The digital divide is closing!....But it’s not all good news.

      It seems as if the digital divide is closing in this country.  In order to understand why and what implications are forming let’s start at the beginning. Personal computers were first in the homes of rich white families. Following them it was more wealthy white people, and then it was the middle class families who were primarily white. These individuals have had a jumpstart on the online world because they could afford the costly hardware.

      

     After a few years computers started to become more affordable, but they were still expensive so some families could afford them and some couldn’t. For the most part it was still African American families and Latino families that did not have computers.  Eventually this gap got smaller and closed so now today we see all groups within close ownership of laptops and smart phones with internet access. 

   According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle the problem now is not that enough people don’t have access to the internet, it is what they are doing online and what they aren’t doing online.Whites are primarily using the internet evenly across the board for news, entertainment, business, and so on while Latinos and African Americans seem to be trailing behind in what would be considered productive areas and surging ahead in what is considered pure entertainment. Why is this? Why is facebook, twitter, and other types of media so popular compared to reading news, checking stocks, job searches? Everyone thought the problem was that the poorer population didn’t have access and now they do they seem to still be struggling to get ahead. What went wrong and why are we still having issues if the playing field has had some leveling.

     The problem may no longer be that many don’t have access, it could be the hardware. African Americans and Latinos use cell phones heavily to access the internet, but a cell phone can’t fill out an application, a cell phone can’t design a website, it can’t do many things a real computer can and that is part of the problem. Focusing on the hardware could be the next step. Somehow we need to move away from the immediate entertainment and ease of use and look at a way to empower individuals who have been held back. Studies are showing vast differences in productiveness when you own your own home computer vs owning a smart phone, using a computer at work, or using a friends. We cant expect to fix the problem without the right product and the right product is a computer not a smart phone with internet access.