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Feature: The Net- Boon or Nightmare?
The founders of the Internet understood from the beginning that the primary moral issue involving networked computers for America and the world wasn't dirty pictures but equal access.
If "The Network" was available for the betterment of all minds, wrote J.C. R. Licklider, a computer pioneer who assigned the Defense Department research that led to the Net, wrote in l968, then the "boon to humankind would be beyond measure."
But if the Net became a privilege rather than a right, and only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to use the "intelligence amplification" of networked computing, disparities in intellectual life and economic opportunities would get worse.
Licklider's worry is, and has always been, the seminal moral issue surrounding the Internet, even if our so-called responsible leaders and thinkers only seem to think about sex online.
We should be fighting to get kids onto computers. But in l999, millions of blocking programs are being sold, restricted access to the Net is a position of almost every national and local political candidate, and schools and libraries have to fight parents and politicians to offer Internet access at all. Licklider's is even more timely now than when he raised it.
The Net is no longer a strange technical phenomena, but an integrated essential of mainstream life: next year, reports the "Computer Industry Almanac," the United States alone will have 133 million Internet Users (about 42 per cent of the estimated 318 million global total).
It would seem logical, even imperative, that society's task is not to protect people from the Net and the Web, but to make sure everyone has access to it.
In our loopy, insanely inverted moralistic culture, neither journalism nor politics pays much attention to growing disparity between the Wired and the unconnected. But let Johnny gets onto the Playboy website, and government grinds to a halt.
In America, there is no tradition of rational consideration of technology. We seem only able to focus on the moral issues that don't matter or are insanely exaggerated. The ones that do matter and are significant are ignored.
This week, the U.S. Commerce Department reported that the disparity between whites and black and Hispanic Americans who own computers and use the Net is growing significantly. Among families earning $15,000 to $35,000, more than 33 per cent of whites owned computers, but only l9 per cent of blacks did.
Ownership of computers is still closely linked to income. Families with incomes over $75,000 were more than five times as likely to own a computer at home and 10 times more likely to have Net access than families who earned less than $10,000. Significantly, gaps in computer ownership and Net use narrowed between white families and blacks and Hispanics earning more than $50,000.
A child in a low-income white family is three times more likely to have Internet access as a child in a comparable black family and four times more likely than a Hispanic child. People with college degrees are more than eight times as likely to own a computer and 16 times more likely to have Net access than people with an elementary school education.
Technologists who study history have predicted that computers - like the telephone, TV, electricity and other technological advances - will inevitably become so inexpensive and ubiquitous that everyone will have one. Many PC's are already less expensive than many TV's, and almost every American household now has a television set. The tube is, in fact, a classic example of how a particular technology can grow rapidly and spread across racial, age, economic and other cultural lines.
These optimistic futurists better be right. So far, they're not. It's the wealthier, better-educated, middle-class Americans who are piling onto the Net. Tech jobs are the fastest growing employment category in the world. Net literacy is essential to economic opportunity, educational research, access to popular culture, and, increasingly, to economic opportunities from the stock market to competitive bidding for products, and global, intensely competitive retailing.
Net skills are essential at most colleges, and increasingly, most good jobs.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that hundreds of thousands of technology jobs go unfilled, and that approximately 100,000 new ones will be created each year for most of the next decade. No other sector of the economy offers that kind of long-term opportunity.
Some of this disparity seems voluntary. The Commerce Department survey suggests not only a growing gap between whites and minorities when it comes to computing, it also suggests some resistance to computing among underclass minorities who might be able to afford them.
"I really don't think the advantage of being online is being instilled in them," Trevor Farrington, a director of the Massachusetts-based African American Internetwork, a Web site aimed at blacks, told CNN.
"Online banking, investing - that's hotter than pornographic sites now but it's not being driven home among African Americans. I really don't think they understand it. They think it's too technical, but it's as easy to use as TV and it's better. Once they understand that, it should grow."
It should. But will it?
And if it doesn't, will these same minorities wake up in a decade or so to find themselves and their families at the bottom of the economic and educational heap.
What's clear is that they aren't going to get much help. The institutions of technology, government, education and journalism aren't spending much time or money making sure it the awareness Farrington talks about does grow and spread. American kids are bombarded with patronizing, boring, generally-ignored messages about drugs, drinking, violence and sex but nobody is hiring ad agencies to spur computer awareness - warnings kidor their parents might actually pay attention to and benefit from.
