There’s good news and bad news across this new continental divide. Access to computers is expanding rapidly. In 1998 more than 40 percent of American households owned computers, and 25 percent of all households had Internet access. Hardware prices are still falling, and used computers are making their way into even the poorest areas. Community technology centers (ctcnet.org) are springing up, and inner-city schools are being wired more quickly than anticipated, thanks in part to the billions provided through Washington’s “E-rate” program, which underwrites Internet access. For Americans with incomes of $75,000 and higher, the gap in home-computer ownership between whites and blacks has narrowed some in the last year. That suggests the digital divide may eventually close, if prices fall and incomes rise.
But in the meantime, the divide is getting worse. According to a new Commerce Department report, “Falling Through the Net” (ntia.doc.gov), the gap in Internet access between those at the highest and lowest income levels grew by 29 percent in one year alone. African-Americans earning under $40,000 are less than half as likely as whites in the same income group to own a home computer. There are plenty of theories as to why, starting with the absence of enough black and Hispanic role models in the world of high tech. That, in turn, is partly the product of weak minority-hiring records in places like Silicon Valley. And there are cultural factors. So far, mobile phones and other wireless communications have shown greater appeal than the Internet in many minority communities, though some individual sites, like the Spanish-language StarMedia portal, are catching on.
What’s being done about the digital divide? Companies say they can’t hire enough qualified minorities, yet few provide more than a token contribution to nonprofits working in the inner city to close the divide. There are exceptions. (Techcorps.org has 6,000 volunteers in 43 states helping poor schools plug in; cyber-mentoring programs that help professionals become e-mail pen pals with disadvantaged kids (for example, imentor.org) are cropping up. More common are the press releases that cross my desk from high-tech companies with multibillion-dollar market caps that want publicity for their five-figure charitable table scrapings. Most would rather lobby Congress to import more low-paid skilled immigrants than seriously invest in closing the divide.
It’s a long road. The computer is not a deus ex machina–a god that can fix every social injustice. Access to technology won’t by itself level the playing field: if you wire them, they won’t necessarily prosper. Computers might become as common as TVs, but they require initiative and creativity to use fully. Knowing how to play computer games is not the same as knowing how to design them.
“The access gap will close, but the gap in being able to use the technology in meaningful ways may get even larger,” says Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media Lab. Resnick, who cofounded creative after-school centers for at-risk kids (computerclubhouse.org), compares it to the study of foreign languages. “It’s like the difference between having a phrase book and real fluency.” Getting out of the ghetto requires the latter, but even fluency isn’t enough. Job-readiness skills–how to show up at work on time and interact well–are at least as important as learning Web design. Here, too, the high-tech companies aren’t doing enough. They’ve mostly turned a blind eye to welfare-to-work programs.
In the political world, everyone keeps asking how the Internet will affect the 2000 campaign. Maybe it will do so less as a tool for organizing and fund-raising than as a metaphor for deeper questions of social justice. That theme is already in play, with President Clinton poised to veto a $792 billion Republican tax cut heavily weighted in favor of the rich. (Average tax cut for the top 1 percent: $32,000.) If prosperity holds, the next election may turn on economic fairness, which today increasingly means digital fairness.
Income gaps will always be with us. The wealth of the Information Age cannot, in a free society, be equally shared. But the knowledge and opportunity that the new economy creates should know no class distinction. Once the digital and opportunity gaps close, some greater economic justice will follow.
