Digital media travels hand to hand, phone to phone across vast cartographies invisible to Big Data
I stood at the corner of Market Street and 4th Avenue, at the edge of San Francisco’s technology-startup neighborhood. An older Chinese woman—let’s call her Fei—approached my friend and me, asking for directions in her extremely limited English. In her hands was a piece of paper with directions from Google Maps, to a location somewhere much further south in the city.
“One second,” I said. “We’ll check the address.” My friend pulled out his phone and punched in the English language address of her destination into a maps app and received a few public-transit options for how to get there.
I asked Fei if she had a phone so I could send her the information, but she said, “I just have a pen.” I ended up writing down the directions on the back of her printout and wished her luck, pointing her in the direction of the bus she needed and double-checking my orientation with my phone’s compass app.
In traditional tech parlance, a phoneless woman like Fei would be considered one of the 4.3 billion who are said to be unconnected to the Internet. The International Telecommunications Union, a branch of the United Nations, measures connectivity via fixed landline, mobile, or broadband subscriptions. Cisco’s Visual Networking Indexmeasures global mobile data traffic to gauge growth in usage. McKinsey and Co.’s research defines the offline population as those who haven’t gone online in the past 12 months.
Following the implicit logic of such statistics, it can be easy to assume that being unconnected means having no exposure to the Internet at all. Phrases like “connecting the unconnected,” “the next billion,” and “the digital divide” all suggest this binary: One either has access to the Internet or doesn’t; one lives on the wired side of the tracks or one doesn’t. But as tech ethnographer Jan Chipchase wrote recently, “Connectivity is not binary. The network is never neutral.” Between those who’ve never touched a computer and those who get a feed of data directly into their Google Glass sits a vast array of modes and methods of connectivity.