The so-called serious press remains fixated on issues relating to what they perceive as morality - that is, sex pursued under various self-righteous guises -- as the Monica Lewinsky nightmare made so convincingly clear.
Web searches on the subject yield only a handful of links, stories and writings on the subject of equal computing opportunity and Net access for all Americans. Try searching for sites and stories on sex, pornography and computing access for kids if you want to drown in links and lists.
Yet anybody who knows the Internet knows that kids are much more endangered in the 21st Century by restricted access to computing and the Net than they are to exposure to sexual imagery. Net illiteracy will become - already is - an enormous barrier at almost every stage of life. Computing skills are a literal passport to the hi-tech economy.
If foregoing computers or the Net is a choice, fair enough. Nobody should be forced to use computers or browse the Web. But it's a big enough choice that the people making it deserve to understand the implications -- especially for their children.
As the Commerce Report suggests, we are, for now, stuck in the looking glass, living in a country with a governing body that passes two Communications Decency Acts, but wouldn't dream of even considering an Internet Access Act.
The irony is that it would be a lot cheaper to give every kid in the U.S. his or her own computer than hire all the cops it would take to monitor Net communications for "decency". And it would do a lot more good.
Good old J.C.R. Licklider got it, even if the people running the country don't. If everybody gets to use it, The Network could end up as one of the greatest boons ever to mankind. But if the country continues to devolve into the favored and the deprived - rich computer users and poorer, less educated techno-illiterates - he and his fellow engineers and scientists understood well that they were participating instead in the making of a social nightmare.
Actually I do have experience in what it's like to be truly poor. My family was in a tough bind for several years straight. When one of my relatives died, we got some money and my mom decided to put part of it to a new computer. It HAS changed my life. With it I was able to start accumulating skills that allowed me to escape the quagmire of poverty. The same went for the rest of my family.
Computers are a gateway to knowledge, and knowledge, when used effectively, is power. And in our society, power is money.
The basic difference between computers and TV is that TV is a passive medium, and computers are an active medium. That's why I worry about current trends in making computers more user-friendly (or in some case replacing them with passive medium type devices, like WebTV for example). You take the challenge out of it, and then you take away the opportunity. Good-bye knowledge, say hello to all the couch potatoes.
Unfortunately, our culture (American culture that is) thrives on mass media, and mass media thrives on people who don't think and just act on impulse. The World Wide Web was a reversal in that trend... suddenly a mass medium that challenged you and made you a part of a community, rather than a spoon-fed society! But the reversal has reversed again, and we're going back to dumb mass-consumerism.
This is precisely the reason why I don't have much sympathy for those who won't take on new challenges because it might be "too hard". If it's too hard for you, then step aside for someone willing to take on the challenge. You're only standing in the way.
Back to the original article that started this thread: If we want minorty and poor families to get involved with technology, making things easier and more user-friendly won't solve the problem. To them, it's just another type of TV. Why bother? Present them with the challenge of opportunity. Believe me, there will quite a few people who are currently disadvantaged economically who will answer the call.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
White Americans earning less than $75K/year are about twice as likely to be using the Net as black Americans in the same income bracket. Why...?
I suspect it's because the numbers don't tell the whole story. First off, there's a wide variation in people earning less than $75K a year; comparing people earning $60 to 75k a year would be more relevant. Also, while their incomes may be similar, I would bet that the average black person didn't get as much from their parents, and has more "dependents." That is, not children (although they may average more of those), but parents or other relatives who need financial assistance because they didn't earn much, didn't save much (or invest it in stocks), etc.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
How do "dependents" differ from "dependants"?
:-)
Well for one, "dependants" isn't a word (or at least not any longer, see the Etymology below.) From Merriam-Webster online:
Main Entry: dependent
Pronunciation: di-'pen-d&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English dependant, from Middle French, present participle of dependre
[...]
I used the quotes to differentiate from dependents in the U.S. legal sense, which mainly refers to children.
You may be thinking of "defendant," which apparently stayed closer to its Middle English roots.
P.S. PHHBBBTTT!!!
