ABSTRACT
IN HIS PRESCIENT BOOK The Other America, Michael Harrington examined the underbelly of the affluent society, exposing the extravagance of its claim to have solved the grinding economic problems of the age related to basic human needs. Harrington’s sobering retort to the optimism of the affluent society was to describe its negative analogue-what he called “the other America”—in which one-third of Americans were mired in poverty. Describing this underclass as “immune to progress” (1962, 13), Harrington suggested that as the economy becomes more technology-reliant, the ranks of the poor expand, since “good jobs require much more academic preparation, much more skill from the very outset.” Today, almost two generations later, the information societyan extension of what Marx and Engels called “the world market” ([1848] 1978, 475)—claims to raise the standard of living of most, while many detractors have spotted the new other America in the midst of superabundance (Friedman 1999). Secluded and marginalized from progress, these have-nots embody many of the same characteristics of 1950s-style poverty, while also lacking access to advanced information and telecommunications services. This exclusion from the means to participate in the virtual public sphere shatters the idols of those who see in advanced television and telecommunications services, as currently arranged and deployed, the key to perpetuating American-style democracy well into the twenty-first century.
