But, I don't think that articulation is the issue, ACCESS is. I once read
an article that talked about poor kids coming to school with ever having
seen a book ... the teacher had to help them master the paradigm of "book"
...opening the cover from right to left, turning each page individually,
text at the bottom ... in addition to teaching the alphabet, phonics,
spelling, etc..
Access to the net is <currently> orders of magnitude more complex then
access to books. When I tried to teach my father to use Word he kept
picking the mouse up and putting it down instead of sliding it. I showed
him how the mouse ball moved the rollers and how that mapped onto horizontal
and vertical movement on the screen .... but he WANTED to pick the mouse up
... part of the frustration he experienced using the computer was that some
things he wanted to do <like pick the mouse up> screwed up the whole
computer interface paradigm. The frustration level for a child whose been
conditioned for attention deficit syndrome will be almost insurmountable.
The memes I see growing from this are class resentments and rationalizations
on par with those between the races in the pre-civil rights south. I
encourage you to look for instances of "blaming the victim" type thinking in
sophisticated cyber media ... The first instance I can think of for this is
when AOL attached to the web and the various groups were full of "BIF THE
RAD HAKER" type parodies.
As the web becomes more entrenched in society the marginal social cost of
bringing new people online will become higher even as economic barriers
become lower. To refer back to my latest favorite book ... "The Corner" ...
When a kid has the choice between pulling down $100 a day selling crack or
going to school to learn to be assistant manager at Mc Donalds the school
route seems pretty lame. Note that the two paths don't have to be
exclusive, but the travelers on the paths make them that way. Similarly,
"netizens" will be painted as nerds ... you can already see pretty people on
TV putting on white lab coats, glasses, and pocket protectors before sitting
down to their keyboard ... and "non-netizens" will be painted as clods ...
ala "Ernest Goes On Line".
----------