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Look it up yourself at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary, variation 2:
/-d&nt/
Main Entry: dependent
Variant(s): also dependant
Function: noun
Date: 1523
1 archaic : DEPENDENCY
2 : one that is dependent; especially : a person who relies on another for support
Now, I'm a maroon for not checking on dependant (although "independant" is not a word), but I still wasn't wrong to use dependent as a noun originally. Note that the IRS 1040A form uses dependent, not dependant.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Use Google. Scan for oncology and neurology. Grab the correct and detailed medical terminology from those hits, and search on those. If you run across a support group page, read it carefully, it probably has links to detailed info about cause, effects, and treatment options.
The internet has massive amounts of information about any and all medical conditions, you just have to put some research work into it.
While it is true that there remain substantial differences in net access between rich and poor, dual- and single-parent households, based on education and some regional differences, when these things are statistically separated out there is extremely little variation based on race.
The cited Commerce Department report's section on acess and race doesn't offer any help. For example (part I section C, 2), only gives overall racial numbers, and numbers for households below $35K where the differences are greatest because of correlations between race, household status and education.
What's really shameful is where the report talks about "the expanding digital divide" (I C 3 a). The report chooses a completely meaningless metric which makes it look like inequality is increasing when in fact you're just seeing an artifact of the rise in overall net penetration with no increase in white/(black or hispanic) ratio whatsoever!! Click on the link to Chart I-15 to see what I mean.
Properly understood, the difference in access between whites and all minorities is so small- or even counter to what the hype tells us- that a black panalist at the recent Unity convention (five minority journalist organizations) said, "With normalized access rates for Asians and Latinos ahead of whites, and blacks catching up fast, we may soon need a commission of minority experts to help more white people get on line!"
The policy recommendation was obviously tongue-in-cheek, differences based on income, household status and education are significant and need to be addressed. But using this report to say that race needs to be addressed separately will result in wasted effort and bad policy. There are important societal reasons why black and latino families are on average poorer, less educated and more likely single parents- many of which are based on prejudice at various levels. So let's focus on these root causes of these problems and not waste our time on symptoms.
"...the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1)
Firmament Science and Engineering
"...the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1)
Firmament Science and Engineering
Standing on the Solid St
Before those technologies became so ubiquitous that even the poorest people could hope to benefit from them, however, these waves of innovation wracked the world as they came and went. Take the time to study these "Schumpeter's Waves" as reviewed by The Economist, Feburary 20, 1999, "Survey Innovation in Industry", pg 8.
First wave, 1785-1845
Water power
textiles
Iron
Second wave, 1845-1900
Steam
Rail
Steel
Third wave, 1900-1950
Electricity,
Chemicals
Internalc-combustion engine
Fourth wave, 1950-1990
Petrochemicals
Electronics
Aviation
Fifth wave, 1990 - 2020(?)
Digital networks
SOftware
New media
Given a study of history, it is an inevitable conclusion that division of economic classes will occur as these waves come and go. Tragically, these divisions are typically along the lines that existed before. This appears to be happening again, as Mr. Katz's essay shows. Much of this may be inevitable and unstoppable, yet some may be done to stop it.
Certainly, every effort should be made for getting large volumes of computers and networks into the chools and adding to the curriculum to give the new skills early. If such an effort should be made by the government, then current class divides should not become a deciding factor in who gets how much. That would help to narrow the gap of class division.
Yet also, as many of these postings by Slashdotters have pointed out, much of the responsibility does lie in the hands of the individual. Some would say most. A happy, fair balance must be struck, if we are all to be ready to catch The Sixth Wave.
So what will be The Sixth Wave? That will be an exciting question to ponder as we carry out the remaining thirty-year or so course of this exciting revolution.
Until then, happy surfing. Don't wipe out before you catch the next wave.
"On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog".
It's a very common reference to the complete absense of "minority status" in an online world at this point.
I don't buy that minorities are 'disadvantaged' on Internet access. Economic issues aside (which is what the stats are doing), saying that a minority (and let's cut the euphimisms, we're talking about black and hispanic people) family is less likely to have a computer and/or Internet access than a "white" family is not about racism. It's about interests and cultural values. It's also about attitudes toward education and learning, which frankly is very poor in most inner city environments, and among certain cultures within America.
These numbers seem to indicate that the interest of minority persons towards computer and network technology isn't up to the level of gadget-happy, white America.
