Digital Divide--So Close And Yet So Far

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mericans can generally afford aspirations beyond mere survival, but Gates' principle--those most at risk of digital disenfranchisement often have their minds on other problems--still applies here. Leah Garland, a second-grade teacher who transferred from an inner-city school in Macon, Ga., to one in the middle-class suburb of McDonough, south of Atlanta, has seen it firsthand. Her Macon pupils (one of whom had his book bag stolen for drug money by his estranged mother) were just as eager as their McDonough counterparts to get their hands on computers. But in Macon, Garland had to battle both short attention spans and the kids' belief that the Internet had nothing to do with their future. "There's little to no parental support for the kids who don't have technology in their homes," says Garland. "And the parents wouldn't buy it if they had the money."

Which is why the $1.6 billion spent during the past seven years by the state of Georgia to get computer equipment into schools doesn't count for much by itself. Well aware of that, town leaders in LaGrange, Ga., are going the extra distance to build an entire Internet-friendly community. Last March, Mayor Jeff Lukken announced that all 11,000 La Grange households would have the option of free high-speed cable-modem access, thanks to a deal he'd spent three years cutting with cable provider Charter Communications, based in St. Louis, Mo. Charter provides the cable box and basic service (cost: $9 a month), and if you can't afford even that, the city will pay for it. "People resist technology because it's irrelevant to their lives, because they fear it, distrust it or can't afford it," says Lukken. "We want to take away every barrier to entry." So far, half the town has signed up; most of the rest already had Internet access. The result is a town of Capra-esque perfection, where the senior center and public housing have superfast hookups to the largest repository of knowledge and commerce ever created. Getting everyone to make full use of it is a different matter. "It's a God-sent gift," says Teri Rockel, a nurse with a 10-year-old daughter.

But is LaGrange's perfection replicable? Will other broadband companies--especially those serving poor or isolated rural districts--be willing to repeat the experiment? Right now 18 million urban and suburban homes and only 1 million rural homes have broadband Internet access. The most popular digital-divide bill before Congress offers tax relief to Baby Bells that make rural phone lines dsl- ready. Trouble is, DSL is the kind of broadband service that requires you to be within a certain distance of your local switching station. Upgrading rural lines across the country would cost a staggering $11 billion. It's hard to imagine a tax break that could compensate.

Corporations do occasionally dole out digital freebies--especially to their own employees. Delta Airlines, for one, started offering dirt-cheap laptops and desktops to its 74,000 staff members in October. Americans who don't enjoy the shelter of corporate wings often have to rely on charity to join the 21st century--or, in some cases, to get a recycled piece of the 20th. Computers to Help People, a nonprofit based in Madison, Wis., turns donated computer parts into systems for people who can't afford new ones. It's a wonderfully well-intentioned enterprise but one more doomed than most others by blitzkrieg advances in computing. Admits Carl Durocher, the agency's assistant technology manager: "We're not closing the digital divide a whole lot like this."

So who is? More and more, it's those with enough determination and luck to scrape together the necessary equipment and learning. Take Withrow High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, an inner-city, 85% African-American school where students were being taught on typewriters less than two years ago. Now all its classrooms have Internet access of some kind, on whatever computers the school could beg, borrow or recycle. It took all the state grants, vocational funds and educational charities principal Paul Ramstetter could muster. He had to eliminate the home-economics class in order to buy a couple of $2,500 laptops. "We decided to go for technology," says Ramstetter. "We thought it was more important."

Yet it appears there is a large and stubborn minority of the population who do not share Ramstetter's priorities. Professors at UCLA recently conducted the first of what is to be an annual, large-scale study of patterns of Internet usage. The first survey, while offering good news on the gender and race front--more women went online last year than men, more blacks and Latinos than whites--uncovered a whole new group of disaffected--those who are Luddites and proud of it. Half of those with no Internet access, around 20%, were simply not interested in getting online. "That will take a generation or two to straighten out," predicts Professor Jeffrey Cole, author of the study. "The U.S. may well end up being the last industrialized nation to achieve 90% Internet penetration."