Privilege of (Internet) Access

This week, my reflection after I finished reading centered mostly around the “Girls of El Seybo” article, probably because it presented such a highly different image of internet usage to what I am used to, both in my own personal experience and in the larger portrayal of the internet in Western media. As a teenager in high school and now as a college student, the primary reason for my internet use has always, like many of the girls in the “El Seybo” text, been about research, either for current academic assignments or in preemptive investigation of where I want to make my academic future. A close second, though, was my use of the internet as a leisure outlet—YouTube browsing, connection through discussion forums and message boards, social networking via Facebook; all the socially-motivated uses deemed fairly standard for/by American teens.

In prior attempts to identify my own areas of privilege, for class and for independent reasons, I have typically categorized this as a class-based issue: because my family was middle-class, we could afford the cost of fast, unlimited internet access and the online agency that gave us. While I feel that is still a valid concern in considering privilege in American society, the points raised in “El Seybo” make clear to me that, in a global context, my internet access becomes not only a privilege I have in America, but also one I have as a result of being American. Because I was raised in a country where regular internet access is considered standard and increasingly necessary, it was never questioned that I would participate in it; and because I was raised in a country with a controlling interest in the internet and the material available through it, it was never questioned that I would be able to access things in my first language, making my participation definitively, encouragingly active. These privileged initial outlooks have affected not only why I use the internet, but also how I do so; how I view the internet as simultaneously a tool, a community, and a medium for creative expression; and how I view myself as alternatively a user, a member, and a creator.

Probably because I read and reflected on “El Seybo” first, I wasn’t able to take as much away from the Jenkins article as I had hoped. Although I don’t have much experience in discussing feminism in a global context (a frustration of mine, and something I am hoping this course, by nature of its subject matter, will help me start correcting), a few points in Jenkins’ post, particularly his qualification of the “contemporary media landscape” (“Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape”) as global, seemed decidedly Western-centric and problematic to me. While Jenkins does mention a concern of potential cultural deterioration in developing nations as “the most economically powerful nations will overwhelm the rest, insuring a homogenization of global cultures” (“Eight Traits”), he never really addresses the problems of access and agency that make this an issue. Granted, this is only a brief introductory article, but that does not negate the fact that the perspective on the media landscape he attempts to define is indisputably a Western-centric one. In discussing mainly the benefits of global interconnection facilitated by the internet (and even those in Western-centric terms) and not seriously raising the issue of access outside the Global North as an issue to address, Jenkins does little to challenge a view of the internet as a Western-dominated social sphere. As Paola Prado makes clear in “El Seybo”, this is not a view we can continue to leave unchallenged if we have any serious interest in expanding digital literacy and making full use of it as the “integral tool in the arsenal against gender exclusion and poverty” (Prado 10) it is now considered.




Works Cited

Jenkins, Henry. “Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape.” Confessions of an Aca/Fan. Ed. Henry Jenkins. N.p., 6 Nov. 2006. Web. 6 Feb. 2011.

Prado, Paola. “The Girls of El Seybo: Logging in to a Different Manaña.” Girl Wide Web 2.0. Ed. Sharon R. Mazzarella. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2010. 9-23. Print.