Nem todas as crianças gostam de tecnologia

O Technology Review do MIT traz um artigo do colunista Simson Garfinkel desmistificando a crença na "Net generation", uma geração que já nasceria acostumada ao mundo digital.

Garfinkel alerta: estamos criando uma sociedade que exclui milhões de pessoas que nunca estarão on-line.

But the more time I spend with the kids who should be members of Generation N'today's high school and college students'the more convinced I am that the notion of universal computer competence among young people is a myth. And the techno-laggards among us risk being relegated to second-class citizenship in a world that revolves around, and often assumes, access to information technology.
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Certainly, more kids today are growing up wired'but millions of them are not. Meanwhile, we're rebuilding our society in ways that make things increasingly difficult for people who aren't online. For example, people who don't want to (or can't) buy their airplane tickets on the Web now typically have to wait on hold for 30 minutes with the airline or go through a travel agent and pay an agency fee'sometimes as much as $50. When I needed to renew my passport, the local post office didn't have the form: they told me to download it from the Internet.

This is a problem that won't be solved through more education or federal grants. As a society, we need to come to terms with the fact that a substantial number of people, young and old alike, will never go online. We need to figure out how we will avoid making life unbearable for them.