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"digital divide" is dead. The New York Times buried its eulogy
in a brief in Tuesday's business section. "People
with low incomes using the World Wide Web at home accounted for
the fastest-growing online group over the last," quoth the Times,
referring to a new report by Nielsen/NetRatings.
Minorities have also jumped onto the web in record numbers. Nearly
nine million African Americans surfed the net in the past year;
that compares to 87 million whites, 6 million Hispanics, 2 million
Asian Americans, and almost 1 million American Indians.
Going by the new 2001 census figures, this means that nearly the
same proportion of blacks (26%) is cruising the Net as whites (32%).
American Indians, it turns out, are more net-literate than
whites.
Now that the "digital divide" has been exposed as a chimera, it
may not get the press it used to. For years it has been a favorite
hobbyhorse of the New York Times. The Times ran more
than 100 stories on it last year. Under the guise of "trend journalism,"
these articles bewailed the plight of the supposed Internet underclass.
Typical of these was a feature story last January by Katie Hafner
called, "We're Not All Connected, Yet." In it Kafner interviews
the heads of organizations at places like the "Appalachian Center
for Economic Networks," the "Digital Divide Working Group," and
"Clickstart." These fledgling Internet start-ups, like the hordes
of undercapitalized dot-coms that have tanked the Nasdaq, needed
cash; so they asked the White House to pony up cash for a massive
make-work project: closing the digital divide.
All the hand wringing won over President Clinton, who announced
a $2.4 billion "Clinton-Gore Agenda for Creating Digital Opportunity"
in February, 2001. Its press release warned — without relying
on a scintilla of hard evidence — that the "divide is actually
widening." Never one to miss an opportunity for demagoguery, the
Rev. Jesse Jackson called the digital divide a "classic form of
apartheid."
If you say something exists enough times, people may just wind up
believing it. That, at least, is Jackson's signature rhetorical
gambit. Last May, he told reporters, "the digital divide is now
a household word, and gaps are self-evident." (He's now trying the
same ploy with "chad chasm," a Jacksonesque alliteration meant to
refer to the Great Disenfranchisement of 2000.)
As Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine has observed, the suggestion
that a digital divide ever existed — or that it mattered even
if it did — hung on a tissue of lies and left-wing propaganda.
Earlier studies that hinted at a gap — "between those who've
got the tools and those who don't" as Clinton put it — were
flawed. For instance, a 1998 survey by Clinton's Commerce Department
failed to consider access outside the home — a pretty big oversight
given that earlier surveys had found that most users went online
at work or school.
Incoming Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell
had an inkling that all this talk about a digital divide was bunk.
When he was tapped for FCC boss by President Bush, he said he thought
the term "digital divide" was a dangerous one because it could be
used to justify government entitlement programs to guarantee poor
people cheaper access to new technologies, like television sets
or computers. "I think there is a Mercedes divide," he quipped.
"I'd like to have one; I can't afford one."
The new Nielsen numbers vindicate Powell's skepticism. They also
expose the stunning gullibility of liberals who bought into this
shibboleth without abiding by facts or common sense. Last year,
Al Gore told a gathering at Morehouse, a black college, that "we
have hundreds of thousands and millions who have the ability, the
curiosity, the desire to learn and to succeed but have not had the
opportunity and the access." In a chapel named for Martin Luther
King Jr., Gore invoked the civil-rights leader's memory when stressing
the need to build computer-learning centers in black communities
across America.
What hooey. And what an affront to blacks.
According to a report last year by Andersen Consulting (a.k.a. Accenture),
91% of U.S. households will be online by 2005. That is more households
than now have VCRs or cell phones — but no one beats their
chest, not yet anyway — about the "VCR-divide" or the "cell-phone
gap." Like any new technology, the Internet has simply taken time
to disperse throughout the general population. Blacks and other
minorities don't need billion-dollar boondoggle agencies to make
them into better people. Nor does anyone else.
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