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A Review of The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth?

Ed. Benjamin M. Compaine
MIT Press, 2001
ISBN: 0-262-53193-3357    $29.95    pp. 340

Review by Barbara Monroe
Washington State University

Overview

Readers looking for a balanced view on the digital divide debate will not find it in this new sourcebook of mostly previously published articles edited by Benjamin M. Compaine. The false binary with its inflated word choice in the sub-title—"Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth?"—thinly veils the implicit hierarchy driving this collection where the second alternative is favored over the first. From the first page, Compaine makes this bias explicit: the digital divide was merely a perceived gap between those who have access to information technologies and those who do not. This fiction was created, we find out at various points in this volume, by the ever-blameworthy media, academics, "welfarists," "ivory tower noodlers," and "the digerati." Even if a divide did exist early on, Compaine and most of the authors maintain, it is clearly closing, and closing fast—so fast, that this volume needed to be rushed to press before the divide became old news altogether, it seems. The real question this sourcebook contemplates is whether or not the Internet will scale economically without government intervention. Its answer is "yes." The pro-public policy position gets short shrift.

          All books on technological issues are similarly pressed for timely publication, but this one has a commemorative feel to it, as the title of the last article, written by the editor, suggests: "Declare the War Won." The expressed aim of The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth? is to place the divide debate within historical context. In keeping with that aim, Compaine has selected several pieces that are indeed old in real-time years (e.g., "Information Gaps: Myth or Reality?" originally published in 1986) and in Internet years (e.g., the RAND report advocating universal email service, published in 1995, before the advent of free Web-based email services). Thus, The Digital Divide is dated, but it is so by design. From the vantage point of hindsight, the selected pieces advocating a laissez-faire approach to closing the digital divide seem prophetic and prescient, while those representing the pro-interventionist position come off as both wrong and wrong-headed. Time has undermined the latter position, Compaine and his selected authors say variously, for the pro-public policy folk failed to predict the impact of wireless technologies, and their claims for the transformative potential of the Internet, especially in the schools, have gone unrealized. Compaine also faults the pro-interventionists for failing to understand future business models, such as free Internet access supported by advertising. (Ironically, free Internet access has already become a discarded business model by the time Compaine's volume came out.) While the volume situates the debate within historical context, that context is implicitly constructed from the pro-business perspective of the telecommunications industry. Compaine himself is a Senior Research Affiliate at the Internet & Telecoms Convergence Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was asked by the MIT Press sourcebook division to compile this collection. His particular field expertise as well as his anti-government bias are obvious in his selections.

          The volume includes reprints (in abridged form) of many pieces that are available on the Web in full. It opens with an edited reprinting of two of the four "Falling Through the Net" reports by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which initially focused on race and ethnic differences in telephone service and personal computer and modem ownership. This narrow focus, Compaine

Pro-Public Policy Position Insights from Free Market Position    * The definition is a moving target    * Haves/have-nots is a false binary    * Utopian claims need to be tempered    * Emergent technologies diffuse unevenly    * Is the divide closing? Table of Contents

and others rightly argue, failed to create a holistic picture of the divide from the get-go. Such a picture would necessarily involve far more variables demanding far more nuanced statistical analysis. The selections in this sourcebook do indeed flesh out that picture with research on many more demographic differences (i.e., marital and children status and specific neighborhood usage patterns) and the impact of such variables on telecommunications use, including use of the Web (e.g., searching, surfing, shopping), telephone, cellular phone, cable television, and add-on services for all of the above. More important is the significance of these demographic differences for the business community in identifying viable market segments pursuant to attracting private investment. As Compaine points out, it is easy to get lost in the statistics and hard to determine which statistics matter. While this collection tells us what matters from an industry perspective, this is not all bad. This perspective does offer important insights relevant to our own field of computers-and-writing, especially in understanding adoption patterns of new media historically and sociologically.