If you cannot afford home access to the Internet, you cannot afford a tenet of “American life” as basic as running water and an indoor toilet. This is not equality, or equity, for persons who live on the “can’t afford it” side of that divide. Doesn’t matter what color your skin is. Doesn’t matter your age, or physical ability.
Matters that you cannot afford the method the government — from local public health departments to the Veteran’s Administration — uses for you to schedule appointments, pay bills, or find out that there are opportunities for vaccinations available. We used to use the US Mail and telephones to take care of these matters; indeed, my generation and the one older than me still do, as much as the other end of the transaction will accept such communications.
But there are young people who can’t access “remote learning” because their parents can’t afford the Internet at home. (Yeah, I know all about hitchhiking on wifi, but when the nearest wifi’s at a fast-food joint and it’s snowing, what are you supposed to do?)
There are people who can’t “go to the website” to follow up on access to health care, deposit a check or make a payment. There are people who don’t have that smartphone app for … anything, because they can’t afford a smart phone. Right here in the USA, and they’re working adults with jobs in agriculture, in restaurant/hospitality trades, in small towns where they’re school teachers or auto mechanics or store clerks or grocery workers; it’s an invisible handicap to a significant fraction of our total population (and that doesn’t count folks who are fluent in a language other than US-flavor English).
Unless and until we have access to programs and services for folks who don’t have the Internet, we’re not serving our communities adequately, and those communities include our veterans, our Medicare and Medicaid dependent citizens, our students from pre-K to postgrad, and just incidentally this lack is far more profound among communities of color. It’s also more likely that Internet access is harder for rural people (and it’s hard to get more rural, frankly, than farmworkers and Native American reservations) to get and keep than for people in cities to get and keep.
It’s a genuine issue. Yeah, it keeps you from getting lied to by Facebook, but it leaves you dependent on the lies the radio and TV (which you can get without a separate fee, unlike the Internet, as long as you have electricity) aim at you 24/7/365. In the era of Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel / Cumulus, it behooves us not to forget this fact.
It’s a first-world problem, yeah, but that doesn’t make it less real. COVID has made it worse.
(In Australia, “remote learning” is done with a dedicated radio channel and hard-copy, mail-out/mail-back correspondence lessons. It’s not “instantaneous,” but it’s *available* and the access isn’t as dependent on income-level as, say, school over a Zoom call.)