Appendix II: Further Information on the Digital Divide in the United States
1. The information below is taken from Falling through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide.A complete copy of the report can be accessed online throughhttp://www.ntia.doc.gov. There are also summary sheets on particular groups' situations.
2. While Black and Hispanic households are twice as likely to own computers today as they were in 1994, the gap between White and Black households with regard to computers grew nearly 40 percent between 1994-1998. The gap in regard to the Internet has grown even more. The gap between White and Black households connected to the Internet increased by over 53 percent and by 56 percent between White and Hispanic households.
3. A child in a low-income White family is three times as likely to have Internet access as a child in a comparable Black family. A child in a dual-parent White household is nearly twice as likely to have Internet access as a child in a White single-parent household, while a child in a dual-parent Black family is almost four times as likely to have access as a child in a single-parent Black household. A high-income household in an urban area is more than twenty times as likely to have Internet access as a rural, low-income household.
4. Cost and "don't want to" are the major reasons people give for not accessing the Internet. Cost was also the biggest reason people gave for dropping off the Internet. While education and income are the leading elements creating the digital divide, these factors vary along racial and ethnic lines, meaning that minority groups will continue to face a greater digital divide over time.
5. While the study was of the view that eventually falling prices may allow a greater number of people - regardless of race - to purchase computers and connect to the Internet, waiting for prices to fall is seen as a long-term solution to the racial divide. In the short-term, community access centres (such as schools, public libraries, and community centres) are seen as necessary to help to narrow the racial connectivity divide.
6. An earlier, separate study is illuminating in respect of the growth of the digital divide. A study by Owen Graduate School of Management, University of Vanderbilt, based on early 1997 data, found that nearly twice as many African/American as Whites (27.2% vs. 16.7%) stated that they planned to purchase a home computer in the next six months.53 Despite this avowed intention however, the later NTIA Digital divide study found that White households continued to own computers at a rate roughly twice that of Black households.
7. The NTIA study also showed that groups that are less likely to have Internet access at home or at work (ethnic minorities, those with lower incomes and educational qualifications, and those who are unemployed) tend to access the Internet at public facilities, such as schools and libraries, for online activities that can result in their economic advancement. This includes taking educational courses, engaging in schools research or conducting job searches. The unemployed are more than three times more likely to use the Internet outside of home for job searching than the national average even though they have to rely on public access points. Nearly 54 percent of those in the study who were unemployed using the Internet at home were searching for jobs online.54
8. Certain areas of the country, usually those with a low population density, are less likely to have high rates of access. Despite issues around connectivity, this study showed that people in rural areas were taking courses at higher rates compared to those in central city and urban areas.
9. However, cost is not the only factor in relation to families without a computer. Amongst Black families earning $15,000-$35,000, only 19 percent owned computers compared to more than 33 percent of Whites.
10. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, in response to the Digital divide report, Henry Louis Gates Jr made the point that few African Americans have been compelled to sign on to a medium (the Internet) that offered little to interest them. He makes the point that Blacks only began to respond to the new medium of the recorded music industry when mainstream record companies introduced so-called race records aimed at a nascent African-American market. New content made the new medium attractive.
11. Gates Jr sees the Internet as the 21st century's talking drum, the very kind of grass-roots communication tool that has been such a powerful source of education and culture for Black people since slavery. In his view, unless Black Americans master new ICT they will face a form of cybersegregation as devastating as the Jim Crow segregation was to their ancestors - a situation that Blacks themselves, as well as governments, have to address (which is being done by partnerships between Black groups and the ICT industry such as that between the Urban League and AT&T). 55
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