Tech and Access

Derrick Scott III with Jess Bielman

When we talk about technology and access, it’s easy to default to conversations about broadband, Wi-Fi deserts, or social media algorithms. But the deeper story is about who gets to imagine the future—and whose experience defines what “innovation” even means. Phygital ministry demands we challenge the myth of equal access and reckon with the reality of technological privilege. That means naming every barrier to accessibility—not just the obvious ones—if we’re serious about faithful stewardship.

Barrier One: Who Gets to Build the Future

Let’s start with the obvious: the tech industry has long been led by white men. That’s not a moral accusation—it’s just a description of how history has unfolded. When the early internet was being built, white men were both the first to gain access and the first whose opinions were amplified. They shaped not only the tools but also the imagination of what technology could be.

That dominance still echoes through our devices. The algorithms that determine what we see were trained on data reflecting a specific worldview. So when I think about access, I don’t just mean who gets Wi-Fi—I mean whose perspective defines what we’re connecting to in the first place.

When we first started trying to build a more inclusive space for conversations about technology, it quickly became clear how narrow those spaces already were. It wasn’t just about who was invited—it was about whose voices the algorithms surfaced in the first place. Finding women and people of color who were visible in the tech world took real effort, not because they weren’t there, but because the system wasn’t designed to show them to us. Only after I started searching intentionally did my feeds begin to fill with the brilliant technologists who had been doing the work all along.

That’s part of the irony: access itself can be algorithmic. What we can imagine depends on what we are shown.

Barrier Two: Where We Actually Live Online

Access isn’t just about who uses technology—it’s also about where we use it. Each digital space creates its own culture, its own worldview.

For example, in a digital campus ministry experiment, a dispersed group of student interns were trying to stay connected across multiple cities — Gainesville, Orlando, D.C., Jacksonville, even Copenhagen. The challenge was finding a technology that built real cohesion without becoming a chore.

Slack felt too formal. Instagram messages didn’t allow for depth. Even text threads fell flat. Surprisingly, the app that worked was Marco Polo — a simple video-chat platform that allowed asynchronous communication. At first, it seemed too personal, too exposed to work for interns spread across time zones. But then something shifted: the group started using it playfully and relationally. At one point, they coordinated a spontaneous inside joke involving a photo from an old rock-opera performance I was a part of — and it became a moment of shared laughter and belonging. It was the first time they’d organized something entirely on their own, outside of official assignments. All of it was facilitated through the video-chat app.

That’s when it became clear: the right technology doesn’t just connect people; it creates community.

And there are millions of these worlds. WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram shape communication across the globe precisely because they use less bandwidth than the big social media apps. Meanwhile, TikTok has become a cultural superpower for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Reddit and Discord form entirely different micro-universes of belonging and belief. Branded, event-focused and niche communities are finding a digital home through platforms like Circle, Mighty Works and WHOVA, where engagement and connection are happening online but a part from mainstream applications. And there are digital communities whose content and message are not appropriate for public audiences, but are nevertheless formative to those who find and engage them.

Each platform produces its own kind of person. I’m convinced you can tell when someone is a “Reddit person” or an “Instagram person”—not because of what they post, but because of how they see the world. As the internet as aged, the choices for digital consumption and connection have expanded - unevenly and unequally. These digital spaces don’t just mirror us; they form us. They teach us how to move through information, how to trust, and how to connect. Depending on access, we may have exposed to more or less of the options, and that informs how we move about the world.

All of this means access is not just technical—it’s emotional and cultural. If you can’t or won’t enter certain platforms, whole ways of being are invisible to you. You don’t just miss content; you miss the formation, for good and for bad.

Barrier Three: The Global Skip

Access looks different across regions of the world. In some parts of Africa, for example, communities are skipping the smartphone era altogether. It’s too expensive, too fragile, too dependent on infrastructure. But now, with services like “1-800-ChatGPT,” someone with only a flip phone can access AI through a simple call. You get 15 minutes with a voice-AI service.

That sounds revolutionary—and it is. A farmer could ask for advice about water management or crop rotation and get information once reserved for those with broadband and a laptop. But it also carries risk. Every time a new technology leaps into a context that didn’t build it, it can reshape identity and culture in unpredictable ways.

When Europeans first arrived on Turtle Island (what many Indigenous people call this land), they brought not only disease but also a new economic logic—ownership, extraction, trade. Those tools fractured tribes and rewired relationships. When industrialization reached Africa, it brought a version of capitalism that turned human beings into commodities.

So I find myself wondering: what happens when AI and other emerging technologies reach communities that missed out on some stages of digital evolution? Will they empower or exploit? Will they democratize knowledge—or create new dependencies on invisible systems designed elsewhere?

Maybe that’s the invitation: to notice when the tools we build—and the tools we’re given—are shaped by someone else’s assumptions. I learned that lesson the hard way when a grant project revealed a gap between intention and access. What I thought was an invitation became a barrier, not because people weren’t interested, but because the infrastructure itself wasn’t built with them in mind.

That story keeps replaying itself on larger scales. From algorithms to AI hotlines, from Marco Polo threads to entire digital economies, we keep building worlds inside assumptions about who’s already inside. But access isn’t just about logging on—it’s about being imagined in the design.

So maybe the real work isn’t just to expand access, but to reimagine who technology is for. To ask, each time we create, code, or connect: who’s still outside the group chat?