Saturday, July 31, 2004

Digital Divide

A number of years ago in college, I wrote an essay about the role of technology exclusion in society. This internetworking thing was only really starting to get going and we had just changed over the web browsers at the college from Mosiac to Netscape, I used to surf the web in 16 shades of grey available on my battered PowerBook 165, when I jacked into the JANET network.

Why am I rambling about a geriatric computer and the 'net before Google? Well, I used the web to research my essay and came across an article on the Washington Post about the 'cash ghetto', increasingly if you had to deal in cash you were on the margins of society. An article in the Arizona Daily Star, which my RSS feed aggregator picked up talked about the pervasive nature of Visa and MasterCard where cash was once king reminded me of the college essay. Interesting reading check it out.