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Todd Wolfson, Jessica Crowell, Camille Reyes, Amy Bach, Emancipatory Broadband Adoption: Toward a Critical Theory of Digital Inequality in the Urban United States, Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 10, Issue 3, 1 September 2017, Pages 441–459, https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12166
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Abstract
Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research that included an engaged participant component, this article seeks to build a critical theory of technology adoption in urban communities. While the high cost of broadband Internet is undeniably an obstacle to adoption, we argue that solving the problem of cost is a necessary but not sufficient solution to the digital divide. To this end, the article contends that a community’s relationship to communication technology—and their ability to see it as a political and cultural tool that can be utilized not just instrumentally, but more broadly as a way to fight poverty, inequality, and other forms of oppression—is a substantial factor leading to what we call emancipatory adoption.