The Chronicle Online - Digital divide: Students complain on-campus cable fails to satisfy...
"When juniors Yousef Mian and Andy Kanderian purchased the centerpiece of their West Campus dorm room—a 51-inch HDTV television—their expectations were high."
I want to make sure that I understand this digital divide complaint:
Allow me to insert a global perspective here: only 5% of Arab homes have even a telephone ...and students are complaining of a digital divide because their 51" HDTV doesn't produce a quality image on their 49 cable channels. Does that not sound like whining to anyone else but me?
On a more serious note, I believe the article is a barometer of sort that identifies generational differences in access and use of technology. Televisions in dorm rooms would have been either prohibited or scarce 30 years ago. Today, finding two televisions in a dorm room doesn't even raise an eyebrow. We may have some distance in years before have's and have not's are defined by those with HDTV and those with only NTSC television. What we are seeing are students bringing 'early adopter' influences onto the campus...a change perhaps historically , when students arrived at college to discover new technologies.