Promotional Information

By presenting the experiences of a population of predominately working-class women whose perspectives are largely ignored in the debates about the impact of technology on our world, Digital Dead End argues that equity-based responses to the 'digital divide' are often misguided themselves. Any person who is working for social justice in the world of technology would benefit from reading this book. -- Jane Margolis, Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and author, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing Eubanks offers a path-breaking work that challenges the redistributive paradigm associated with many digital divide initiatives. She gets at the heart of how technology contributes to social stratification and how technological designs that are attentive to issues of social relations and power are necessary to enable and empower economically challenged groups. This is a book that all those caught up in digital advocacy should read, in order to better understand the socio-technical dynamics in which they operate. -- Atsushi Akera, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute If we're to move forward as a society we'll need to abandon many of the platitudes and utopian musings that characterize computerization and actually start doing the work that needs doing. This is what Virginia Eubanks lays out in Digital Dead End. Is she the Jane Addams of the digital age? -- Douglas Schuler, author of Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution

About the Author

Virginia Eubanks is the cofounder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots anti-poverty and welfare rights organization, and is Associate Professor in the Department of Women's Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Reviews

A great backgrounder on technology-enhanced hardship...this will appeal to the technological and sociological minded alike.—Library Journal

Eubanks offers a critical and constructive agenda for the design of an information society where people matter.—Leslie Regan Shade, Journal of Information Policy

Highly recommended.—Y Tao, Choice