Discussion Two

In summary, Lincoln Dahlberg’s article “Re-construction digital democracy: An outline of four ‘positions’” categorizes the users of digital media as the following: liberal consumer, deliberative, counter-publics, and autonomous Marxist.

Do you agree with Dahlber’s conclusion that the uses of digital media and can be summed up in four categories and all serve a democratic purpose?

Do you believe that with digital media, the objectives of the four categories would be difficult to achieve?

Suppose you lived in a censored country such as China each digital category outlined in the article would be exclusive to the government. Would you consider it a social injustice to have limited access regarding digital media?

Discuss the broader digital media and social justice topic, issue or cause that your social action project will respond to? What is the ethical, historical and/or political significance of this topic, issue or cause?

           

            Internet access is a vital and necessary tool in today’s society.  This is the Internet Age, where information is king and you can find anything online.  But many people are trapped by this wealth of information because they have no way to access it.  Internet access is taken for granted by many, but imagine how difficult simply going to high school is in this day and age without it, or starting and managing a small business, or taking a high level position anywhere without access to valuable online resources.  There is no historical precedent for this, however.  The easiest way to access the Internet currently seems to be through the mobile phone.  Even if we could provide more low-income families with a mobile phone and low cost data plans it would go a long way in evening the Internet access gap that divides middle and lower class families.

Describe the type of social action project that you have identified.  Offer examples of how it has been used in the past. Why does this type of project form an appropriate response to the specific topic, issue or cause introduced above?

I would like to start a campaign to have people donate their old cell phones so that they may be recycled: not for parts, but resold to people cheaply and effectively to low-income families.  That would go a long way to solving two problems: the Internet access gap that divides this country and the growing amount of e-waste that pollutes foreign countries as a result of the United States’ inability to reduce its carbon footprint.  The idea is simple, get the message out via posters and word of mouth that there are boxes set up around campus specifically for old cell phones to be recycled.  We then team up with a local charity to provide local underprivileged parents, young adults, and teenagers with access to the World Wide Web through their newly acquired smart phones.

Weblog 4

     Most American's are naive to the impact our consumerism has on a global scale.  Our Nike shoes are made by horribly underpaid Asian workers of different nationalities, our household appliances produced in Chinese factories that pump out an incredible amount of air pollution creating a smog that lingers over Chinese cities and pollutes the lungs of millions of people, and our e-waste is shipped overseas to be dealt with by the youth of foreign countries so that that adults of this country don't have to deal with it.

     Though all of these are major issues, the focus of this weblog is e-waste.  According to www.greenpeace.org:

"In the United States, it is estimated that 50-80 percent of the waste collected for recycling is being exported.  This practice is legal because the US has not ratified the Basel Convention.  Mainland China tried to prevent this trade by banning the import of e-waste in 2000. However, we have discovered that the laws are not working; e-waste is still arriving in Guiya of Guangdong Province, the main centre of e-waste scrapping in China....  In India, 25,000 workers are employed at scrap yards in Delhi alone, where 10-20,000 tons of e-waste is handled each year, 25 percent of this being computers."

     These statistics are staggering, and though efforts have been made by China to reduce the amount of e-waste entering their country e-waste is still being imported.  This is another symptom of the problem.  E-waste sites are far too profitable for them to be abolished completely through statutes.  The only solution is to find a profitable way to safely recycle these materials in an eco-friendly way, something that is much easier said than done.