A Restricted Revolution?

by Jon Katz

28 April 1998

According to a Vanderbilt University study released this month, 44.3 percent of all white Americas own a home computer while 29 percent of black Americans do. Even more alarming, 73 percent of white college and high school students have access to a home computer, while just 29 percent of black students do.

For most of a decade, journalists and politicians have defined the Internet's most pressing moral issue as pornography and its alleged electronic proximity to children. The Vanderbilt study reminds us what the most significant moral issues involving technology really are, and why they cry out for at least as much media and political attention as dirty pictures.

From the first, there's been reason to worry - not that some people have too much access to technology but that so many have too little.

"I don't see anyone getting a break in our society," writer Denise Caruso said of digital technology's haves and have-nots in John Brockman's Digerati. "Little effort is being made to bring along anyone who's not a white male with access to lots of money. This is a mistake of colossal proportions, because anybody who doesn't think that this is going to cause a revolution at some point is nuts."

As it turns out, white women are now pouring online in even greater numbers than men. But Caruso's warningaccess."

Voices like Caruso's and Hoffman's tend to get drowned out in all the hype - and hysteria - about technology and the Net that now infuses mainstream media coverage of the digital world.

The wired worlds and the computer industry have mostly brushed off this troubling gap between the techno haves and have-nots. They've always expected this dilemma to melt miraculously away, much the way that the whole country acquired VCRs and microwaves over the years as those machines became cheaper and simpler.

But computers still aren't simple to acquire or use, especially those that hook up to the Net and the Web. They remain expensive and require access systems, software, and a range of skills to be used effectively.

And research suggests that an inverse kind of cultural bigotry at work in this problem - some minority underclass kids deem computers the unfashionable toys of white geeks, not a group to which many minority teens aspire.

"Income isn't the only impediment; there's something else going on," Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Irving told Amy Harmon of The New York Times. "There is more content by, for, and about the African-American community on the Net than there is in probably any other medium. There's still a mythology that this isn't for us, that this is for scientists or upper income people or for geeks."

In the email I receive regarding this column, African-American participation is sporadic, but it can be intense. Obviously, some blacks write and don't identify themselves by race. But columns on Tupac Shakur, rap music, the coverage of the Atlanta Olympics, the alleged CIA plot to flood Los Angeles neighborhoods with crack, the movie Amistad, and the coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial drew scores, sometimes hundreds of email messages from blacks identifying themselves as college students or professionals, especially in government and academia.

This email tide suggests that material of African-American interest on the Web gets printed out and redistributed to many other blacks who don't have computer access. Email from teenagers also flows in a steady stream. But email from teenagers who identify themselves as black is very rare.

Americans never seem to quite grasp the perils of ignoring race. If blacks and other minority groups don't get online in roughly proportional numbers, the economic and political implications for an already racially divided country are dismal. Jobs in whole sectors of the booming techno-driven economy will be closed off, as will forms of research, community, and communications.

Websites like Net Noir have drawn considerable media publicity, and public Web discussion areas on sites like AOL and Pathfinder have sparked much direct interracial discussion.

But the Digital Age heralds the rise of a new culture that, as much as any that preceded it, will separate society into those with the tools to participate and those on the outside; the people for whom change brings optimism, democracy, and prosperity - and the people for whom it just means falling farther and farther behind.

Irving's statement that the Web offers more information for African-Americans than any other media is astounding, yet another stinging rebuke to the blockheads who have focused so obsessively on pornography and theft as the defining characteristics of life on the Internet.

But what good will all that information be if most blacks don't get to see or use it?

. . . . 

Talk about computers, the Net, race, class, and access.

Did the Unabomber hate technology, or just people?

Related stories:
Young people talk about race on the Net.
Katz on Tupac Shakur's media legacy
Readers respond to Katz's Tupac Shakur eulogy.

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