Video Response

My initial reaction to the video was that it was an interesting portrayal of the change in our economy that was brought about by computers. It talked about how the advent of computers in the business world led to a loss of blue collar jobs and the potential to make a community poor because the workers did not have the proper skills for the new computer age. It was also interesting how the different kids had such different experiences with their exposure to computers and with their expectations of their computer use in their adult lives depending on where they were from.

Teaching computer skills to kids was shown as a way to build social capital. It was both individual social capital for the kid and community social capital in some cases. The girl from the rich community noted that nearly everyone in her community worked for a computer company. The wealth of that community was built on computers and those skills were being passed on to the children who had computer access both at home and at school. The girl from the poorer community took the skills she had learned and hoped to use to better her life and taught them to younger children, allowing them a head start she never had in gaining computer skills and thus trying to better her community.

I was especially interested in the relationship between the tech high school and the businesses. The children were building their own social capital by learning skills that would help them in the increasingly computer based business world while the businesses were making an investment so that high school graduates would have the skills that they now needed in employees. They no longer needed factory workers that could work by the bell and do their assigned job with no interaction. They now needed creative people who could work in groups and had computer skills. The businesses were building their own capital by sponsoring a school that taught young people what they needed for the new work environment.

The digital divide was seen most readily in the girl from the poorer family. The very fact that she was poor made her have to work while she was in high school and she spent so much time working that she eventually fell behind in school. This perpetuated her difficult living conditions because she was not able to finish high school when she should have and she continued to work a low paying job instead of moving up in the world as she had planned to by using her computer skills.