Divided We Surf

...Digital divide advocates skillfully blur the issue to their political advantage: If it weren't for E-Rate (the Clinton-Gore program that uses new federal phone taxes to connect rural and inner-city schools to the Internet), they say, the digital divide would be worse...

...Second, the divergence between single-parent and two-parent households is striking: 61.8 percent of married couples with children own computers, while only 31.7 percent of female-headed households do...

...But, on balance, this latest crusade—the "fourth movement in the civil rights symphony," Jackson calls it—is based more on myth than reality, and offers only mythical solutions to real problems...

...The major piece of evidence for Daley's "racial ravine" is the following: Between 1994 and 1998, the gap between white computer ownership f and black computer ownership grew from 16.8 to 23.4 percentage points...

...As with white families, this has raised the incomes of millions of upwardly mobile black families, who now have enough money— and the desire—to buy computers...

...the gap between whites and blacks grew by 53.3 percent between 1997 and 1998...

...The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights have all called the digital divide the "new frontier of the civil rights movement...

...1. "This may well be the leading civil rights issue of the 21st century," AOL chairman Steve Case said in a speech last May...

...Which is, of course, the other great unsubstantiated claim of the digital divide movement: that what children especially need to succeed is more time in front of a computer...

...it has created millions of new high-paying jobs, especially in technology industries...

...In 1997, 69.2 percent of black children were born out of wedlock...

...more than a third of white families earning between $15,000 and $35,000 per year own computers, but only one-fifth of blacks do"—for reasons, President Clinton claims, that "we don't entirely understand...

...The key factor, as usual, is not race but income and marriage...

...more important, it now needs the FTC's approval for its $170 billion buyout of Time Warner...

...They'll praise the hightech CEOs (like Case) who have stepped up to close the "information gap" and criticize those that have ignored it...

...The whole thing is called a "New Markets Tour," but it will consist largely of new government spending proposals...

...B. Keith Fulton, director of technology programs at the National Urban League, is similarly dismissive: "The Forrester study was based on 1,500, maybe 2,500 people polled by telephone...

...the company had a racially diverse workforce, she said, and besides, in the previous year Intel had donated $100 million in cash and equipment to education groups...

...prominent Republicans—Virginia governor James Gilmore has challenged the high-tech community "to step forward and make a commitment to close the digital divide...

...Not increased access to technology or the Internet...

...But these statistics are not cited with the same frequency or alarm as the official statistics on the race gap...

...Later this spring, President Clinton and commerce secretary William M. Daley will travel the country on "close the digital divide" tours...

...Walsh gives three reasons for this: the rapid decline of computer prices...

...Or One Big Boondoggle...

...Whites are 2.5 times more likely to have home Internet access than Blacks and Latinos...

...Maybe so, but the Forrester report was in fact based on a mail survey of 85,000 people...

...The digital divide is now the hottest social policy issue in Washington...

...Indeed, in its 1998 report, which is the basis for its many "alarming" comparisons, the Commerce Department did not even collect data on out-of-home access...

...Intel, Intel you're no good, / bring computers to the 'hood," the protesters chanted...

...Don't throw us aside, / close the digital divide," say the protesters in Silicon Valley...

...We've got quite an agenda facing us...

...Is it in fact a consequential social problem...

...The Clinton administration has announced a $2.4 billion campaign "to slam shut the digital divide...

...Even Larry Irving, former head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the driving force behind the Commerce study, concedes that "we did miss a certain amount of information with regard to lower-priced PCs...

...apartheid," says Jackson...

...Few things can be more appealing to a politician than fighting for the poor by hobnobbing with billionaires...

...The spokesman had failed to grasp the essence of the fast-growing social justice movement that aims to end the "digital divide"—inequality between the rates at which rich and poor, black and white, use high-tech goods and the Internet...

...In reality, the "new new thing" in civil rights politics is just the latest variation on an old civil rights theme, the problem of inclusion—or, in digital divide-speak, the problem of access...

...But apparently not all ideas are worth sharing...

...President Clinton made "closing the digital divide" a major theme of his State of the Union address...

...And for the tech companies themselves— always keen on building market share—the idea of giving equipment to the poor is an attractive one, especially if their philanthropy is defrayed by government subsidies...

