WEBVTT 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Applause) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Andy Carvin) Good morning. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For a couple of moments there I really had no idea what Joey was talking about (laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, he'd ask me a few minutes ago to critique his introductory remarks 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and, you know, all I did was this (laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For those of you who are listening to the podcast of that, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I was doing a "We're not worthy" kind of thing on the ground. (laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Yes, I am recording this. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For those of you who are contemplating taking notes fret not. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You really don't have to because the presentation, this powerpoint, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 is already on my blog, andycarvin.com . 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's been released on what's called a Creative Commons license 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I'll talk about that later, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but that basically means you can use it almost any way you want. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And with this little digital recorder I have here I'm going to be taping my presentation 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and making it available as a podcast on my blog as well. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, if you're really obsessed about taking notes, you know, have at it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But if you're on the fence about it like I am about these kinds of things, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 don't worry about it, hang back and instead it would be better for you 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to be thinking about some really good questions to throw me by the end of this presentation. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, first of all what exactly is the Digital Divide? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The term has been around for at least 10 years, now, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 probably since around 1992, 1993. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it often gets used in very different ways. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, one of the very first uses of the Digital Divide I ever heard 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 was on a Greatful Dead's discussion list in the early 90's, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 where a Dead Head was describing the challenges he had 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 recording Greateful Dead's concerts, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he was about to make the leap from analog recording to digital recording 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and so, he was asking for assistance in bridging this digital divide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He could easily have been the one to claim to coin it 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but thankfully, the term has evolved since then to mean a variety of things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But when I talk about the digital divide, I try to summarize it in three very basic ways. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In the most basic sense, it's the gap that exists between populations 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in terms of who has access to ICTs, or Information and Communication Technologies, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and who doesn't. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, that includes the internet, computers and the like. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For a long time, when people talked about the digital divide, the definition stopped there. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They would just look at who had internet access at home, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who had access at school, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and that was only marginally useful, in my perspective. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It -- I think it became much more important to treat also as equal factors 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 access to literacy skills and the ability to use ICTs effectively, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because if every person on the globe had internet access tomorrow, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 if they weren't functionally literate, if they weren't IT-literate, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 then their internet access would be rather meaningless to them. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Similarly, you'll need to have access to high-quality, robust and diverse content, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the ability and the skills to create content yourselves. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And we'll talk a bit more about that later. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Sometimes these three ideas have been described as the ABC's of the digital divide: 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Access, Basic skills and Content. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now where does this term come from? (laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's a tough question and people have been tossing around the question 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 for a very long time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Sometimes people are giving credit to Al Gore. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He may not have invented the Information Superhighway, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he did invent the term, though, interestingly: 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he's been using the term Information Superhighway since the late 70's 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and some have said that he tried claiming to have invented the internet. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, we'll leave that for historians to judge, but I think we all know better. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Similarly, occasionally people attribute Bill Gates as coining the term. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He didn't. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Perhaps it was some anonymous beltway bureaucrat in Washington. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The fact of the matter is, we simply don't know. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The term has been around since, at least, the early 90's. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I think the first time I've heard it was around 1993, from a -- early 1994 -- 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 from a K-12 educator named Bonnie Bracey 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who was working on an advisory commission that President Clinton had organized 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about the information infrastructure, as this internet and everything else was called back then. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But the term had been around even prior to that. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When you ask people who are often credited with coining the term, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they always pass the buck and say: 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "No, it wasn't me, I got it from someone else, but frankly I don't remember whom." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so, in fact I think it is quite likely that the term may have been indeed created 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 by some anonymous betlway bureaucrat, or an anonymous educator, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or someone else who started using it in their professional networks, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 online networks, and social networks. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And by the mid-1990's, it had become a term of art to describe this gap between the have's and the have-not's. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I should also add that the have's and the have-not's, that term, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 has actually been around much, much longer than the term digital divide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, it was coined by Cervantes. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If you go and read Don Quixote, you'll see that Sancho Panza describes his grandmother 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as coming from a family who represented the have's rather than the haven't's. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so, that term has been used to describe equity issues and poverty ever since. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, the digital divide has been a policy issue at one level or another for over 10 years, now. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Much of it began in '93, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when President Clinton created this Advisory Council I mentioned a few minutes ago, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 this National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Basically, they were given the task to take a look at this Information Superhighway, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 figure out where it was going, whether it was going to leave the country, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and what it was going to mean if some people had access to it and some people didn't. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 By 1994, the Commerce Department was releasing a report, which eventually became a series of reports, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 known as Falling through the Net, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and this became essentially a national benchmark on the digital divide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And initially, they were just looking at who had telephone access and who had computer access 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and who didn't. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But in the years since then it evolved to a much deeper look 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 at the state of the digital divide in America. (6:22) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 As the years go by, a variety of things happen. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This advisory council recommended that all schools and libraries 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 be wired to the internet. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And after the Telecom act of 1996 was passed, that became a reality 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 through the creation of the E-Rate program, which offers government 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 subsidies to cover the cost of intenet access at schools, libraries, and public health institutions. