In her mind\u2019s eye, Nicol Turner \u201990 Lee sees kids she tutored in a small computer lab in Chicago while she was a graduate student. She sees adults from the city\u2019s overwhelmingly African American South and West sides whom she steered through online job applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDuring the hours I spent volunteering as a tutor to those young children and as a counselor to parents seeking employment opportunities or public benefits, I realized that technology would soon become the new driver of inequality,\u201d says Turner Lee, who was tapped in 2020 to direct the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her forthcoming book, Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass<\/em> (Brookings Press, 2021), addresses the lack of digital connectivity in America versus other countries and how the internet has become a commodified privilege rather than a human right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As she was finishing the book, COVID-19 began laying bare a range of systemic inequalities. \u201cWe [often] only consider historically disadvantaged groups to be the ones on the wrong side of digital opportunity \u2014 African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous people,\u201d she says. \u201cIn my book, I argue that this new underclass also consists of older Americans and rural residents, especially small farmers who, without access to the internet, cannot be productive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lack of digital access also hurts small businesses in communities with limited broadband. And it ensnares millions of schoolkids who are without online access required for distance learning, says Turner Lee, whose qualitative research for the book included a listening tour throughout the nation\u2019s urban and rural communities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are seeing COVID-19 exacerbate existing inequalities. And now we are seeing the correlation between the lack of access to broadband and poverty, which makes people digitally invisible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turner Lee is a sociologist \u2014 whose doctoral studies at Northwestern University placed her in proximity and relationship with Chicagoans \u2014 not a tech head. In 2009, while job interviewing with an African American think tank in Washington, D.C., former Federal Communications Commission chairmen William Kennard (a Democrat) and Michael Powell (a Republican) encouraged her to accept the offer and bring her influence to the nation\u2019s capital. (Last year, the FCC estimated that 18 million Americans had no internet service before the pandemic. Turner Lee says that tally surely has grown amid a COVID-fueled joblessness that\u2019s slashed household budgets and internet service. Still, she cautions, the U.S. government has not precisely tracked where internet exists or is absent.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBoth of them,\u201d Turner Lee says of former commissioners Powell and Kennard, \u201crecognized that this issue of digital connectivity that I was evangelizing about was important.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, after landing in D.C. as the first media and technology director at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, she conducted the first major research on barriers that have kept Blacks and Latinos, disproportionately, from access to the internet. The FCC\u2019s National Broadband Plan cited her research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, at the nonpartison Brookings Institution, Turner Lee has continued to enumerate the nation\u2019s digital shortfalls, including the fact that some other nations provide free internet for all. If the United States does not catch up, she says, it will worsen the disparities she\u2019s been working to erase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Turner Lee\u2019s day-to-day duties at Brookings has her addressing (via Zoom) U.S. and international audiences about digital inclusion; leading Brookings\u2019 efforts to address inherent racial biases in machine-learning algorithms; talking with educators, industry leaders, and community activists about how to get online access to all distance learners; and writing policies she\u2019ll funnel to President Joe Biden\u2019s administration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe can do this as a country,\u201d Turner Lee says. \u201cIt\u2019s largely a matter of revisiting the social contract around what it means to be a digital citizen. It\u2019s a matter of modernizing, as well as reimagining, tech policies within a 21st-century context \u2014 and centering them around racial and economic equities.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Innovator Nicol Turner \u201990 Lee fixes her sights on the \u201cdigitally invisible.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1221,"featured_media":5814,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[259,260],"coauthors":[632],"class_list":["post-5887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-endeavor","tag-soan","tag-sociology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-1wX","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2020\/11\/RT-Nicol-Turner-Lee-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5887"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6188,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887\/revisions\/6188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5887"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}