No one will prevent a black man from buying a computer. The checkout person at Best Buy doesn't care. No one will prevent a hispanic person from getting an Internet account. I've never met anyone from my ISP's over the last several years.
Should economically disadvantaged be offered online access. Sure, but based on economy, not racial lines. Schools. Yes, regardless of economic stature. Should minorities be aware of possible opportunites they may be missing out on by not being "plugged in"? Maybe. But this should be done through education and encouragement, not through civil rights legislation, as I have heard is considered.
I expect that some of the above comments will be construed as racist. Of that I am sorry, as I am not trying to offend anyone. I judge people as individuals, regardless if they are black, white, red, yellow, purple, or polkadotted. However I don't believe that EVERYTHING has to do with race and the majority putting down the minority.
However, I also suppose that in some respects, this whole issue could be just another example of the majority dictating what is important and what isn't to the minority. There are many things that many people find important that have nothing to do with technology; Family, relationships, careers, quality of life, hiking, fishing, spirituality. Maybe being less plugged in is more important in the long run for many people. And maybe they may be right.
While TV may have become a fixture in American society, it did not happen over night. Similarly, you can't expect the same of the net, which requires far greater infrastructure and more equipment to keep going than television. For a long time it was rare someone would have >1 television. TVs are less complicated to operate, as well. Any one who can press channel up/down can have an effective television experience. In the end, you can't really compare TVs to PCs on this subject, because there are inherently different. One is a two-way communications tool, the other is manipulated by "the media" to deliver what they please.
During my first two years of high school (this was 2 years ago, I just graduated), bus tokens were only given out to the "minority" students, as opposed to those living the farthest from the school. I didn't see anyone complain beyond a half-whispered "that's pretty stupid". Had the rule been the opposite, there would be 10 lawsuits for every black student in the school. By the way, I think the rule is still in effect - I just went to a different school for the second two years.
Many colleges are now offering scholarships for "minority" students only. Of course, how could I forget mentioning affirmative action.
It seems to have become acceptable to favor minorities simply because of their race, which is what the minorities were fighting against not so long ago. If race really doesn't matter (which is my opinion, BTW) then these statistics are pointless, right? So why pay attention to them?
</rant>
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Look at VCRs. To program it, all you have to do is set the date and time when you want it to record whatever it is you want to record, and the channel it will be on. Still, most people have trouble doing this - the endless jokes are evidence.
TVs and VCRs are fairly simple to use. How do you expect an average person to use a computer? Maybe things like the iToast will solve this, but today's computers aren't for everyone.
Also, most people who have never even seen a computer, except on TV, see them as something complex and something that is beyond their ability to understand.
Another obstacle is all the articles about some naive girl meeting someone she talked to on AOL and getting raped and/or killed. "I don't want my kids on the Internet with all those psychos around."
Here is more proof. Make sure you read the users' comments.
This is why not everyone is on the Net yet. Just give it some time, though - we'll get there eventually.
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I think most people /do/ want a single-family detached home instead of a massive apartment or condo complex where people are packed together like ants.
Those who rail against suburbia have some valid points, but I see more anti-suburbia negativity than I see positive advocacy of the alternative. I suspect this is because the alternative is unpalateable to many.
I think the negative things people attribute to suburbia are at least partially created by our own fears. We have somehow been trained to fear other people instead of loving them. I think if we were trained to love, suburbia would be a friendly place. But since we're trained to fear, suburbia becomes cold and sterile. Packing a lot of people in one place isn't going to fix society. Look what happened to high-rise housing for the poor - they were such horrid places to live they were abandoned or blown up.
(I will admit that I hate the kind of suburb where the laws of the subdivision don't allow you to change one brick of the house you supposedly own. But that's not a characteristic of suburbia itself - check out the Hollywood Hills and you'll see single family detached homes, each one unique).
D
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To use the net successfully, you have to do two things: read and write. I know that we have all kinds of pretty pictures now, but if you want to communicate or find stuff, reading and writing are vital.
The most popular medium in the country is television, because it doesn't require any form of thinking. You don't need to read to understand TV; you just need to watch and listen. A bestselling book attracts less than a million readers; a popular TV series attracts 50-100 million viewers. I think this gives you an idea of the disparity between people who like to read (natural net users) and those who like to watch (people who may never master the net).
I'm not sure what, if anything can be done about this. My gut feeling is that only sharp people are going to put the effort it takes to use the net. And I don't think people who aren't sharp will ever be more than a peripheral part of net culture.
