The Digital Divide: Is the Internet a Racist Concept?
(NPR Commentary)
By Dinesh D'Souza

“Digital apartheid,” NAACP president Kweisi Mfume calls it. Social critic Michael Walzer frets about the “digital haves” and the “digital have-nots.” Physicist Freeman Dyson warns that “people who are not wired are in danger of becoming the new servant class.” Tech moguls like Ted Waitt and Gordon Moore have warned that the web is empowering some people and disenfranchising others.

What they are talking about is the digital divide—the problem that minority groups don’t have access to the Internet in the way that whites—especially rich whites—do. One activist has even suggested re-naming the Internet the World White Web. Some have called for the government to provide “info-stamps,” the high-tech equivalent of food stamps, to enable the digitally deprived to buy access to computers and the web. These charges raise the question: is the Internet a racist concept?

It is certainly true that not everyone uses the Internet equally. Surveys show that whites and Asian Americans are more likely to surf the net than Hispanics and African Americans. The discrepancy is even more pronounced along economic lines. Poor and lower-middle-class people are much less wired than the upper-middle-class and the affluent. These are facts, but do they really reflect a problem of “access”?

After all, Internet access today seems about as serious a problem in the United States as “telephone access,” “television access” or “automobile access.” The poor in this country don’t have much of a problem gaining access to phones, cars and television sets, so why should computers be any different? Admittedly when computers cost $2,500 five years ago, it made sense to worry that only families with discretionary income could afford them. Now a second-hand computer doesn’t cost any more than a TV set, and some companies are virtually giving away PCs. Internet use ranges in price from $20 a month to free. Increasingly computers with web connections are popping up in public schools and public libraries. Soon they will be at post offices, airports and train stations. So just about everyone in America who wants access can have it.

There is a digital divide, but it is not about gaining access to computers or the net. The real digital divide is that some people and some groups know how to use these tools to get information and put it to use, and others are not as adept in doing so. In the United States, the information and knowledge are available; the problem is one of teaching people the value of knowledge, how to obtain it, and what to do with it. The digital divide is a skills divide that can only be bridged through education. We have to teach our young people, especially those who are captive to poverty and disadvantage, how information technology can be a source of wealth and of liberation.

Abroad, especially in the Third World, the situation is different. There, access is a genuine problem. Today only about 10 percent of the world’s population has access to the Internet. But network and storage capacities are increasing at a rapid rate, and costs are decreasing. The good news is that, over time, access to information will cost pennies or nothing. Even in the villages of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the issue of web access will become irrelevant in the not-too-distant future. The world’s biggest library and the world’s biggest marketplace will both be available essentially free to anyone, anywhere.

(See also: The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence)