One day while staffing The Urbana Free Library’s computer help desk, Kim assisted a man applying for a job at a fast food restaurant. His case manager specified one particular position, but the library patron was having trouble finding the application online. Google searches kept bringing him to third party job search sites that asked for his personal information. Kim explained that he should be able to go right to this restaurant’s website and apply directly to them and not give away his information to third parties wanting it for advertising purposes.
The pair tried finding the application on the restaurant’s website and it was surprisingly difficult. The path to the application was long and complicated. The site sent the patron to multiple databases to search for jobs in the area even after he had found what he wanted and clicked “Apply for this Job!” Despite these frustrations, Kim encouraged him to be persistent. He finally got to the application and Kim left him alone to fill it out (urging him to get her if he encountered any more problems).
Upon reflection, Kim realized this situation exemplifies the writings of one of our foundational authors, Virginia Eubanks. In her book, The Digital Dead End she writes that the socio-economically disadvantaged don’t suffer from a lack of technology access but instead, their experiences are “technological ubiquity” (Eubanks, 9). Applying to this job required an amount of perseverance and patience that Kim (an economically and socially privileged person) had never encountered before. This gave her interesting perspective on how people encounter and use technology, especially as we see an increase in web-based portals for all sorts of tasks once done with pen and paper.
For more information on Eubanks’ ideas, please visit our Fundamentals page.
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