The Digital Divide

In spite of the potential for Internet access to democratize information, disparity continues to reign amid income levels, race, urbanization, and education level. Here are some findings according to Wendy Grossman in her 2001 book The Net Comes of Age:

• Households with incomes of $75,000 and higher are more that twenty times more likely to have access to the Internet than those at the lowest income levels, and more that nine times as likely to have a computer.
• Whites are more likely to have access to the Internet from home than Blacks or Hispanics have from any location.
• Black and Hispanic households are approximately one-third as likely to have home Internet access as households of Asian/Pacific Islander descent, and roughly two-fifths as likely as White households.
• Regardless of income level, Americans living in rural areas are lagging behind in Internet access. Indeed, at the lowest income levels, those in urban are more than twice as likely to have Internet access than those earning the same income in rural areas.
• The gaps between White and Hispanic households, and between White and Black households, are now more that six percentage points larger than they were in 1994.
• The digital divides based on education and income level have also increased in the last year alone. Between 1997 and 1998, the divide between those at the highest and lowest education levels increased 25 percent, and the divide between those at the highest and lowest income levels grew 29 percent.

Here are some quotes about the digital divide:

"Technology favors those who are already advantaged." (129 Grossman)

"While eduation is the great equalizer, technology appears to be a new engine of inequality." (129 Grossman)

" ... although the Internet could potentially help us to fulfill the same democratic dreams we have every time a new technology in invented, so far it is increasing existing disparities of income, race, and education." (129 Grossman)

"The gap is widenting, not narrowing." (129 Grossman)

Can you answer these questions?

1. What is the digital divide?
2. Where does the digital divide exist? (What countries? What continents?)
3. Who is affected by this divide?
4. What is the diference between the disadvantageous side of the digital divide and the advantageous side?
5. How can you move from the disadvantageous side of the digital divide to the advantageous side?
6. Has a digital divide developped based on gender?
7. Has a digital divide developped based on disablitiy?
8. Has a digital divide developped based on language?
9. How does the digital divide support social and economic inequality?
10. How can we close the gap or eliminate the digital divide?

    Check these links to find out more about this topic:

Wikipedia definition

Online News Hour

Moyers on America

National Telecommunciations and Information Administration

A Nation Online (see Access and Use)

Edutopia

You can also search online with your own keywords in Google, for example, "digital divide" or "Internet access" or "Internet education" or ...?

Write your answers in question-response format or in essay format (numbered). Use MLA guidelines.

(See also this World Wide Web MLA page.) (Here is the home site for MLA.)

Works Cited

Grossman, Wendy M. (2001). The Net Comes of Age. New York University Press. New York.