...It's "technological segregation," says NAACP president Kweisi Mfume...

...Or, as Wilhelm puts it, "The [Benton] Foundation's identity has become closely connected to the digital divide and other equity issues...

...the increasing availability of free Internet access...

...Jesse Jackson had given four months earlier, in which he called Silicon Valley leaders a "national disgrace...

...The Commerce Department study went door-to-door to 48,000 people...

...Methodology becomes important here...

...To be sure, some of the digital divide efforts will have some positive effect—especially those dedicated to real mentorship rather than just computers in the classroom and technology courses for teachers...

...Al Gore in his stump speech calls this a "national crusade...

...It's the "new new thing" in civil rights politics...

...As much as a crusade, closing the digital divide has become a cottage industry for many Washington-New York-Silicon Valley intellectuals, civil rights leaders, and philanthropy bureaucrats...

...it's closing...

...In Internet Time (computers are penetrating the market place seven times faster than electric service did and five times faster than telephones), December 1998 is another era...

...dual-parent black families are four times as likely to have Internet access as single-parent black families...

...It's now grounded in the need to perpetuate a winning issue...

...This is the great tragedy that political leaders and captains of the computer industry who are philanthropically minded should be talking about...

...If government didn't step in, the racial ravine would be a racial abyss...

...The first is that blacks and whites with incomes over $75,000 per year own computers and use the Internet at roughly the same rate, while low-income whites are almost twice as likely to own PCs as low-income blacks...

...They'll proclaim, sometimes in the same compound sentence, that we have the "lowest minority unemployment rate in history" but that there is a "widening gulf"—a "racial ravine," as the Commerce Department calls it—between "those who've got access to the tools of prosperity and those who don't...

...They'll quote Martin Luther King Jr., and talk about "equal access...

...It has captured the imagination (and deep pockets) of major foundations, leading high-tech companies, the New Democrat economic-policy gurus, and even Eric Cohen is managing editor of The Public Interest...

...Dual-parent white families are twice as likely to have Internet access as single-parent white families...

...You get the feeling, though, that the digital divide movement has already moved well beyond the need to be grounded in fact...

...AOL has gotten very close to the Clinton administration on this subject, as Business Week pointed out last week in an article headlined "One Wired Nation, Indivisible...

...The Commerce study also exaggerated the "widening gap between technology haves and have-nots" by excluding computers outside the home—in the workplace, in schools and libraries—from its many white vs...

...The high-tech community is listening: America Online, Intel, Microsoft, and others have made "closing the digital divide" Philanthropy Mission No...

...The company's self-interest is obvious...

...In fact, the Commerce Department study has some very interesting findings—two in particular—that are either not discussed or not effectively explained...

...Anthony Wilhelm, communications policy director at the Benton Foundation, says of the Forrester report and others that criticize the concept of a digital divide, "the values these reports promote are not appropriate for a democratic society...

...Andy Carvin, senior associate at the Benton Foundation and editor of the DDN, told me that "the website is absolutely comprehensive...

...A lot of poor people, maybe 20 to 30 percent, don't even have phones...

...The political class, for its part, with the Clinton-Gore administration leading the charge, has proved highly enthusiastic...

...On the subject of race, the official statistics tell an ambiguous story...

...Nine major corporations (AOL, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Gateway, Intel, iVillage, Microsoft, SBC Communications), the Ford Foundation, and the National Urban League have partnered with the Benton Foundation to create the Digital Divide Network (DDN), a clearinghouse "to enable and facilitate the sharing of ideas, information and creative solutions...

...An obvious reason, besides income, suggests itself: Men are more often early adopters of technology than women...

...This—far more than "technological segregation" or "apartheid" corporate boards—is what shuts off poor children from American prosperity...

...Perhaps unsurprisingly, given everything that's in it for them, the crusaders have barely slowed down to ask: Is there really a digital divide...

...In 1994, whites were 2.6 times as likely as blacks to own computers...

...There are other interesting statistics in the report: Asians at every income level are more likely than whites to own a computer...

...It's precisely because booming tech companies are progressive, charitable, and loaded with cash that the civil rights movement and anti-poverty activists have targeted them...