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 By 1999, the digital divide policy debate had reached a fever-pitch 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in which it was often in the national headlines, it was being discussed by 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 government leaders and business leaders all over the country. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And by December of that year, President Clinton hosted a national digital divide summit. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Which as it turns out is the first and only national level government summit on the digital divide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was a great time to be working in this field. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was a bipartisan, or at least a non-partisan issue. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And essentially we were all engaging in a big retorical policy group hug. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was a good time to be doing this. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But it's been rough over the last few years. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In many ways, some people have pointed specifically to September 11 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as being the watershed moment for the digital divide, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because resources started going in other directions -- going to international policy issues. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Similarly at that time, No Child Left Behind was being developed, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and that changed many of the policy goals, specificaly in K-12 education. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 At the same time, unfortunately, there was also a change in political climate, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in the sense that when you talked about certain issues the terms you would use 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 would often have a bent to them. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The rhetoric would often be seen as left or right. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In the case of the term 'digital divide', it got associated with Clinton and Gore 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because they were very vocal about it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And despite the fact that you had politcians from both sides 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of the political spectrum supporting digital divide initiatives, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it started being discussed in a more partisan manner. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it had started splitting coalitions that had once existed. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 As time goes by we found ourselves in a situation where there was being 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 less emphasis being pitted at a national level on bridging the digital divide, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and instead it was being made a local issue, a state issue, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and issue for civil society in the private sector to deal with. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so slowly but surely, the momentum in the national level leadership 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that once existed on bridging the digital divide started splitting off 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and going on in its own directions. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Meanwhie though, while the digital divide has become less of an issue here, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it's become a huge issue in pretty much every place on the planet. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In the late '90s, the U.N. decided to host a series of presidential-level world summits 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on internet policy called the World Summit on the Information Society, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the first of which took place in 2003, and then the next one two years later 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 just in the past November in Tunisia. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this was the first times that world leaders gathered 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to discuss the digital divide and strategies for bridging it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so, while on the one hand you rarely ever hear 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about the digital divide being discussed in the U.S. media or by U.S. politicians, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it's something that you find on a regular basis when you look at media accounts 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 from almost every other country in the world. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So this raises the quesion, are we at a point where 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the digital divide has become a non-issue here in the U.S.? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There are some arguments to suggest that maybe it is a non-issue. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For example, the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington D.C. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which is an extraordinary research group that I have immense respect for, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I have been a fan of their work for a very long time... 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they came out with some startling statistics earlier this year in which they said: 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 60% of blacks, 73% of whites, and 79% of English speaking Latinos go online here in the U.S. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This completely defied conventional wisdom on the digital divide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Historically we had always thought of whites as being leaders on the digital divide, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with African-Americans coming second and Latinos coming third. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But this data was suggesting something else. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Meanwhile, almost every single K-12 school in America is online today. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Almost every school of higher education is online today. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Almost every library is online today. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So just from those stats alone it might cause some people to think there is no digital divide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, there was an article in the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about the digital divide in African-Americans and the report interviewed Magic Johnson, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who along with being a basketball star has been a leading community technology activist 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 through his foundation for much of the last ten years, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and so when the reporter asked him about the digital divide 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Magic Johnson responded by saying "what digital divide?" 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So that raises some interesting questions. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When people like Magic Johnson and others, who once were seen as 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the forefathers of the movement if you will, are beginning to suggest 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that maybe we really don't have to be worrying about this digital divide any more. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But when I look at the issue, I think there are some flaws in these arguments. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Not all access is equal. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When you look at the data that came from 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the Pew Internet and American Life project you'll see that they ask the question 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of whether or not people have gone online. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They don't ask how you've gone online, or the qualitative situation 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you are in while you are going online. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There's a big difference between having access somewhere, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 whether it's at work, or in your community, or at school, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 verus having continuous access at home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Meanwhile, the Latino data, as I mentioned before, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 only took a look at English-speaking Latinos. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Which is a sizeable part of the Latino population in the U.S., no doubt, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but the fact that they didn't factor in those households that don't speak English 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or don't speak English well, in some ways causes concern for me 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because these households are some of the least likely housholds to have internet access. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it's really important for us to think about the digital divide 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as being a home issue and a family issue, because for many people 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that's where they have an opportunity to be most productive. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's the place where you can work on your own schedule, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you're not limited to the infrastructure that exists publicly, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 so even though 99% of the libraries in America have internet access 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 some libraries are only open one or two days a week, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 for maybe three or four hours at a time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So even though there is a large internet blanket covering 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 public libraries in America, if you add up the number of hours 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 for many communities, especially low-income communities and rural ones, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they simply don't have the capacity at the moment, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and don't have the resources to serve those populations that don't have internet access at home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So where do we stand right now? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We're running a little behind in terms of having a good national snapshot 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of the digital divide at home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The Department of Commerce usually does a study every couple of years 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we're over-due for one now. