The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy

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dc.contributor.advisorFarman, Jasonen_US
dc.contributor.authorGreene, Daniel Marcusen_US
dc.contributor.departmentAmerican Studiesen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2016-09-08T05:32:48Z
dc.date.available2016-09-08T05:32:48Z
dc.date.issued2016en_US
dc.description.abstractIn 2013, a series of posters began appearing in Washington, DC’s Metro system. Each declared “The internet: Your future depends on it” next to a photo of a middle-aged black Washingtonian, and an advertisement for the municipal government’s digital training resources. This hopeful discourse is familiar but where exactly does it come from? And how are our public institutions reorganized to approach the problem of poverty as a problem of technology? The Clinton administration’s ‘digital divide’ policy program popularized this hopeful discourse about personal computing powering social mobility, positioned internet startups as the ‘right’ side of the divide, and charged institutions of social reproduction such as schools and libraries with closing the gap and upgrading themselves in the image of internet startups. After introducing the development regime that builds this idea into the urban landscape through what I call the ‘political economy of hope’, and tracing the origin of the digital divide frame, this dissertation draws on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in startups, schools, and libraries to explore how this hope is reproduced in daily life, becoming the common sense that drives our understanding of and interaction with economic inequality and reproduces that inequality in turn. I show that the hope in personal computing to power social mobility becomes a method of securing legitimacy and resources for both white émigré technologists and institutions of social reproduction struggling to understand and manage the persistent poverty of the information economy. I track the movement of this common sense between institutions, showing how the political economy of hope transforms them as part of a larger development project. This dissertation models a new, relational direction for digital divide research that grounds the politics of economic inequality with an empirical focus on technologies of poverty management. It demands a conceptual shift that sees the digital divide not as a bug within the information economy, but a feature of it.en_US
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/M2JV4R
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/18692
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledAmerican studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolleddigital divideen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledinequalityen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledinstitutionsen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledinternet accessen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledmedia and technology studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledpovertyen_US
dc.titleThe Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economyen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

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