The Rivard Report, September 26, 2019: TechTonics: Jordana Barton on the Digital Divide and the Threat to Economic Justice
Jordana Barton’s built-by-hand childhood home in the former South Texas colonia of Benavides wasn’t a particularly pretty structure.
Though Barton remembers being embarrassed by her house, with its piecemeal additions for every addition to the family and lack of insulation that made Texas summers even more unbearable, it was part of her family’s path to the middle class.
But Barton, now a senior advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, says the bridges to the middle class are eroding because of a worrying phenomenon known as the digital divide. Instead of lacking streets, power, and water, as the residents of the former colonias often did, now the residents of Benavides and other former shantytowns are being left out of the middle class because they lack high-speed internet access – which Barton calls “a platform for access to the economy.”
