet and access to broadband provides a currency of information that can help solve problems and bridge the economic, social and cultural divides between the haves and have nots. New York, and the country in general, has been woefully behind in understanding that broadband is as important to the success of our country — it’s education, it’s economics, it’s environmental health — as water and electricity were in the industrial age.
Rasiej continued by revealing the issues for gaining more access somewhere in New York in comparison to more remote areas.
In some ways, New York actually has it worse than other parts of the city because this was one of the cities that was very successful in the 20th century and it has an infrastructure that’s already set in place. It’s a lot easier to run fiber in a trench, or an open field in Iowa than it is to run fiber in the streets of New York, so it gets really hard sometimes to try to figure out how you can get this technology to be distributed equally. There’s other problems too: There are political problems, in that there are companies, like cable industries, that have built systems that make it very, very hard for others to compete. In New York, very few people have one choice for a broadband provider but if you were to go a city like Seoul in South Korea or to Singapore, people would be able to choose between 5 to 6 providers who would provide not only faster service, but at a 1/5th of the cost.
New York has a real great challenge now but it also has a mayor who has actually made broadband distribution at an equitable level a major policy priority and there’s a lot that New York can do to bridge that, to make that happen. The key thing to remember is that it’s only going to happen through a coalition of people working together — it’s not going to happen because of a law that gets passed tomorrow or because of some new technology that comes out tomorrow. This is a big problem that is going to require everyone’s help to try and solve.
Schlesinger moved to panelist Bruce Lincoln, Executive Producer of Silicon Harlem and Executive Director of Silicon Harlem Meetup, to talk more on his experiences and what he believes it would mean to have more broadband access throughout New York.
Silicon Harlem is a social enterprise that focuses on four areas that are very important to how we platform ourselves in the 21st century. The first one, which is integral, is the gigabit infrastructure. If you've seen what’s happening in Chattanooga, Tennessee or in Lafayette, Louisiana or even in Kansas City with Google Fiber, inputting in that kind of infrastructure gives rise to all sorts of opportunities and so we want to make sure that Harlem, rather than being the community that gets it last, gets it first and then leads because of its unique cultural characteristics and tied into that is the idea that in deploying this next generation is that we use that to activate an innovation economy in Harlem.
That would include not simply the growth of technology companies which is what Silicon Harlem is supporting but as well, an increase in STEM literacy and STEM entrepreneurship and in support of that we can develop things such as The Leadership Academy where we can look at Afro-Latino youth who are the highest when the index is in the use of multimedia, social media with the adaption of smartphones and make them the producer of these technologies. So they learn not only how to develop the content, they learn how to build businesses. So what you’re looking at is this idea now of technology-driven economic development. So it’s not simply the tech startups, it’s the “Mom and Pop” store.
Lincoln illustrated how working together created changes and how, if it continues, equal access is inevitable.
One of the things to keep in mind is, though in some respects we lag in Harlem, in some respects we are advanced. So we actually have carbon neutral buildings that are smart and green. They’re smart and green because we were able to put Fiber in those buildings that’s called the 6th utility. It’s not as if there aren't those kind of models, what has to happen is the critical take off. We have to bring together all the key public and private parties who then can make this happen and create this kind of ubiquitous access.
Schlesinger asked how Lincoln sees the benefits that Fiber will bring to these “Mom and Pop” shops.
It wouldn't be the “Mom and Pop” stores, it would be the Mom and Pop stores that existed historically who now, let’s say, can’t exist within where the current rents are. If they’re basically organized as an online cooperative, then all of the sudden you can use the Internet to not simply deal with the growth of the changing demographic or tourism but you have a global audience. That’s why it’s so important.
Rasiej quickly commented on the changing phrase “Mom and Pop”:
The notion of what the “Mom and Pop” is changing. So “Mom and Pop,” instead of being a store front, could be a woman or a man who is a graphic artist who is now selling their services on a global basis. Someone who uses Etsy as a platform because they make things and they are able to reach markets now through the Internet.
