Talk:The Internet and Societal Inequity

Title

I'll suggest: The Internet and the Offline World? Is this uncomfortably dichotomizing? I think it can nicely incorporate both social inequity and environmental impacts of online actions. --G 02:12, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I like that title as it implies a sharp dichotomy between the two. When we speak of the Internet, although we rarely do so precisely, we often think of a reified location, a sort of Internet-as-place. Specifically we often think of it as "cyberspace" -- in many ways not of this world or at least not bound by many of the constraints of this world. I'm hesitant to continue that distinction. Some of the more recent literature on these issues focuses on how we've imported much of our prejudices and constraints into the social fabric of the Internet and that there isn't as sharp a divide as we thought. Turns out Second Life is even more racist and sexist than this one. These are topics I think would be interesting and playing off the tension between the Internet and the Offline World could be fun; let's not assume a conclusion here.

Anyway, that's a long way to say that I'd prefer the title "The Internet and Inequity." I think the word societal is misleading if we're going to include OLPC and some of the digital divide issues, as well as environmental concerns. The social aspects often include issues of gender, sexual identity, ageism, race, and education, which might be more interesting to focus on, but subsuming the environmental and developmental elements under the aegis seems overly broad to me. Anytime you bring up the word inequity, you instantly become the "cold stream" of the curriculum, but it might be worth embracing. It might be nice to have a break from technophilia. --Megerman 06:13, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

feb 2 feedback

• would like a concrete example
• what is inequity? by what criteria would we define it?