Lacking access to the internet is about so much more than FOMO.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Lily Dramale. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a photo of two little girls in the parking lot of a California Taco Bell went viral.

They were pictured on laptops doing school work there because the restaurant provided free

Wi-Fi something they didn't have at home. The girls came to symbolize the

digital underclass that's emerged since the rise of the internet.

And there are millions of American kids like them,

according to Nicole Turner Lee,

a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

She's out with a new book called Digitally Invisible.

Being Digitally Invisible means that you live perhaps in a rural community,

where you are a farmer, and you're in need of the types of resources that larger, more advanced farming, you know,

machinery have than your particular generational, right, a farm. Or you're a young person who lives in a big city, but yet no one understands that living in public housing, for example, has not provided you the same opportunity as if you were to live in a

wealthier part of the city.

You know, we've been invisible.

They've been invisible to us, right, when it comes to their particular needs that the internet provides.

You share some examples that reflect this idea of digital invisibility.

You visited Staunton, Virginia, back in 2019 where you met a

young man named Joseph, who is a day laborer and who depends like so many of us on his

phone to get work. His mobile provider though places data caps on his

service. How did that affect him? Yeah, it's just so interesting and I mean he was

someone that I think really struck me right he he couldn't do anything

except find ways to negotiate getting online like going to his girlfriend's

...