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So the last one came out in the fall of 2004. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, if you go back almost ten years ago, almost 20% of homes had internet access. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But by the time they did the study two years ago, it was around 65%. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So I would venture to guess that the access level is probably closer to 70% or even 75% at home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Similarly, that study suggested that there were around 25% of homes that were online. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I would assume it's now one-third are now online with broadband. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But we're still waiting for the latest data to come in. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The digital divide becomes more stark when you break down the numbers 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on a variety of factors. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 First here is internet and ethnicity. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's a contrast to what the information coming out of Pew suggested. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Here we have white households and Asian-American households 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 being highly online, though I find the Asian data 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a little misleading because it lumps all Asian communities together 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it doesn't differentiate between Japanese-Americans and Korean-Americans 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and Chinese-Americans who may have been in the country for three, four, five generations 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and are all middle-class and well-established, versus Asian immigrant populations 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that may have come over in the last generation, still struggling sometimes with 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 language and literacy issues and are often on the lower end of the income brackets. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But the data collects them as one large ethnic group and I think that skews it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 African-American households have about 50% access online, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and Latinos were behind at about 37%. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So that's in stark contrast to what the Pew data was showing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now if you look at the trends over the last ten years regarding internet and ethnicity, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you'll see that in some ways the digital divide has actually widened. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If you go back to 1994, there was a much smaller point spread 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 between white households, blacks, and Latinos, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 versus where it is today. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And in fact, at one point Latinos had slightly higher access than African-Americans, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but then sometime around 2000 it started to switch and that gap has widened as well. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We also have an income digital divide gap, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in which households that earn more money are much more likely to be online 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and those people who live at the poverty level are least likely to be online. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That should come as a no-brainer in many ways, it shouldn't be a major surprise. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The biggest gap though appears to occur when it comes to education. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So if you have a Bachelor's degree or higher, there's a very very high chance, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 85% chance or higher...that 85% of those households are going to have internet access at home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But meanwhile if you look at households that don't have a high-school diploma, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or a GED, at least two years when this data came out it was only 16%. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Have those numbers gone up a bit? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'm sure they have somewhat, but as long as people lack 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a broad range of educational skills to use technology effectively, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 then it's very unlikely that many of them are going to have internet access in their home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In many ways, we've got a very bizzare situation, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 what I often call the access paradox. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And that is: the more people are online, the worse the digital divide gets. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, even when I say that it doesn't even feel right, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because you think "well, okay if you've got a community 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 where 80-90% of the population is online, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you've bridged the digital divide, right?" 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, maybe not. Because we're in a situation now where 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the vast majority of main-stream, middle-class America is online, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 whether at home, or somewhere else in the community. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Marginalized America continues to be offline in many ways. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 These include: recent immigrant populations, people with disabilities, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 people with limited literacy skills, etc etc. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And the reason why this has become more of a problem is 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 we've reached a point in time where internet access 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 is generally assumed among a population. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Just before I started speaking, Joe asked the question 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 how many of you were moving services online that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 were solely going to be online, and many of you raised your hands. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, you're not alone out there. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The federal governments and local governments are doing the same thing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They are shutting down services that previously were only available 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in an offline circumstance, whether it was at a store-front of some kind 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 like a post office, or through a telephone number, or through mail-order 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and moving those services to the internet. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And across society we're seeing this happen. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In schools there's more pressure for students to have internet access and internet skills 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because a lot of the assignments they're getting are going to require internet access. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, the state of Michigan is just getting ready to 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 implement a new part of its curriculum. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In order to graduate from high school in Michigan, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you're going to have to have completed at least one online activity of some sort... 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 an online research project, or something to that effect. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And that makes sense in a world where 100% of all households are online and are internet literate, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but how do you enforce things like that when you have communities that are not online? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's a real challenge. But since we're not discussing the digital divide 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as a major national policy issue, we're just assuming that everyone's online 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or if they really wanted to they could get online, so maybe we could just strong-arm everyone to do it 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 by moving these services to the internet and somehow that will solve the problem. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 A big part of the problem from my perspective at least is the content aspect of the digital divide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There's a group here based in California called the Children's Partnership 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who came out with a seminal report on content and the digital divide about six years ago. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And they took a look at low-income and minority communities 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to see what their content needs were and how they were accessing it, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and whether they were getting what they needed. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And they found four things that were lacking. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Populations were having a hard time finding content that was locally-relevant, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 culturally relevant, linguistically relevant, and appropriate for their particular literacy levels. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I think these four factors still hold true today in many ways, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but I would add a fifth point to that list...is that you also have to discuss 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 content and its accessibility for people with disabilities. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Nearly half of all Americans at some point in their lives 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 will experience a chronic disability, and if you have motor skill impairments, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or have hearing impairments, or in particular visual impairments, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the internet can be a very very daunting place, and we don't always address that. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (20:21)