Digital society from the bottom up
As communications takes an increasingly central role in the postindustrial economy worldwide, the transition to a digital society is threatening those at the bottom — and could marginalize people of color, a University of Southern California scholar said Tuesday as he opened the three-part fall W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series, “Exclusions and Inequality in Digital Societies: Theories, Evidence, and Strategy.” Defining the gap simply by access to the Internet “is the old digital divide,” said Ernest J. Wilson III, the Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “The new digital divide is ownership, control, and content.” Wilson described a “scissor effect,” in which minority ownership, control, and content in the media has decreased in lockstep with the growth of media importance. In 2009, he said, African-Americans owned 1 percent of broadcast assets; today, that number has shrunk to 0.7 percent. “We should care about this...