Jimmy Wales responds to Danah Boyd

danah boyd wrote:

I think that you're right that this is a deep truth, but one that is
also worrisome because it fundamentally means that those with
privilege stand the greatest opportunities to benefit from new
opportunities that rely on cultural capital and time (regardless of
whether or not economic capital is needed). I don't know that I have
an answer for you as much as I feel the need to highlight that what
we're creating may result in a new form of inequality that, as you've
succinctly put it, has no good checks or balances.

I think that this is worthy of some concern, but I also think that we need to acknowledge that the actual trends on the planet are very strongly in the opposite direction. Far from providing elites with greater and greater access to knowledge while depriving the poor of the same, we see stunning improvements in access to knowledge in some of the poorest places in the world, driven by these technologies.

My point here is that I don't mind us raising the abstract cautionary note, to check our premises, but I find that when we do - we have much to be happy about.

I spend a fair amount of my time traveling the world, looking with my own eyes at what is going on with access to knowledge in the developing world. And it is hard to stand in a slum in the Dominican Republic chatting with teens in an area that has only had legal electricity for 3 years... where they are insanely happy about Wikipedia, youtube, IM, google, and everything that we're all pretty insanely happy about... and remain particularly pessimistic.

The digital divide is going to evaporate quickly, and the major cultural change we're looking at in the next 20 years is the next billion people coming online.