Inequalities of Access

Mike's interest in the intersections of technology and access has a history that significantly shaped his perspective on the official and unofficial uses of computers. Mike grew up with a personal computer (an Atari 800) in the early 1980s, and learned to program in BASIC. Later, Mike spent four years as an enlisted soldier in the Army's 24th Infantry Division, coincidentally serving for a brief time in the same battalion where Jeff, at the time a captain, held company command. In his company of 150 soldiers, Mike was one of only two soldiers who had a personal computer in the barracks. At the time, the Army was using computers primarily for word processing and presentations, and slowly adapting to e-mail for official purposes. The unofficial uses of computers were clearly present, though: Mike watched the battalion commander's mechanic install the game Doom on one of the computers at headquarters, and they would play when unobserved.

Mike pursued a PhD in rhetoric and composition, teaching himself HTML along the way. One mentor, Charles Moran, sparked Mike's interest in the intersection of class, access, and computers, which would later evolve into the topic of Mike's dissertation. As he completed that dissertation, Mike taught composition in computer classrooms that seemed pitifully obsolete and bare-bones in comparison to the high-tech luxuries that the nearby campuses of Amherst College and Smith College offered their students, who came from socioeconomic strata significantly different than Mike's. Mike worked with his students to use the available digital technologies to the full extent of the possibilities they offered.

Concerns of socioeconomic difference emerged again for Mike when he accepted a position at the United States Military Academy. West Point produces officers, and Mike had been an enlisted soldier: in Mike's experience, enlisted soldiers were often in the Army because of limited economic opportunity, and officers represented privilege. In many ways, such hierarchies of opportunity and privilege are self-sustaining, and as this special issue argues, hierarchies of opportunity and privilege shape access to technology and to what one can do with technology. Yet Mike felt that West Point represented an opportunity to help guide and mentor tomorrow's officers, and perhaps to help them make a difference in how they approach emerging uses of digital technologies.