NEW DIVIDE BETWEEN HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS?

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If there was any lingering doubt that the computer has become ensconced as a member of the American family, it was dispelled at the turn of the year by some startling statistics. For the first time ever, consumers in 1994 bought $8 billion worth of PCs -- just a smidgen away from the $8.3 billion they spent on TVs. The sales record in terms of dollars is bound to fall to the computer soon, though the TV's cheaper price guarantees its dominion in numbers for a while yet.

In the nation's poorer areas, however -- places like Washington's Anacostia neighborhood, the hollows of Appalachia or Miami's Liberty City -- families with IBM Activas, NEC CD-ROM drives, modems, Internet connections and all the other paraphernalia so beloved by computer users are few and far between. Therein lies one of the most troubling aspects of the emerging information age. In an era in which success is increasingly identified with the ability to use computers and gain access to cyberspace, will the new technology only widen the gap between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, blacks, whites and Hispanics? As Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown puts it, ``How do you create an environment so that once we've built this information infrastructure, you do not create a society of haves and have-nots?''

The stakes are high. Access to the information highway may prove to be less a question of privilege or position than one of the basic ability to function in a democratic society. It may determine how well people are educated, the kind of job they eventually get, how they are retrained if they lose their job, how much access they have to their government and how they will learn about the critical issues affecting them and the country. No less an expert than Mitch Kapor, co-founder of Lotus Development Corp. and now president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, feels that those who do not have access ``will be highly correlated with the general have-nots. Early in the next century the network will become the major conduit through which we conduct our lives. Any disenfranchisement will be very severe.''

The fact is that access to the new technology generally breaks down along traditional class lines. Wealthy and upper-middle-class families form the bulk of the 30% of American households that own computers. Similarly, wealthier school districts naturally tend to have equipment that is unavailable to poorer ones, and schools in the more affluent suburbs have twice as many computers per student as their less-well-funded urban counterparts. All this disparity comes to a head in this statistic: a working person who is able to use a computer earns 15% more than someone in a similar job who cannot.

The debate over how to handle the problem pits the freewheeling techno- cowboys of the computer and telecommunications industries against traditional advocates for the poor. The computer and telecommunications industries proclaim a paramount faith in market forces, at least partly because they fear eventual government regulation of access to the infobahn. As they see it, the forces of competition and the marketplace will drive the prices of equipment and online services downward and make both increasingly available to the less affluent.