Published on 01/16/2000, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

BY STEVE CISLER

LAST year the phrase "digital divide" entered the vocabulary of policy experts, high-tech executives and non-profit organizations. It has a nice ring to it. But itís simplistic, insulting to some and, if it has the half-life of other tech jargon, it should last no longer than the buzz words "infobahn" and "techno-realism" did.

Even those who embrace the term now may not realize how the meaning has shifted over the past four years.

In 1996, Amy Harmon, then a journalist at the Los Angeles Times, wrote a story about the split between a husband who spent a great deal of time online and the wife who felt alienated from him because of his obsession with computers. Harmon called this a "digital divide." In another article a writer characterized the battle over the digital television standard as a "digital divide."

The roots of the current meaning arose about the same time. Allen Hammond, a law professor at New York Law School, and Larry Irving, a political appointee at the Department of Commerce who headed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, began using the term in public speeches to characterize the split between those who owned computers and were online and various classes of Americans, including women, blacks, American Indians, the disabled, rural and low-income Americans, who were not.

Irvingís use of the phrase has become a kind of alliterative shorthand that some groups, especially non-profits serving disadvantaged and minority groups, have found helpful in raising money and calling attention to the lack of equity in access to digital tools and resources.

People working in a public computer lab in the inner city or a rural telephone co-op in Iowa may find it easier to say they are working to eliminate the digital divide than to describe their actual jobs. The Commerce Department has issued oft-quoted reports on the digital divide, and last December convened a summit in Washington, D.C., of business and philanthropic leaders who discussed how they were addressing the problem. Another meeting was held just prior to the World Trade Organization debacle in Seattle.

Web sites from government, industry and non-profits have sprung up as clearinghouses on digital divide activities. PBS is airing a four-hour series on the digital divide that will probably be sponsored by companies whose equipment and services help define the split Irving described.

I had a minor advisory role in the PBS series because of my work in public access computing and networking projects, but the term was always very troubling, and I began talking to many other people in this field. The problems with the phrase are several: It is simplistic; some of us find it demeaning; and it takes on a very different caste in an international context where the problems are so much greater than in the United States.

The term digital divide is simplistic. This binary expression of a very complex series of problems is perhaps fitting for the digital age. You are online or offline; you have a computer or you are without one; you are trained for the digital future, or you are in dead-end, low-paying work.

The reality is that all of us online exist on a spectrum of connectivity. Internet 2 participants have extremely high-speed access to advanced applications; a few million American families have DSL and cable-modem access, and the majority are still using modems of varying speeds. Those in rural areas may have poor phone lines that are an expensive toll call to the closest ISP because 20 percent of the counties do not have an Internet point of presence.

Are all of them on one side of the digital divide, and those without any access on the other? What about the millions of people who use public access computers in public libraries and community technology centers around the country?

The reasons for being offline vary. Those without access may not have the money; others still find computers too cumbersome and complex to bother with. Others, in various income and educational brackets, may prefer to spend their time differently and not use computer networks.

Masking the complexity of both online users and the Americans offline by using such a simplistic phrase will not help solve the problems of inequity.

At a recent fundraising event for the San Jose non-profit Schools Online held at the Palo Alto Country Club, the invited guests all raised our glasses and toasted the goals of the philanthropic group. One woman at my table shouted, "Connect all the schools in the world, whether they want to or not."

When 21^st-century digital evangelists express their fervor by casting the world as online (good) and offline (doomed), it reminds me of the 19^th-century European and American missionaries who looked at all the unconverted lost souls in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and South America. Their efforts were well-meaning but had many unintended consequences.

Having worked and traveled in more than 45 countries, it is clear to me that this technology can be very beneficial (if too expensive for much of the world), but most people in the world still live rewarding, if modest, lives without electronic mail, Web access, a synced PalmPilot or a full shopping basket at buy.com.

Though the rest of the worldís connectivity is now growing at a faster rate than in the United States, the range of barriers to Internet connectivity in other countries is far greater and more serious than what is available in the United States and Canada.

Other activists who are working on connectivity and training have found the term digital divide unhelpful. Amy Borgstrom, director of the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks in Athens, Ohio, trains out-of-work miners, women and teenagers to use this technology, but she assured me that "most of the people I know who would be considered on the other side of this divide would resent some person of privilege describing them so."

Art McGee, an African-American who works in Southern California on technical support for non-profits, echoed this sentiment. "It tends to be used to refer to a binary black-white racial divide, but it fails to spur dialogue. Itís a phrase that ëStarbucks liberalsí like to use when overhyping equitable Internet access, while continuing to ignore fundamental issues such as equitable access to education and health care. Johnny canít read, Jane canít run, George has lost his curiosity, and they seem to think it will all be solved by the wonders of the Internet."

Mario Morino of the Morino Institute comments, "The digital divide is a manifestation of economic and educational gaps that have existed in this country long before the microchip and the Internet were invented."

Digital divide is a term as demeaning as one from a past era, "They live on the wrong side of the tracks."

"Itís too constructed, too alliterative, too Al Gore," says Bill Callahan, a Cleveland community organizer. "Eventually weíre going to need a pithier, more evocative, more specific name for the thing weíre fighting."

Surely we can do better.

Steve Cisler is a consultant working on telecommunications and access issues in libraries, community organizations and public sites in the United States and developing countries. He can be reached at cisler@pobox.com