Brookings Analyst Calls for Connecting Digital Underclass

WASHINGTON, September 5, 2024 - Reduced access to the internet has negatively impacted already disadvantaged communities, requiring more help for vulnerable people, said Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, an author and analyst at the Brookings Institution. 

“[We have seen] people being told to schedule their vaccinations online and not having connectivity or not knowing how to do this,” Lee said Thursday in a discussion of her recent work. “This is a different technological revolution that is going to beg us to just be much more flexible in our thinking and to not drive ourselves by policy, but by people and community.”

In addition to being the author of the recently released "Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass," Lee is the director of the Center for Technology Innovation and as a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. 

Lee’s research is focused on the intersection between technology and social justice as applied to a wide range of topics, including access to communications and the application of artificial intelligence models. 

The underclass, as Lee put it, is a growing social class that is defined by an inability to access the internet and, consequently, an inability to achieve what most might assume are basic tasks. By way of example, someone in the underclass defined by Lee may not be able to graduate from high school as a result of inequitable access to the internet.

Responses to the consequences of our digital world must be equitable, said Lee. Programs that support disadvantaged populations were essential to achieving fair internet access.

“We heard the stories about young people sitting on the stoops of the retail stores and McDonald's,” said Lee, noting that children were a particularly vulnerable group. 

Lee asserted that, although libraries and other public facilities can offer free access to the Internet, radical responses, such as subsidization in other areas like housing, were required to increase equitable internet access and avoid the unintended consequences of increased digitization.