Barriers to Equal Access

[Paul Orum <paul_orum@yahoo.com>]

Barriers to Equal Access

Several participants caution that over-reliance on computer communications disenfranchises certain communities by creating technological barriers.  (These participants included Sheila Foster, Peter Schlesinger, Hamilton Brown, Steve Taylor, Barbara Kautz, and Fred Stoss, all in their own words of course.)  This critique is well taken.  Certainly the Internet is just one means to communicate.  

However, experience suggests that non-profit environmental, community, and social justice groups in particular act as "catalysts" in interpreting environmental hazards to wider audiences.  The news media and public officials also play this role to a different degree.  I suggest looking at well-organized computer databases not in terms of HOW information is communicated, but WHAT information people are able to communicate, in particular these "catalysts" for social dialogue.

The lack of computers disadvantages some of the people some of the time; the lack of a basic national facility registry disenfranchises all of the people all of the time - including the very people who should be able to serve others, at EPA, in libraries, at environmental justice resource centers, in environmental groups, and so on.

Paul Orum
Working Group on Community Right-to-Know