Is the Internet Creating a New Underclass?
Will the Internet democratize society, or will it further divide the rich and poor? by Wade Rowland © Wade Rowland I had the disconcerting experience this summer of seeing my family lionized in a TV documentary as pioneers of a coming information age utopia, and in the same month being personally accused by a publishing company editor of being a reactionary elitist for having bought my two children state-of-the-art computers and an Internet hookup. Somehow, my purchase was giving my kids an unfair advantage, helping to widen the gap between the rich and poor – the same gap that the documentary implied would be erased by new technologies. There’s a lot of this kind of woolly thinking going on as we slide inexorably into the information age. The big fear today is that as we build an information-based economy, we are cutting adrift large segments of the population, those who are not computer literate, and those who cannot afford to buy even the most basic of the necessary new appliances l