...But read past the executive summary, and you discover the following: In 1994, 27.1 percent of white households and 10.3 percent of black households had computers...

...BY ERIC COHEN Outside an August 1998 trade show in Santa Clara, Calif., a coalition of left-wing Bay Area groups denounced Silicon Valley for failing to share its wealth with minority consumers and employees...

...black comparisons...

...An Intel spokesman complained to the San Francisco Chronicle that the giant chip-maker was being unfairly singled out...

...In 1998, the comparable figures were 46.6 percent for white households and 23.2 percent for blacks...

...The Commerce Department has created a digital divide clearinghouse—digitaldivide.gov—to monitor the nation's progress...

...Couched in pro-market language and the hyperbole of the Internet age, the effort to close the digital divide is the latest version of the Jesse Jackson approach to social policy: talk about anything except the real cultural crisis of the underclass...

...Some basic arith-metic—conspicuously missing from the Commerce Department study, ich presents the data in the st "alarming" possible way— shows that from 1994 to 1998, white ownership of computers rose 72 percent, black ownership rose 125 percent...

...Not that either study is without weaknesses, but Forrester's numbers and projections are certainly more current and closer to reality than the Clinton administration's claims of a widening "racial ravine...

...Not only does AOL stand to profit greatly if the government starts subsidizing Internet access...

...two-parent families of all ethnic groups are twice as likely to have Internet access as single-parent families (four times as likely among African-Americans...

...and the surge of first-time computer buying during the 1998 and 1999 Christmas shopping seasons—periods not included in the Commerce Department study, which collected its data in December 1998...

...Skepticism about this claim actually grows the more one is familiar with how kids actually use computer access...

...But the Forrester report and other critical articles—such as those by David Boaz of the Cato Institute and Adam Clayton Powell of the Freedom Forum—are nowhere to be found...

...The argument is familiar: Blacks and Latinos (unlike Asians) have, on average, lower incomes than whites because they have been ignored by the old-boy networks, shut out of the capital markets, and excluded from the well-financed elite schools that make white people so wealthy...

...They'll tell stories about schoolchildren whose lives have been changed by using the Internet...

...Altogether, the evidence suggests something like this: The economic boom of the last few years has made the vast majority of American families more wealthy...

...If we don't do it now, we will never get around to doing this," Clinton told an audience of poor schoolchildren, wealthy high-tech CEOs, and civil rights leaders...

...The divide is not yawning wider...

...Ekaterina Walsh, author of the Forrester study, projects that 40 percent of black households will be online at some point this year, while 44 percent of whites will—hardly a "racial ravine...

...Some sort of stable home life is what poor children desperately need...

...This trend is consistent with another major study of Internet access—"The Digital Melting Pot," published by Forrester Research—which found that African Americans are getting home Internet access at a faster rate than any other ethnic group...

...In its press release, the administration called its initiative "From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunity"—the same title as a speech Rev...

...Now who are you going to trust...

...Institutional racism is still the norm, and new technologies only promise to exacerbate old divides...

...There are no doubt worse things big government and corporate America could be spending money on...

...This group, not surprisingly, is not surfing the Web...

...in 1998, they were only twice as likely...

...The bible for this movement is a 1999 Commerce Department study—"Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide"—that activists cite with the agility of Talmudic scholars...

...Sounds terrible...

...But there is a portion of the black community—a significant minority—that is not only chronically poor but burdened by unsafe streets, gang violence, and utter hopelessness...

...But in their speeches, Clinton-Gore officials continue to use the Commerce Department figures that exclude school and work access—which is where most Americans, African Americans included, actually use the Internet...

...There just aren't the advocacy groups in place for single-parents," says Anthony Wilhelm, director of communications policy at the Benton Foundation, perhaps the key player in the digital divide movement and a major beneficiary of AOL's multimillion-dollar largesse...

...If there is no divide, there is no movement, so there must be a divide...

...They'll celebrate the Clinton era of prosperity and promise not to "leave anybody behind...

...Jackson's slogan is, "We want to be shareholders, not sharecroppers...

...Some sort of stable home life is what they need more than access to the Web...