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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.
"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.
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