Great article over on Technology Review that outlines the deterimental effects of DOPA, should it be signed into law. Chief among them, and of great concern to anyone studying youth culture:
"Already, you have a gap between kids who have 10 minutes of Internet
access a day at the public library and kids who have 24-hour-a-day
access at home," [Jenkins] says. "…Now we’re talking about adding even
more restrictions. It exaggerates the ‘participation gap’ — not a
technology gap, but a difference in access to the defining cultural
experiences that take place around technology today."
What happened to leave no child behind?
Given that any site that has chat or social networking capabilities would be banned from schools receiving federal aid, it’s not just MySpace that we’ll miss. The edublogging community, for example, is up in arms (scroll down) over the possiblity that blogs might be yanked from the teachers’ toolkit. I know that Internet fear is nothing new, but this type of political fearmongering is so short-sighted and frustrating.
