Diversity

A proposed merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, the country’s third- and fourth-largest wireless operators, would have a profound impact on Californians. Wireless prices will rise so the merger will be particularly onerous for customers on tight budgets. In California especially, low-income customers tend to be people of color and immigrants. The merger would therefore disproportionately burden this vulnerable group — many of whom rely on cellphones as their only form of internet access.

In 2018, women comprised 20% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.  This represents an increase of 2 percentage points from 18% in 2017.  In 2018, only 1% of films employed 10 or more women in the above roles.  In contrast, 74% of films employed 10 or more men.  Women accounted for 8% of directors, down 3 percentage points from 11% in 2017.  This is 1 percentage point below the 9% achieved in 1998.

This paper examines how and why activist groups representing marginalized communities of color are increasingly engaging in communications technology policy issues, particularly in relation to issues of digital access and representation.

In 2016, Free Press released Digital Denied, which showed that disparities in broadband adoption — commonly known as the digital divide —stem not only from income inequality, but from systemic racial discrimination. The report found that nearly half of all people in the country without home-internet access were people of color. Much of that gap was indeed the result of income inequality.

Disruptions and threats to an individual’s digital security have profound impacts on that individual’s willingness to use technology—a particularly big problem when you consider just how much technology permeates people’s everyday lives.

Through a series of interviews with Native media practitioners and experts, Jodi Rave of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance reports on the major trends and challenges for American Indian media today:

This study draws on participant observation and interviews with low-income adults in Chicago to show how the poor stay connected to phone service and mobile Internet through the possession of multiple phones, including those subsidized by government aid. The “accumulation” of phones by individuals is widely observed, though underexplored in scholarship. Popular media coverage in the US frames the possession of multiple phones by people in poverty as criminal or excessive.