From 2003: The Wetware of the Digital Divide: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES
A quarter-century ago back in the High Weblogosphere Summer, I thought the big story was that some of us—those with NYRB subscriptions, fast T‑1 lines, and a taste for “unassigned surfing”—were going to weaponize the internet for learning much faster than others. Boy was I wrong!…
The hardware curve seemed straightforward: Moore’s Law would do its work, the pipes would widen, and cheap devices would diffuse globally. The interesting action, I thought then, lay in the wetware: who knew how to search, how to classify, how to hop from Balkin to Varian to Bowerstock to Millar and back again. The Digital Divide problem was ging to be not “access versus no access,” but unequal command of the skills that turned access into understanding. Google and the NYRB archives would be force multipliers that would widen the gap between infovores and everyone else. The librarians would rule the world. Those of us who understood library systems would prosper. The rest would be locked outside, shivering virtually underdressed in the virtual infofimbulwinter outside of the virtual Lamont Library.
Boy! It has been a long, strange trip since then.
Here is the historical artifact from almost exactly 23 years ago:
2003-07-08: The Wetware of the Digital Divide
<https://web.archive.org/web/20031019130907/http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001723.html> <http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001723.html>
Eszter Hargittai worries not about the hardware or the software but about the… wetware, I guess, of the “digital divide”:
Eszter’s Blog Entry: “It is not Google but search savvy that may make the Web God, and only for some” (07/08/2003): …Results from a study I conducted on average users’ ability to find information on the Web suggest that there is great variance in whether people can locate different types of content online and their efficiency in doing so. These findings imply that simply offering an Internet connection to those without access will not alleviate differences or the so-called “digital divide”…. Referring to Google has become the high-culture status symbol of Web use. When presented with an information-seeking task, the supposed savvy searcher quickly suggests the use of Google. However, just like simply referring to the latest opera at the Met should not be equated with expertise in the genre, a throwaway comment about Google should not make us think that people know how to find information online…
Others discuss the same issue, but from a different perspective:
Alcibiades: I would recommend, for that, Jack Balkin at Yale and taxpolicy.blogspot.com.
Thrasymachus: Amazing. What else useful is there on the internet that I do not know about?
Alcibiades: A great deal. This is why Hal Varian has been known to say that in the future the librarians will rule the world: in the future the answers to all questions will be on the internet–but nobody except librarians who understand search and classification will be able to find anything.
Thrasymachus: Google?
Alcibiades: The rewards to gaming Google are just too great, and it is just too small. Think of the Treasury Department lawyers in the Office of Tax Policy versus the collective private-sector tax bar of America.
Thrasymachus: Hmmm… I suspect the advantage to the well-connected, those in the intellectual “know”, is increasing rapidly. For instance, observe how useful the website for the New York Review of Books is for quickly getting an undergrad-level understanding of almost any field of academic inquiry in the humanities. The gap between (i) a bushy-tailed undergrad w/ a subscription to the New York Review website w/ archives and (ii) an average undergrad in section must be pretty darn large–significantly larger than in our day.
Alcibiades: But in our day the back issues of the NYRB were on the second level of Lamont, easy to consult if you wanted to spend time in the library. There is however, a big difference between slogging up to the library through the February snow and then laboriously searching through issue cover page after cover page in the hope of finding something useful on the one hand, and forty-five keystrokes from the comfort of one’s dorm room on the other.
Thrasymachus: There is indeed. Only sheer intellectual curiosity tuned to a fever pitch, or a more-than-undergraduate realization that you need to really impress at least three of your section leaders in order to get three superb letters of recommendation can drive one outside into the Cambridge winter to make the cold, wet trek to Lamont to do unassigned reading.
Alcibiades: And isn’t it the same for unassigned surfing?
Thrasymachus: No. It is not. Only the real weirdos–excuse me, I meant the future Ivy-class university professors–would trek to Lamont then. The barriers to information access are so much lower now. Back then the barriers to information access were so high that only the truly demented future academics made the library their friend. Now the barriers are low–and so you merely have to be clued-in and have a little extra cash.
Alcibiades: But is the difference really that great?
Thrasymachus: Yes, it is. The key is the ability to search. Remember, you do not know ahead of time if there is anything useful on The Roman Revolution in the New York Review of Books, or even in what decade it might have been published. How long would it have taken to go through every cover page since 1970? One hour? Two hours? And even then you might well miss it.
Alcibiades: That is a good point, Thrasymachus.
Thrasymachus: By contrast, the time elapsed just now in pulling up “The Emperor of Roman History” by G. W. Bowerstock from the March 6th 1980 edition of the New York Review of Books? 25 seconds! (Admittedly w/ a fast, well-maintained T-1 line.) It looks as though I could have read this review, quite thoroughly, in 10 to 15 minutes. Follow that with 30 to 40 minutes perusing the reserved reading in The Roman Revolution and I would have been far, far better prepared for my sophomore history tutorial than I ever was in reality–even when I had spent 4 or 5 hours going through the reading laboriously.
Alcibiades: And this is a good thing, no? People find it easier to learn. They become better educated.
Thrasymachus: Children sent to private school and children of infovore parents who get clued-in and well-connected to how to make the internet their friend find it easier to learn and become better educated.
Alcibiades: Hmmm…
Thrasymachus: If you go to public school and have non-infovore parents, it will never occur to you that the online archives of the NY Review of Books will make your humanities courses much easier.
Alcibiades: It’s a force multiplier. But a force multiplier that further stratifies our society. Is that what you are saying?
Thrasymachus: Yes. Exactly. And so it is obvious what we should do.
Alcibiades: Obvious?
Thrasymachus: Our children are still young. We have plenty time to teach them…
Brad DeLong today back: What are the implications that this is how we—or at least I was—thinking nearly a quarter-century ago, in the High Classic Weblogosphere Age?
I thought I knew what the big story was going to be. The hardware curve seemed straightforward: Moore’s Law would do its work, the pipes would widen, and cheap devices would diffuse globally. The interesting action, I thought then, lay in the wetware: who knew how to search, how to classify, how to hop from Balkin to Varian to Bowerstock to Millar and back again. Hence my Alcibiades-and-Thrasymachus dialogue back in 2003, which is now merely an interesting historical artifact about how badly DeLong needed to think smarter and do more back then to mark his beliefs to what the information reality was already starting to become.
I made very wrong predictions about how things were going to go down—not because the wetware ceased to matter, but because I implicitly assumed something that has, perhaps, not held: a broad, stable floor of deep-reading plus fast-skimming capability on which these search skills would rest. But right now we fear that that has crumbled beneath us—sustained attention (and skimming a literature productively requires as much sustained attention as deep reading), comprehension, synthesis—on which any kind of digital enlightenment, egalitarian or aristocratic, would have had to have been built.
Thus I see three big, linked assumptions embedded in my 2003 dialogue.
First, that the key constraint was finding good text, not staying with it.