* The divide is closing—if
we take a let-them-eat-cake attitude, that is.There are many signs that the
divide is closing fast. According
to Compaine's "Declare the War Won," cost is no longer prohibitive. Equipment
costs have dropped dramatically to under $1000; newly developed net appliances
for accessing the Web can be had for under $500; and free Web-based email
is available. Plus, the value of
the Internet has appreciated, as more people get online. For
example, as more people use email, that capability becomes more used and
more useful. To be sure, Internet service providers start their buildouts
with groups most likely to buy; by the same token, they expand into other
markets as other groups become interested in buying, too. And "current
rates of adoption for those groups variously included on the unwired side
of the early divide are greater than for the population as a whole" (p.
326). The latest studies have shown
that PC ownership among Hispanics has grown 55% faster than the population
at large; and the highest rate of growth, according to Forrester's study
of 80,000 households, the largest sample to date, is among African American
households.
Compaine also stresses, as
does Adam Clayton Powell III in "Falling for the Gap: Whatever Happened
to the Digital Divide?," that gaps will always be with us, not because
the poor will always be with us but because some will always be "voluntary
non-users." Just as some choose to not have television, as acts of resistance
to mass culture, so there will be many who will choose to pay $20 for cable
but not $10 for a dial-tone. After
all, not everyone has an automobile, Compaine argues, but we don't talk
about auto haves and auto have-nots; nor does anyone advocate giving away
free automobiles to equalize that divide. Nor has anyone ever advocated
giving away television sets to the poor. John Simons in "Cheap Computers
Bridge Digital Divide" suggests—apparently, with a straight-face—that for
the poorest of the poor, perhaps municipalities could put in public Internet
kiosks on street corners, like public telephones. "Today's
digital divide was yesterday's computers-in-the-schools divide [...], the television
divide of 1955, the radio divide of 1930, or the book divide of the previous
half-millennium. The difference between
then and now is that both the technologies and the business models seem
to eliminate most of these gaps at much faster rates." (Compaine, p. 102).
What Compaine, Powell, and
Simons fail to acknowledge, however, is the role of public policy in shaping
these outcomes, for without the infrastructure, these groups would not
have emerged as "markets" in the first place. That is exactly what the Clinton-Gore administration hoped to achieve: to grow the economy by continued government sponsorship of the Internet. In the past, public funding supported other infrastructures, including transcontinental railroads and interstate highways. And public funding continues to shore up mass transit even today.