What is needed to make information age tools an opportunity, rather than a barrier, for low-income Americans?
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To many people, Palo Alto, Calif., is America's Information Age capital. But that city, snuggled in Silicon Valley, has something in common with the nation's political capital. Just as the marbled perfection of federal Washington, D.C., stands in sharp contrast to some impoverished and crime-infested neighborhoods that surround it, the many opportunities that technology is creating in affluent parts of Silicon Valley cannot be found in East Palo Alto. "Anywhere else in Silicon Valley, your parents use computers, there is a shop down the street to sell you a computer, another to fix your computer, another to give you computer classes, [and] there are Kinkos everywhere," notes Bart Decrem, director of a California youth technology initiative called Plugged In. "In East Palo Alto, there's none of that." Decrem stands at the edge of a great divide. On one side is an America rapidly rebuilding its economy around digital technologies: a society in which technology increasingly is the key not only to economic success, but to political and social success as well. On the other side are inner cities and isolated rural communities, where the new tools of the Information Age are much harder to find: an America in which individuals lack the skills required in today's technologically-oriented job market and where communities are finding it ever more difficult to hold themselves together as jobs flee and social bonds fray. If this technology gap is not closed, the dream that the Information Age will bring economic advancement and social progress could give way to a future in which social divisions grow deeper and despair tightens its grip on those who are left behind. Realizing the dream will take a concerted effort at all levels, from Washington to the grassroots. |
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Falling behind
A poll conducted by the Times-Mirror Center for the People and the Press in May and June 1995 painted a stark picture. Just 16 percent of people earning less than $30,000 a year have computers at home, compared with 55 percent of those earning more than $50,000. Not surprisingly, the Rand Corporation reported in a separate study that only 3 percent of the poorest quarter of families with incomes below $15,000 had Internet access in 1993, compared with 20 percent of those in the most affluent quarter of the population.
These figures carry ominous implications, not only for the individuals involved but also for the inner-city neighborhoods and isolated rural areas where disproportionate numbers of such people live. "Information technologies represent an opportunity to level the playing field," notes Amy Borgstrom, executive director of ACENet, an organization dedicated to using networking technologies to open new markets for citizens in Appalachia. "But without infrastructure, training, and access, information technology and these opportunities will pass these communities by. It will be a disaster."
Who suffers?
Young people who are not exposed to the new technologies increasingly find themselves at a disadvantage in today's job market. By 2000 some 60 percent of jobs will require technological skills, according to Larry Irving, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information for the U.S. Department of Commerce. Moreover, the earning prospects of people who lack technological skills are bleak: according to the U.S. Department of Labor, people who use computers on the job earn 43 percent more than other workers.
As skilled jobs disappear from inner cities, the neighborhoods that are left behind are caught in a vicious cycle. Lacking exposure to new technologies, they are not building the human capital—workers skilled in using the new tools of the digital age—needed to attract high-paying industry to their neighborhoods. At the same time, without such industry nearby, they have a hard time developing a technologically skilled workforce.
Moreover, because they are not connected to emerging communications networks, they are less able to seek redress through the political system. Indeed, as more and more government and commercial transactions take place online, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) notes on its website, Americans without access are finding it increasingly difficult "to fully participate in our nation's economic, social, civic, and government life."
The role of government
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 included several provisions to begin addressing this imbalance. Most important, it established a new mechanism to promote universal access to telecommunications services. It also created a Telecommunications Development Fund to stimulate new technology development and "promote delivery of telecommunications services to underserved rural and urban areas." And it set up the National Educational Technology Funding Corporation to foster the spread of new technologies to schools.
Public interest advocates will be tracking all these activities to ensure that the needs of low-income communities are addressed. They also will be watching such continuing government efforts as the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP), which since 1994 has awarded 276 grants for telecommunications projects, and HUD's "Neighborhood Networks" initiative, which seeks to encourage the development of community technology centers in public housing areas.
Grassroots initiatives
But much of the work of spreading digital technologies to disadvantaged areas ultimately will be done through community-based projects like Decrem's Plugged In. Operating out of a storefront between a check-cashing center and a boarded-up store, the East Palo Alto project offers 30 different classes ranging from beginning Macintosh to web page design. The goal is not only to teach young people new skills, but also to help build up their self-esteem and foster leadership. It teaches entrepreneurship as well; a for-profit arm offers web design and other publishing services to area businesses.
Plugged In is just one of a number of creative initiatives that will be highlighted in a Benton Foundation report on technology and poverty later this year. In New York City United Neighborhood Houses, part of the University Settlement Society of New York, has opened neighborhood "family rooms" in five settlement houses where low-income families can use the organization's computer network to connect with the Internet for job listings or other information. In Boston a corps of 70 volunteers runs a computer center established by the nonprofit foundation Virtually Wired. The center teaches such classes as "Introduction to the Internet," "Job Searching," and "Building Web Pages." Some 110 community-access centers have joined a loose affiliation known as the Community Technology Centers' Network (CTCNet). CTCNet is an outgrowth of Playing to Win Centers, which were founded by Toni Stone, a high school math teacher who opened her first public-access center in Harlem in 1983.
Community centers have proven to be an effective device for introducing technology into disadvantaged communities. But they face tough challenges in figuring out how to survive and become self-sustaining at a time when funding can be hard to find. "The recipe for introducing technology into low-income communities is there," says John Anthony Butler, the National Urban League's vice president for technology. "It's just a question of whether we as a society going to make enough of an investment."
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Break Away Technologies
"If young people are computer literate and well mannered, then they can go anywhere and be comfortable," says Loeb, founder of the Break Away Technologies computer training center in Los Angeles. The center offers students basic instruction in computers, networking, and electronic publishing, but it seeks to accomplish much more. Each class also emphasizes character development and personal responsibility. As students advance through classes, they take on more responsibility, working first as study partners and then as mentors. Loeb says the center seeks to make students "visible examples of leadership in the community." Break Away Technologies has come a long way since 1992, when Loeb sold his car and used the proceeds to start teaching kids about computers out of his garage. The training center now operates out of a building formerly occupied by a bank in the Crenshaw Corridor neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles. It has about 100 computers, most of them donated by Microsoft. Each day about 400 elementary school students from the West Angeles Christian Academy come to the center to attend workshops. Every afternoon 75 to 100 teens wander into Break Away to attend classes and to surf the Internet. A teen development group, Rites of Passage, also comes in for classes. The center often works with children in group homes. And on Fridays and Saturdays it offers classes for adults. Most recently, Break Away became a "mentor site" for training nonprofit arts organizations and individual artists in online communications and electronic publishing under the Open Studio program, operated jointly by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Benton Foundation. Break Away receives the bulk of its funding from private donations and private foundations. It also charges a minimal fee for classes and services. |
To Joseph Loeb, skills training and moral education are closely connected.
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