Last week, I joined the Baltimore County Public Library for a powerful Digital Divide Simulation, led by Kansas City Digital Divide. I walked away with more than just information. I walked away with a felt experience.
The room was full of library staff, board members, community partners, and corporate partners. Each of us was given a persona meant to simulate life at the intersection of barriers to internet access.
My role? A newly divorced mom of two, working a low-paying job, juggling childcare, housing challenges, and the urgent need to get internet access at home. Everyday tasks like registering children for school, filing a housing complaint, or applying for benefits became mountains to climb. Time-consuming, confusing, and often demoralizing.
Even as someone who is tech-savvy and privileged to have regular access, I felt frustrated, hurried, and at times dehumanized by the process.
This is what we mean when we talk about the digital divide: who gets to benefit from technology and online access and who is excluded from those opportunities.
And layered onto that is time poverty: a persistent feeling of lacking enough discretionary time for personal well-being and other activities, often resulting from a combination of heavy workloads, unpaid domestic labor, and the pressures of a 24/7 economy.
As an avid book lover, I’ve always seen libraries as sanctuaries. But this exercise reminded me just how much they are also the backbone of our communities, providing the computer and internet access that so many rely on. Imagine needing to search for a new job, schedule a medical appointment, apply for childcare vouchers, or check a bus route, and the only way to do so is to spend hours at the library, while others can complete the same tasks from their couch in minutes.
These dynamics create not just inconvenience, but structural inequity. Outdated systems, limited service channels, and rigid processes become bottlenecks that keep families from accessing resources many of us take for granted.
When I think about equity work, I often return to this, systems are not neutral, and neither is service. Every process we design, every interaction we shape, either creates access or deepens exclusion. Which means we always have a choice, to design with empathy, to meet people with grace, and to ensure dignity in the process.
The digital divide isn’t just about connectivity. It’s also about being seen and being valued as a full member of the community. And the irony is this, most of us rely on the internet for everyday tasks, banking, scheduling doctor’s appointments, tracking school assignments, renewing prescriptions, yet we remain largely unaware of the impact its absence has on entire communities, from low-income households to students to rural families.
For those who are working on access how does closing the digital divide show up in your sector, and what could be possible if we solved it?