But frankly, so what? People who aren't smart enough to use the net aren't going to do well with all those new jobs anyway.
Of course I've always been a bit of an elitist, personally. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
D
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send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Now that I've gotten your attention with the subject line ... :^)
The issue of access and class/race stratification is an important one, and I'm glad that Jon Katz chose to highlight it for /. However, while he makes a good start at outlining the issues, he then muddies the water by using equitable internet access as a springboard for some unrelated rants about pornography on the internet and blocking software.
Here are some issues where Katz is clearly missing the point or just doesn't get it:
Sex on the Internet is a legitimate issue . Please remember that the First-Amendment, free speech rights are not absolutes. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded theater, you can't slander or libel without being liable, and you can't distribute obscene materials. Obscenity laws have, in general, been upheld by Supreme Court review (IIRC, particular obscenity laws have been struck down for various reasons, but the concept itself has been upheld as Constitutional). The test is normally "community standards" and "redeeming social value."
The only difficulty that the internet brings to this situation is that the definition of obscenity (and enforcement of obscenity statutes) varies from place to place. When dealing with distribution of physical media, this isn't that much of a problem. You simply end up with results such as Playboy being sold in city A while not being available on shelves in city B. But with the internet, by making something available on the web (or via FTP download), you've managed to "publish" simultaneously in cities A and B (and even countries X, Y, and Z). Which leads directly to the next point ...
Blocker software is about empowerment, not censorship . People like to talk about how "decentralizing" the internet is, but in reality it centralizes in some very key ways. By saying "open the floodgates" to pornography, with no ability to do blocking, you have circumvented the ability of communities and of families to make and enforce their own decisions about what constititues community and family standards. That doesn't look like empowerment to me. If the only possible standard I can apply is the lowest common denominator of the entire world, and everyone needs to apply that standard everywhere, it looks pretty centralized to me.
There are other problems with Katz's essay, such as the relative importance of internet access among problems facing teenagers today, and the lack of mention of how free software can make a difference in providing internet access (such as Mexico's decision to use GNOME rather than some proprietary company's software for their schools, so that they could actually afford to get computers into the classroom. But I don't have time for that today, hopefully someone else will pick up the slack.
Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. -- G. K. Chesterton
Absolutely!!! I mean come off it North America! For crying out loud you ignore your kids, expect TV to raise them, don't instill any values in them, and you don't force your school boards to teach the essentials of literacy, history and mathematics and now you complain of the disparity! Get real! Quit smoking. Quit drinking. Spend some time with your kids. Get your priorities straight. And when the kid can't read, do simple long divisionin or write a legible sentence in long hand in the first place, regardless of colour, a computer isn't going to help until they can. Technology is wonderful but you have to have the mental tools to know how to use it in the first place. And why, can someone tell me, is the internet required for research today? Are there no libraries anymore? No newspapers? What gives? Or am I a Luddite?
If what I said is nonsense,
I'm making a point with it.
If what I said makes perfect sense,
you obviously missed the point.
Microsoft's offer was a free PC in exchange for 3yrs MSN signup at $17/mo, and others have similar deals. If you can't prioritize your spending to afford $17/mo on your kids, then you shouldn't be having kids in the first place.
Yes, I know that "obscenity" is not legally protected under the First Amendment. Who doesn't?
However, bear in mind the things that obscenity laws have been invoked to stop: information on birth control, AIDS awareness sites, gay teen support groups, images of classical artwork, even pictures of breastfeeding mothers! Oops, was there a baby in that bathwater?
Furthermore, is a kid honestly going to be traumatized-for-life by a couple of nasty pictures? I've never understood that "logic", which is what Katz seems to be complaining about the most, anyhow. I saw old copies of Playboy and Hustler in the fire station bathrooms on a Girl Scout field trip (of all things!), and I don't think it damaged me.
And if all blocking software had a design similar to SafeSurf or RSACi, which allow for customized description of content and varied blocking levels, I'd say go for it. But when we've got crap like CyberSitter out there, which is blocking sites that have nothing to do with explicit sex or violence or intolerance (let's see
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
... the Hellmouth. Remember?
It's Not Cool to Be Smart.
