February 07, 2000 New Thinking:
The widening divide
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February 07, 2000
The widening divide
By Gerry McGovern
Is it one billion or two billion people who live on less than one dollar a day? Is it five million or ten million orphans that will be left in Africa as a result of the AIDS epidemic? And what impact, if any, is the Internet having on world poverty and inequality?
“Caught up in the growth of the Internet, we seem to have lost sight of the earth’s deteriorating health,” Lester R. Brown, president of Worldwatch stated recently. “It would be a mistake to confuse the vibrancy of the virtual world with the increasingly troubled state of the real world.”
We are told that the world has never been better off. Certainly for those of us involved with the Internet, we are in a lucky position. However, even in wealthy countries such as the United States, the divide between those who are ‘online’ and those who are not is widening.
“The boom on Wall Street is widening the income gap between the poorest and richest U.S. families, according to a report by two Washington think tanks,” The Associated Press wrote in January. “The earnings for the poorest fifth of American families rose less than 1 percent between 1988 and 1998 but jumped 15 percent for the richest fifth, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute said.”
Even in Silicon Valley, the centre of the digital revolution, the divide is growing. “Silicon Valley's prosperity reached dizzying heights in 1999,” The Industry Standard wrote recently. “The regions' employers paid better than did employers in the rest of the country. It had a record number of companies going public. And the amount of venture capital invested in start-ups there nearly doubled the previous year's total.
"But the boom appears to be bypassing large segments of the region's population, raising concerns that the so-called capital of the new economy is also becoming the poster child for the digital divide.”
President Clinton has recognized that left to itself the digital revolution is increasing the divide within society. This month he announced a USD2 billion online access initiative that would seek to give all Americans equal access to the Internet. The package includes some USD100 million for technology centers in low-income areas and USD150 million in technology-training funding for teachers.
We face major problems in this information society of ours. In reality, we have a world where some 30 percent will fall into the information worker realm and where the many of the rest will end up in low-paying service-type jobs. Creating an information-literate society that is comfortable and productive with computers is no easy task when many have just about managed basic literacy skills.
If the problem is significant in the United States, what is it like in the poorer countries of the world? There the challenges are even greater and the oft-spoken ambition of ‘leap-frogging’ into the future by employing modern technology holds little water in countries where having clean water to drink is a major challenge in itself.
As the new millennium begins, the Internet is full of promise for many of us, but the great march forward of progress that it represents, leaves a large proportion of the people who share our world out in the cold.
Gerry McGovern
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