Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass

by Nicol Turner Lee

Billions of people around the world lack internet access. No one cared until the whole world had to go online.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that the United States would close the digital divide under his leadership. However, the divide still affects people and communities across the country. The complex and persistent reality is that millions of residents live in digital deserts, and many more face disproportionate difficulties when it comes to getting and staying online, especially people of color, seniors, rural residents, and farmers in remote areas.
Economic and health disparities are worsening in rural communities without available internet access. Students living in urban digital deserts with little technology exposure are ill prepared to compete for emerging occupations. Even seniors struggle to navigate the aging process without access to online information and remote care.
In this book, Nicol Turner Lee, a leading expert on the American digital divide, uses personal stories from individuals around the country to show how the emerging digital underclass is navigating the spiraling online economy, while sharing their joys and hopes for an equitable and just future.
Turner Lee argues that achieving digital equity is crucial for the future of America’s global competitiveness and requires radical responses to offset the unintended consequences of increasing digitization. In the end, Digitally Invisible proposes a pathway to more equitable access to existing and emerging technologies, while encouraging readers to weigh in on this shared goal.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 2024

Reviews

[lily murakami ng]

got to read this book and hear dr. turner lee tell us the stories herself, a privilege!

my biggest reflection on the digital divide is how flashy new technologies like ai capture the attention too often, and we must not forget about digital redlining or we risk leaving millions of people behind. as things continually move online (critical services like healthcare or government benefits) we must ensure everyone is able to access them, or we will render them digitally invisible. focus on the sociotechnical always!

[Vincent Cole]

Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating a New Underclass by Nicol Turner is a book that focuses on the divide of internet access among groups, and is largely based on economical standing. Nicol Turner, with a PHD from Northwestern, started her work documenting and researching how wealth inequality affects technology access in 2017, and when the covid lockdown went into effect, it showed this disparity clearer than ever. This book is well written and easy to read, while addressing complex topics. In her book, she talks about how not having internet access leads to poor health and stagnation of wealth. She studied how, with the lockdown, people working from home skyrocketed, and people without a home computer were left in the lurch. This resulted in a lot of people not being able to work, and then not being able to find a job during the lockdown. This also affected a lot of children, specifically for school during covid. Without an electronic way to do homework, which by far the majority of schools have and did during covid, children fell behind, While many schools now provide Ipads or computers, they largely do not supply internet. This book shows that poverty is cyclical, with its greatest example being about the internet. With no internet, you cannot learn computer skills, which are very often needed for any kind of higher paid work, or you have a much harder time with school, which leads to the same thing. As in person options dwindle, and telehealth appointments become more popular for doctors to be able to do easy visits, access to the internet becomes more important. Something that can help combat this growing divide is libraries- libraries provide a public space to use computers and cheap printing, they have resources for school help and can be places for community and mutual aid. Nicol Turner also says that this wealth and internet disparity is especially prevalent for older people, as they already are less likely to have internet knowledge. She talks about how the Biden administration vowed to help the people with this issue, but that promise was largely forgotten. A well written book by a qualified and informed person, that manages to be both informative and a good read.

[READER VIEWS · Rating 4 out of 5]

The internet has rewritten everything. In the old days, young students learned through books and classes led by living teachers. Now, websites can teach credibly and effectively, students can join seminars distant in time and space, and an entire generation has grown up with no experience of life before the web. Surely, a time of rapid riches has arrived.

But not for everyone. Nicol Turner Lee takes us on a tour of those parts of America still struggling to connect with the internet, places where the infrastructure and politics will falter before the challenge of bringing high-speed access to human users.

Nicol Turner Lee is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution and the founder of the AI Equity Lab. No doubt she knows what she’s talking about. As her book tells, she began as a volunteer computer assistant in a housing project, moved up through volunteer and paid positions and eventually helped establish more than 500 public access computers around Chicago where she lived before moving to Washington.

She knows intimately the problems associated with connecting lesser advantaged people to the information superhighway. Likening the modern build-out of high-speed internet infrastructure to FDR’s Rural Electrification project of the 1930s, “Digitally Invisible”by Nicole Turner Lee is a field guide to the places untouched by the modern enlightenment, the author’s effort to understand it all, and her suggestions for progress.

The book dwells long on the economic disparities between higher and lower socioeconomic groups. Ms. Lee amply demonstrates how these gaps exacerbate our nation’s ramp-up to technological flourishing. The digital divide, she says, is a particularly troublesome hitch, as more and more of life’s business goes online. This deficit of online access leads to greater deficits elsewhere.

Homework, for example. Without online access, students often can’t do homework, and fail to develop their skills, and thus fall further behind in the great march toward prosperity. And because the digital divide requires money to fix, also a certain amount of political motivation, it seems to pose a special problem demanding national attention.

For all this, though, Ms. Lee is cautiously optimistic. We may well close the digital divide, she says, but it will not change “the trajectory of wealth and equity among the invisible.” Her book is a careful exploration of the digital divide in all its annoyance and nuance. It deserves to be read.

Leave A Comment

[Matthew Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

U.S. counties with the worst broadband access also have some of the worst healthcare outcomes characterized by the weakest healthcare systems, highest barriers to health access, and highest levels of social vulnerability. Broadband remains our country’s most inequitable infrastructure in both urban and rural communities. Dr. Turner Lee's book brings these realities home with personal interviews with people who are "digitally disconnected" across the country and what it means for their health, wealth and lives. Nicol has spent her life working to close the digital divide, and this book weaves policy, interview and biography together in ways that are illuminating, readable, and motivating that we must as a nation do better. Highly recommended!

[Ireland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given the swing in the political landscape a lot in this book now is outdated (BEAD, NTIA’s digital equity grants, USF, etc), but Dr. Nicol Turner Lee’s goals for a more equitable and fully connected future still ring true. Really interesting to read the different individual stories in this book and hear about the ways people are directly impacted by the lack of access to broadband and internet. Some really interesting ideas on a path forward. Excited to hear more about her work.

[Ken Rogerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written and researched book. The policy analysis couple with the interviews of real people who are feeling the effects of the digital divide should make want to assure that no one is left out of benefiting from the positive impact of technology.

[NickiBReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok I read like 80% and it’s nonfiction AND I did book club for it at work. Interesting book, very impressive author, and conceptually/politically this is cool, but as a book I found it a bit dense!

SG 2.5 rounded up