Life Underground by Terry Williams

Author:Terry Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

DIGITALIZATION OF SERVICES

Current health crises have shown that the relationships between technology and the community play vital roles in the survival of the local economy and the community overall. The pandemic crisis has altered the fabric of communities, including their support and communication systems in New York City.

The 2011 Bloomberg administration report titled “Road Map for the Digital City: Achieving New York City’s Digital Future,” presented a comprehensive plan suggesting the ways the city intended to develop a digital future. The report detailed how the New York City government’s commitment to technology in the public sector could work. An idea was that the digitalization of public service would further expand access and bring more transparency and efficiency to the government, by helping connect “high-needs individuals” to funded city initiatives and programs.

During the current crisis, it became apparent that the entanglement of technology and the community was not completely understood. Questions whether the technological transformation of public services that started in 2011 under the Bloomberg administration was able to provide sufficient support to those “high-needs individuals” and mitigate the use of public resources in a more equitable way have to be approached in a critical manner. But the question I would explore here is whether this digital system of public services has been developed for the use of only a particular social group.

Social scientists know people learn things. People living in a particular community learn about their community, and that knowledge becomes localized. Different communities have different systems of local knowledge. I believe it is important to know that in poor communities, social and economic interactions are not only largely shaped through and influenced by this local knowledge but also to a great extent resistant to the use of technology, because the common bonds and social interactions that sustain poor communities tend to have been built on traditional forms of communication.

I have been studying poor communities for decades, and one focus of my work has been the links between new technology and social and economic disparities in poor communities. Generally I have been guided by two questions: (1) What social and economic factors affect the level of new technology penetration in poor communities, thus perpetuating the digital divide? (2) How did low levels of technology penetration affect those most vulnerable during times of crisis? In 2003, my colleague William Kornblum, in his ethnographic study “Digital Divide and Disadvantaged Youth,” examined the links between the technological skill/literacy of teenagers and their socioeconomic conditions; he detailed how poor technological skills were affecting their future successes in life. In my recent work Harlem Supers: The Social Life of a Community in Transition,4 I examined how the use of technology was changing the way building superintendents do their job, the role technology played in redefining their job duties and responsibilities, and how their increased reliance on the use of technology affected productivity and efficiency. My research showed that new technology has been eliminating not only people but also manual tasks and has become a major

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