May 31, 2012--The Digital Divide Revisited

Walking the streets of Manhattan it looks as if the digital divide, of great concern during the 1990s, has been bridged.

Pretty much everyone is so hooked up to something digital that bulky people texting while dodging cars and buses are another traffic hazard. Unless you give them wide berth they are as likely to crash into you as rampaging taxis and, increasingly, bicyclists.

The concern then about the divide was as much cultural as socioeconomic. The evidence was clear--affluent folks were two or three times more likely to own or have access to computers and wireless devices than low-income people. Of special concern was the divide between children--without access to the increasingly essential Internet, the digitally deprived would fall further and further behind those who could Google or get help with their schoolwork from Wikipedia.

Forget emailing and texting--back then social networking still meant actually talking with flesh-and-blood friends. Not Facebook's virtual version.

Government officials and progressive foundations worried about this and so did people who wanted to sell us things. The more Americans who had the capacity to go on line the better Amazon would do. So telecommunication companies were required to expand low-cost broadband access to inner cities as well as rural communities, particularly to schools and libraries.

As a result, the United States is doing better, but access inequalities persist--though 65 percent of all families have broadband access at home, only 40 percent of households with annual incomes of less than $20,000 do while half of Hispanic and 41 percent of African-American homes lack broadband connectivity.

This is just the beginning of the story. There is yet another equally worrisome divide.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, Internet-connected lower-income children are wasting more time on line than more advantaged youngsters.

In households where neither parent is a college graduate, kids spend an hour a day more playing video games, Facebooking, texting, and watching TV than children who have better educated parents. An astonishing 11.5 hours per day as compared with "only"10 hours for other youngsters. And this gap is widening.

Further, since less well educated parents are not as computer literate as more affluent adults and since they have less time to spend with their children because they have to work more jobs to stay afloat, they aren't as able to monitor what their children are up to while on line.

There is a current TV commercial in which a mother pokes her head into her son's bedroom to check to see what he's doing on his computer. She asks something like, "How's your homework coming, Jimmy?"  He quickly clicks on Wikipedia, hiding the fact that he's been surfing what we presume are Websites where child predators are lurking.

These real threats aside, spending all day on YouTube is not a good thing.