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Information Revolution widening the gap
between ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ in America
by Khalil Osman
For some Americans, the
‘information revolution’ has transformed life radically. Yet for
others the new technology and the ‘new economy’ it has helped to
set in motion have only created a new dividing line between the
information "haves" and "have-nots."
In fact, US census data and
sociological studies indicate that few of the poor in America’s
society enjoy the empowerment that comes with access to the new
technology. In the words of Michael Holtzman, chairman of the Next
Generation Institute, a thinktank devoted to researching issues of
importance to younger Americans, the digital divide in America is
helping to breed a "techno-underclass."
A study conducted by Market
Intelligence, a research institute based in California, has
confirmed that 80 percent of households with incomes of over
$100,000 per annum own personal computers, compared to a mere 25
percent of households with annual incomes of less than $30,000.
Likewise, a recent report by the US Commerce Department, Falling
Through the Net, shows that the digital divide is continuing to
widen, particularly along racial lines. Black and Hispanic
households are approximately one-third as likely to have Internet
access at home as households of Asian or Pacific Islander descent.
Moreover, White households are more than twice as likely (41
percent) to own a home computer than Black ones (20 percent).
Parallel trends can also be
found when examining the pattern of access to the telephone
service. While 94 percent of American households have telephones,
only 54 percent of households living on welfare and 50 percent of
female-headed households living at or below the poverty line have
telephones. For Blacks and Hispanics, access to telephones drops
by about 10 percent even when income is taken into account.
Even in Silicon Valley, which
has become synonymous with the information revolution, the epic
boom of the new economy has not reached everyone. In East Palo
Alto, a low-income area abutting the corporate headquarters of
multimillion-dollar information technology (IT) companies such as
Yahoo and Oracle, about one-fifth of the inhabitants live in
poverty and fewer than one family in five has access to a computer
in the home.
The digital divide in America
also follows rural-urban lines. Those living in urban areas are
more than twice as likely to have Internet access as those living
in rural areas, according to the US Commerce Department’s report.
Even in the urban centres the diffusion of technology has been
highly uneven. Whereas middle-class and wealthy communities are
entering a new technological era, the poor of the inner-cities
have been slow in approaching the previous cycle. While urban
households in wealthy and opulent urban neighbourhoods are swiftly
acquiring top-of-the-line home computers, inner-city households
have little exposure even to earlier-generation tools, such as
laser scanners at supermarkets and bank automatic tellers.
In a society whose corporate
culture is dominated by materialism and the profit motive, such a
state of affairs is not the outcome of premeditated and deliberate
choices made by the poor. Telecommunications investments,
especially by cable and telephone companies, are focused on
affluent neighbourhoods and suburbs, to the neglect of systems in
inner-city neighbourhoods. The lack of adequate telecommunications
facilities leaves the low-income communities without the proper
infrastructure to get "wired" to the Information Age. It also
feeds a spiral of poverty whereby the lack of investment leads to
fewer economic and employment opportunities at the community
level, thereby making these neighbourhoods less attractive to
businesses.
In addition, the new
information technologies, such as e-mail, video conferencing,
facsimile- machines and computer networks, are also facilitating
an exodus of jobs from the cities to the suburbs and beyond.
Financial and industrial institutions, such as banks, insurance
companies and factories, are beginning to take advantage of new
technologies in their efforts to consolidate operations and set up
"back-room facilities" in the suburbs; they tend to eliminate
downtown jobs in the process. But most of the low-skilled poor are
concentrated in the inner cities rather than the suburbs, and
public-transportation systems in the urban areas rarely connect
the two.
Rural areas, however, do not
benefit from the relocation of job opportunities outside the
cities. In a report whose title is Rural America at the
Crossroads: Networking for the Future, the Office of Technology
Assessment noted that, "Unlike routine manufacturing industries
that migrated to rural areas in search of lower production costs,
today’s high-technology industries are attracted by a highly
skilled workforce and communications networks to other economic
markets and information centers. These are precisely what rural
areas lack."
Government initiatives
ostensibly designed to respond to information inequities have
proved ineffective, such as the federal Title I program, aimed at
bridging the information gap by assisting poorer schools to obtain
computers and software. In a report issued in 1997, the
Educational Testing Service said that the national ratio of
students per classroom computer is 10 to 1. In schools with a
low-income student enrolment of 90 percent or more, the ratio is
about 30 to 1, whereas the ratio is 22 to 1 in schools with
low-income student enrolment of between 24 and 49 percent. The US
Department of Education recommends a ratio of 5 to 1.
The exclusion of America’s poor
from the benefits of new technology undermines their prospects for
political mobility as well as social and economic advancement.
Computers and networked information increasingly pervade American
society, from personal communication and entertainment to banking,
business shopping and political participation.
The digital divide in America
is taking a toll on relations between individuals and government,
and on patterns of civic involvement. According to the Office of
Management and Budget, 75 percent of all transactions between
individuals and the government, including services designed to
help the poor, such as delivery of food stamps, social-security
benefits and Medicaid information, will soon all be conducted
electronically. Access to communications technologies can also
facilitate coordination and foster collective action on the part
of issue-oriented associations that poor people form to deal with
specific problems such as unemployment, drug abuse, crime, poor
street maintenance, environmental threats and inferior healthcare
and education. The Internet enables individuals and organizations
to get information and updates on pending legislation and
government-funding opportunities. The technology gap thus deprives
these communities of potential "social capital" that they should
be able to use to deal more effectively with their problems.
The personal computer has been
described as "the great equalizer," having the ability to help
those with access to the technology to break traditional
monopolies on information and knowledge, thus disrupting societal
hierarchies and empowering the ordinary people. But the
technological promise of benefits from access to computers and the
Internet will remain unfulfilled as long as information inequities
between the rich and poor persist. As long as the technological
abundance unleashed by the marriage of computers and
communications networks does not ‘trickle down’, poor Americans
will remain excluded from the benefits of the Information Age that
their wealthier neighbours are enjoying.
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