Even among the "gifted and talented" it's still not considered cool to really have an interest in something intellectual. To an extent, this goes away by college (depending on what college you're at), but even then you can still run into it in more subtle forms.
And how many times have those of you who have gone as far in school as you care to for the forseeable future heard, or said, "I'm not in school anymore; why should I stretch my brain?"
"Educational" and "fun" are still supposed to be oxymorons in this country, and in pseudo-attempts to combat that, people say and do the damndest things
*sigh* It's funny, but it's horribly depressing at the same time. And until the culture as a whole gets some respect for education, we're not going to see much improvement. The lifestyle that the underclass wants to move up to tends to be brainless middle-class ignorant suburbia anyhow. (Yes, I'm bitter -- look at my
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
What you have to understand is that with all of the "Red scares" in this country, the mass media became very allergic to ANY talk about class at all. The lessons of McCarthy sunk in a bit too well in some cases.
Race made a handy metaphor for class, and it's been used and abused in this fashion. And you better believe it pissed me off when a black student whose family makes more money than mine (and I don't exactly come from poverty) is getting scholarships that she doesn't need, while my parents scrimped and saved and rearranged priorities such that I didn't need to be on financial aid.
That's because Americans don't want to talk about class, and those who try get "You godless Commie!" screamed at them for their troubles. The exception is academia, but this does WHAT exactly to fix the problem? Nothing, really. It mostly becomes a concern to those who have access to higher education in the first place.
And there is something wrong with not asking the have-nots precisely what it is that they would like to have. Admittedly, you and I aren't likely to like some of the answers (as I've posted elsewhere, most of them seem to want white-bread suburbia to start with). But it would make a good starting point.
It's sort of like what happened to the feminist movement in the 1960s -- Betty Freidan made a huge tactical error that had all sorts of race and class bias tucked away into it: Women can't possibly be fulfilled by the "domestic arts," so hire a cleaning lady and live out your life the way you were meant to. Um
I'd like to stay that other social movements (including those that try to advance education) have learned from this mistake, but I'm not so sure.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
And again, I find it ironic that I see someone griping about the very existance of the minimum wage on
Here's a clue: Someone who works minimum wage jobs for 40 hours/week makes just over $10K in a year. Perhaps this person holds two min wage jobs (since most such jobs are reluctant to give overtime), both for 30 hours a week (so the employer can say the employee is "part-time"), thereby making about $15K in a year.
I worked a minimum wage 32.5 hour/week work-study job in the summer when I was at college, and was able to live off of it -- barely. I had no car at the time, and was renting a room the size of a large closet for $100/month plus utilities from some friends of mine. It's not an experience I would care to repeat.
I also just love the assumption that blue-collar workers are lazy. Here I am slacking off a bit on the job as an entry-level tech. writer. And over at Toys R Us, there's my boyfriend working on a remodel project, carrying heavy things around for 7.5 hours/day and getting paid $3.25 less an hour for it. I freely admit that I'm the lazy one here, but the default assumption is exactly the opposite.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
And not promoting non "opensourced" books here, he might have the bright conclusion that hey. We don't want every American in this country to be computer literate. In fact, It guarantees high salaries for the people that actually read slashdot.
Katz might not have been clued enough to come to this conclusion because well, he writes books for a living. Katz doesn't exactly have to worry about what he will be doing for work in twenty years.
I on the other hand have the concern that this boom market of jobs may be sated in the next ten years by the outsourcing of most IT labor from countries such as India and Pakistan. My future job might just not be economically viable one day for an employer faced with the opportunity of cheap technical labor from developing nations.
Katz doesn't consider these things, though. Who would expect him to? It's easy for an Author with his head in the clouds to preach equal opportunity for all, but the fact of the matter is if everything was "equal" the way he wants the world to be, the only people that would make money would be stock holders of large public corporations, and of course, the authors that would continue to write books about them.
This country is about initiative. It's not about total exposure. Anyone who lives in America today has the ability to use a personal computer if they choose to do so. I could safely even go a step further and say that ownership of a personal computer is financially plausable for any tax paying citizen in this day and age. Katz's opinion is nothing more then scare tactics that sell his next book, except it's just not the sixties anymore.
I dare Katz to cancel his publishing contract and put his book out for free online. Then donate all profits to the charity of his choice. Given the amount of socialist utopian bullshit he preches, this should be the kind of action that should be expected of him.