This is more or less why I don’t spend a ton of time at work worrying about the digital divide. It’s tempting to tell yourself that the reason politically marginalized populations don’t avail themselves of their representatives’ attention is that they lack access to the necessary technologies. If only you could write your senator through an SMS interface instead of needing an expensive, Javascript-capable smartphone!
But of course this is nonsense. To a first approximation every American can afford to use the telephone and the post office. And in urban and suburban areas, at least, libraries make computers widely available. What marginalized people lack is time, attention and education. Maybe they don’t have a cellular data plan either, but first things first. Besides, to the extent that technology access is a real problem, falling electronics prices are likely to do much more to address the issue than even the most conscientiously designed interfaces (on this score, the news on smartphone penetration is very encouraging).
Still, just because projects that concentrate on technological deficits are focusing on a small and relatively unimportant part of a dauntingly large problem doesn’t mean that such efforts aren’t laudable. There’s always room for making a difference at the margin. And there’s something to be said for principle. Designing our work to be inclusive and truly democratic is important — sometimes more important than maintaining a depressingly realistic appraisal of our chances for coding our way to egalitarianism.
(I should probably add that I think creating accessible interfaces for politically engaged populations that have difficulty using technology — the disabled, seniors, etc — is a very different endeavor from the broader/gloomier digital divide issue)