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Watching last night’s “Digital Democracy: Who Decides What’s Next?” on PBS, I ran into a quote by the President and CEO of Knight Foundation.  I eventually found it on their website:

We believe that if you’re not digital, you’re a second-class citizen. You’re second-class in access to information and second class economically and even socially. In a country where even entry-level job applications must be made online, denial of digital access equals denial of opportunity.

The forum/show was about the changing face of journalism and on how people get the news.   I don’t remember the last time I bought a newspaper.   I get my news from watching CNN or BBC, and mostly, from independent sources on the Internet.   My Internet life, and I call it “Life”, is highly contextualized and coalesced.   I am plugged in 24/7, without any sense of guilt or withdrawal.  It’s a lifestyle now.  I wake up, make coffee, make breakfast, whilst surfing the net for news.   My work is also the intersection of education and technology.   I feel that participatory democracy begins here, in bytes.   That said, I also recognize the foundational problems for those who was referred to last night as the digital age’s second class citizens.

The Digitally Marginalized

The world moves very fast, nary a blink about the ones who are left behind.  For centuries, the have-nots give the haves momentary guilt and for the most part, the inclination to simply move on.   Life is the becoming of Darwin’s survival of the fittest.   If you are poor, it must be your fault, or at least your gene’s.  

The digital age has opened the pathways to all walks of life.   We are constantly watching people far away.  When the recent earthquake hit Haiti, there was a barrage of images in the media, especially on the Internet.  We are moving very close to the real lives of those who suffer, the ones who are left behind.   We have become a society of spectators.   Some of us do extend a hand, some simply look away.  

The Information Superhighway Pushcart

I remember growing up in Manila without a Television.   My father had decided to buy us a bookshelf of Encyclopedia, as TV was portrayed as the bane of Filipino existence.  That didn’t stop me, as a boy, from watching TV from outside the window of our neighbor’s house.   I was always left out of conversations, especially as my young peers discussed the shows they had seen the night before.   In my private school, it was totally unimaginable that someone would not have a TV at home. 

What my neighbors didn’t know was how much letting me watch their TV meant to my young life.   As an educator in marginalized communities, I see the disempowerment of adult learners who have heard of the Internet, but have no idea what it means.   They talk amongs themselves on what it can do and what they can find there.   Some of the young women in my class thought it would be a good way to find a husband.   I’ve had Chinese students who wanted to access newspapers from their homelands.   Yet, for many of them, the Internet is still being delivered on a pushcart, while the rest of us are already speeding along the concrete superhighway. 

I don’t think my students are any different from me, as I wake up in the morning, press the On Button of my laptop, and idle to the kitchen to prepare my breakfast.    I see their lives taking similar shapes in the future, with Internet technology as a career pathway and a multipurpose room to address their many barriers to better opportunities.  

Technology these days has so many substructures.   The network of devices is appaling and confusing.  I gave my mother an Ipod for Christmas and realized she didn’t know how to download music from Itunes.   I gave her my laptop, but then she has yet to make the connection between the Ipod and her laptop.   Life is not so simple anymore.   The complexity of the Information Superhighway pushes many people to second, third classes of citizenry.   But I do believe, with more education, anyone can learn and access information.   It was such tenacity to learn that my Chinese students in Brooklyn found their Chinese newspapers on-line.   From there, they would ask, what else can this do?

Related Reading: F.C.C. Takes a Close Look at the Unwired (NYTimes)

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These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power…that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. – Franklyn D. Roosevelt

One of my favorite books of recent years is The Bottom Billion by the economist  Paul Collier.    In the book, Collier zeroes in on fifty failing states in the country and “analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that snare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance.”  This may not sound familiar to this generation of middle class Americans.    Most of us are so far off from the greatest generation of World War II that we don’t understand any longer what economic strategies built this country that guaranteed our absence in the world’s failed states.  

Having worked in the lowest rung of the economic ladder in the U.S., I see a lot of the same problems operating in the inability of the American poor to improve their lot, and advance.   Unfortunately, many of these people caught in the poverty traps are the traditional marginalized populations: blacks, urban poor, single mothers, and immigrants.    When big government decides to cut costs, they target social services  for radical budgetary slashes.   Yet, at what cost?  Education is getting worse, and jails are getting bigger, homelessness is invading the clean suburbs.   And we don’t make the connections readily.   The disenfranchised remain disposable.   As long as they are kept there.  (There where?)

