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In His Novel “Animal Farm”, George Orwell Famously Parodies

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In his novel “Animal Farm”, George Orwell famously parodies the American Constitution when he writes, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” While Orwell clearly was reflecting on the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution and Stalinist Russia, his words still hold true today when examining the transformative power of the Internet. In the 1990s, many predicted the ability of the Internet to empower the human experience; the Dotcom Bubble has, and the Social Media age still, bears witness to that testament. However, it is incorrect to say that empowerment has affected all Internet users in an equally distributed manner. The Internet, while containing transformative powers through widespread information and …show more content…

As Freedom House notes in it’s discourse on “Obstacles to Access” when examining the status of American Internet, “access, cost, and usability remain barriers… particular [for] senior citizens, people… in rural areas, and low-income households” (Freedom House). Therefore, not only is cost a barrier to even having Internet access, and thus the “empowerment” that entails, but both the Internet speed and availability, both hallmark disadvantageous of living far away from central cities, severely damper this ability to empower. In fact, I would say this dampens all three facets of Internet empowerment. However, as Freedom House concurrently notes 80% of American households subscribe to a broadband connection. Thus, I would not say that the Internet is only empowering an elite group just based on resources, but it is definitely exclusionary to people with lesser monetary and location-ary means. Moreover, there is a secondary consideration when examining resources among Internet-enabled users in terms of economic empowerment. As Curran et al. point out in “Misunderstanding the Internet”, the companies and individuals which flourish in e-commerce are those with the means to overcome “economies of scale” – that is, the operational cost savings realized by wholesale and bulk purchasing(Curran et. al PG. #). For example, Amazon is successfully in delivering products because the amount of items it ships a day allows it access to bulk

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