Community leaders, nonprofits tackle social barriers to technology in East Austin

By Jazmine Ulloa, Lisa Hernandez and Brenda Menchaca

For a city renowned as a technology hub, Austin faces a digital divide, which threatens to grow wider in light of a historic economic recession.

To close the tech gap, experts and policymakers will have to redefine the divide to encompass the social and cultural barriers separating people from new media, some of which stem from the city’s segregation legacy. But that demands a tough, close look at the past some don’t want to see.

“A lot of people in Austin just don’t want to pay attention to (such barriers) because this city is a great, hippie, liberal, music, creative, community paradise for them, and they don’t realize part of the basement is rotten—that part of the infrastructure of the community just doesn’t work,” said Joseph Strabhaaur, a Radio-Television-Film professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

What is the digital divide?

There is no one definition. The simplest describes a gap between those who use technology and those who don’t. But the reasons for why people don’t widely vary, spanning from lack of access to resources and limited media literacy to age—younger people tend to adapt faster and learn more quickly how to use emerging technology.
Throughout the 1990s, Straubhauur said, people defined the divide as: 1) Fear that a lot of people—particularly people of low income, those from rural areas, minorities and even women—were falling behind in terms of who had access to media, such as computers and the Internet. 2) Background concern that such people without access would not be able to keep up with the job market in the nation’s surfacing information economy.

Tech gap at schools

Studying the divide in terms of race, ethnicity, class and culture did not come until later. Straubhauur and his research team first began to analyze such barriers at East and West Austin high schools, where they discovered hurdles to technology stretched across class and color lines.
At Johnston High School in East Austin, now known as Eastside Memorial, students had an incredibly fewer amount of computers than the Liberal Arts and Science Academy, the magnet school located on its own campus, he said.

The former Johnston is the only school located in East Austin and has a Latino and black majority student body. In 2007, the school’s population was 82 percent Latino, 16 percent black and .02 percent white, according to demographics on the school’s Web site. The magnet school’s student body comprised of 53 percent white students, 24 percent Latino, 13.4 Asian American and 8 percent black.

“It was unbelievable to see the divide in terms of who had access to computers,” said Straubhauur, whose children attended the magnet at Johnston, which has since then moved to Lyndon B. Johnson High School.

Straubhauur discovered even greater discrepancies in terms of access when comparing Johnston high school to Westlake high in West Austin. But even more impacting, he said, were the social obstacles he discovered. Minority boys at Johnston, for example, had trouble finding their economic niche in the information economy.

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