Poverty in Numbers

The Bottom is the biggest part of the pyramid.    If history fails to remind us, we simply have to look at its shape to understand how much power there is in numbers.   If that is not scary enough, the bottom is now becoming a big hole where many in the middle class are slowly slipping into.   The media is full of personal stories about people losing their homes and their jobs and now living in tent communities (see this recent New York Times article about recent evictions in poor communities).   There are lines to food drives of people who had never thought they would end up there.    Economic recovery gets extended every month.   The leaders of this country are in some battle over rhetoric on how to save the American dream.  

We are faced with a huge challenge in America as the numbers at the bottom of the pyramid grows.   The middle class is slipping into the cracks.  Government is scrambling for solutions.   Big businesses are big businesses as usual.   CEOs are giving themselves huge severance packages for failing to run their companies.   America is returning to its pre-World War II shape, excavating deep divisions similar to the civil war era’s.  In all these goings-on in politics and the economy, the poor suffer most. 

Hand-outs

What many of us learned about Haiti is the absence of infrastructure for international aid.   Public outcry generated an an influx of millions for recovery and aid, with no organized system to distribute it.   We found out later that Haiti was a home base for thousands of international aid agencies for years, yet there was no organized system of cooperation and collaboration.  This is hardly old news, as Collier’s in his book, The Bottom Billion would find the same oppressive song sung in the other failed states.  

For many of us, the idea of helping poor people is likened to giving a dollar to a beggar on the subway.  It is a random act of giving.  There is no introspection of where that money would go.  We hope that the beggar get to eat, that the dollar travels far.  I asked myself the same questions during the four years I worked in the welfare system.   Once I was sucked into the system, was I helping to eradicate poverty or was I promoting it?  Was I stuffing the cushion of those who are receiving hand-outs with feathers so they don’t hit the pavement as hard?   Where does generosity of spirit cross the line of true action?

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{ We Speak America } will eventually be an internet-based workplace, vocational, and language-based portal for low-wage workers and immigrants.    I imagine an internet school that encompasses the four basic skills:  Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking.    The big chunk of work is getting to that place.    When I created the business plan for the organization, I recognize the enormous amount of research that I need to do in order to make this happen.   I also recognized the anti-immigrant climate in the U.S. that has resulted from the economic downturn.   In short, strategizing is key in creating the (dot) com product of the organization. 

I am calling the (dot) org a Think-tank; indeed, it is a thinking blog.    I am making it public to also sense the climate of support that may be available out there for this kind of effort.  My target population, the bottom of the pyramid, rarely gets any attention from the echelon of decision makers, but is always the first to pay when the economy turns topsy-turvy.   I consider myself as someone who got out of the bottom.  I grew up knowing that as long as I work hard enough, I can climb the pyramid.   In many ways, this is a personal voyage for me, a time for reaching out, and bringing others along to make a difference in the lives of those in the margins.  

I have opened the comment box, please feel free to write your thoughts.   Constructively, of course.   I respect your mind as I wish that you respect mine.    I am making my thoughts public to gather support from think-alikes out there who also believe in this effort.    As I construct this organization, I want to make sure that the different components are effectively put in place.    Obviously, there is much to gain in empowering the millions of people in this country who are trapped in the revolving doors of unemployment due to lack of education, training, and language skills.   I don’ t have to mention that this country is built on the backs of the immigrants who have come here.   Nothing has changed.

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Having visualized this organization for the past few years and having created a business plan around it at Harvard, I can see what it looks like at the end of this voyage.   Just like for many people who attempt to create organizations and enterprises, for me, the voyage itself is still a blur.  

Come 2010.  I enter a new era in life.   I have behind me over twelve years of experience in Adult Education, a graduate degree from a premium university, and a passion for a population that’s been highly ignored and neglected in American society: low-wage workers and low-skilled immigrants.   I have many role models in the arena of social entrepreneurship, and I have met many more during my term as a fellow in social entrepreneurship.   THey have many things in common, but one stood as the backbone of action against a constant barrage of discouraging forces:  PASSION.

The need to believe.  The need to take action.  The need to take that dream into something meaningful and life-changing.  The need to create and innovate.

So this year is the beginning of something new for me.   I will take my dream– {We Speak America} — to the next level.  Small steps.  Big dreams.

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