Race and technology have been intertwined for centuries. Think of Europe using superior military technology to impose hierarchies in Africa, Asia and the Americas that institutionalized racism. Think of railroads, the telephone, the radio: These technologies were advertised as democratizing, but in fact were available only to those who could afford them. Fifty years ago, when only the wealthy could buy a television, there was a yawning analog divide.
And now the Internet. Is it, too, a medium of division? So argue the essays in Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, edited by New York University's Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu. Technicolor's essayists base their glum assessment on a seeming paradox: Only mass-audience sites - the Yahoos and MSNs of the world - can afford to provide low-cost or free content to minority readers. Yet left to their own devices, those sites will not provide content oriented toward minorities, because they are by definition not a "mass audience." Conclusion: Only "multiple avenues of intervention" - that is, the law - can close the digital divide.
That is a stunning assertion that, fortunately, is wrong. For its first two decades, the Net was largely a researcher's medium, and the universe of researchers was indeed disproportionately white and male. The Web changed that, though. Starting in the mid-1990s, the demographics of America's online population rapidly converged with the demographics of the United States as a whole. Although Technicolor was published this year, it relies on data from the mid-1990s and earlier - and concludes that the digital divide must still be with us. Books have a long lead time, of course, but by citing Commerce Department analyses published in 1995 and 1998 (which rely on data gathered even earlier) and citing U.S. Census data from 1980, this one forfeits any claim to contemporary criticism and becomes a work of history.
Indeed, more recent surveys, such as 1999 and 2000 Forrester reports, show Latinos had closed the gap with whites by the end of 1999. And a Pew Research Center survey this year documented the explosion in Latino and African-American Net usage in 1999 and 2000.
If the authors had analyzed more current data - or gathered new information themselves - they could have provided a rich and useful discussion. Even as the digital divide in general is closing, some pockets of people are still being left behind. Indian reservations, for example, continue to have lower Internet penetration, but this is because they have fewer phone lines - a historical problem that may be resolved by wireless technology.
Perhaps more unsettling, readers are expected to agree with such unsupported assertions as "technology ... insinuates into an iniquitous system one more element of oppression." Yet the opposite seems to be the case. Around the world, millions of men and women of all races and religions are communicating with each other for the first time, often on shared computers, and often for less than the price of a postage stamp. Their presence, often missed by statistics that count computer ownership and not actual usage, flatly contradicts this book's argument that free speech on the Net is "crass hype cranked out to feed the expansionist fantasies of telecom Goliaths."
A healthy distrust of new technology is to be applauded, but the authors of this collection have it backward. By relying on obsolete data, they completely miss the soaring Net usage by people of color around the world.
That's too bad. Racism is very much alive in the world. But the Net, at least for now, is part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Adam Clayton Powell III is the Freedom Forum's VP for technology and programs.
