The digital divide is the separation of people from technology due to socio-economic status, leaving many without access to computers and information that have become vital to the 21st Century economy. The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition has emerged as a leading collaborative effort to combat the digital divide, founded upon the principal that communication is a human right to be protected.

On April 15, 2012, the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition hosted another installment of the DiscoTech! series, a gathering of individuals and organizations demonstrating skill sets for lessening the access gap to technology. Short for “discovering technology”, DiscoTech! is a regularly hosted event with the purpose of demystifying technology to help foster education about technology, multimedia and internet ownership and rights.

 


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The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition is grounded by the principals of access, participation, common ownership, and healthy communities.

Principles

Access

  • Digital justice ensures that all members of our community have equal access to media and technology, as producers as well as consumers.
  • Digital justice provides multiple layers of communications infrastructure in order to ensure that every member of the community has access to life-saving emergency information.
  • Digital justice values all different languages, dialects and forms of communication.

Participation

  • Digital justice prioritizes the participation of people who have been traditionally excluded from and attacked by media and technology.
  • Digital justice advances our ability to tell our own stories, as individuals and as communities.
  • Digital justice values non-digital forms of communication and fosters knowledge-sharing across generations.
  • Digital justice demystifies technology to the point where we can not only use it, but create our own technologies and participate in the decisions that will shape communications infrastructure.

Common ownership

  • Digital justice fuels the creation of knowledge, tools and technologies that are free and shared openly with the public.
  • Digital justice promotes diverse business models for the control and distribution of information, including: cooperative business models and municipal ownership.

Healthy communities

  • Digital justice provides spaces through which people can investigate community problems, generate solutions, create media and organize together.
  • Digital justice promotes alternative energy, recycling and salvaging technology, and using technology to promote environmental solutions.
  • Digital justice advances community-based economic development by expanding technology access for small businesses, independent artists and other entrepreneurs.
  • Digital justice integrates media and technology into education in order to transform teaching and learning, to value multiple learning styles and to expand the process of learning beyond the classroom and across the lifespan.