I have experiened both first hand.

First, the countries.

In Ghana, West Africa I spent about six hours in a van traveling from Kumasi to the Mole reserve. My intestines will never be the same. I felt like a hamster in one of those exercise balls that got kicked across the Brady’s den. The actual distance wasn’t that far.

On a paved road the trip might have taken three hours or less. I couldn’t imagine a case of Snapple lasting more than thirty minutes on said road, let alone valuable equipment.

There has to be an efficient way for goods and people to be transported in order to close the gap of opportunity. If Bono really cares about Africa he would trade in his ugly sunglasses for an even uglier orange vest!

In education it’s the same.

Kids who were already distracted by “bling” and institutionalized racism will act no differently with a laptop. Their parents need to be informed and aware. Teachers have to get continuous training and remain cheerleaders for all kids’ success as human beings.

Caring competent adults must pave the road for students to have a rich and meaningful experience with technology. Educators need a level head and supportive colleagues not to lose perspective in this education cyber mall. Laptops and internet access must be given to students in tandem with skills.

It’s the skills the students will take with them, not the modems. Technology should build out from a student’s social, emotional, artistic, and intellectual knowledge base, not up. Piling on the equipment only builds a flimsy tower that is doomed to fall more quickly than Jan and Peter Brady’s house of cards (they blamed it on Tiger, but we all know it was bad engineering).

Thank you Ejovi for validating the feelings of many educators who struggle with this issue on a daily basis. You rock more than Metallica!

A Snapshot View of a Complex World

by David Boaz

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of
Libertarianism: A Primer.

Once again, front-page headlines are trumpeting a “digital divide.” “Internet
revolution bypassing poor, minorities,” USA Today says; “Report Finds Net
Users Increasingly White, Well Off,” The Washington Post says. The headlines are
based on Falling through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide, a 108-page
report from the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA). The preface to the report indicates that dozens of
smart people pored over Census Bureau data to produce hundreds of graphs and
charts on minute issues. Sadly, however, the report and the stories about it range
from misleading to wrong. Seeing the big picture

In fact, they illustrate some typical problems with journalism and public
debate. We all understand that a plane crash is news while millions of successful
landings are not. But the constant adherence to that standard creates serious
misimpressions about our society.

First, the emphasis on bad news creates a wrong impression. The NTIA study sho
wed that “the number of Americans connected to the nation’s information
infrastructure is soaring.” Despite all the charts designed to emphasize income and
racial differences, the introduction to the study made that point clear.
However, major newspapers all emphasized the bad news — the alleged “digital
divide” — rather than the good news of the rapid spread of access to the
Internet.

Then there is the misimpression created by the snapshot view. A reporter who
interviewed me about the NTIA study asked me about “this snapshot” of the
Internet access situation. That is a good metaphor for a bad way to look at a
dynamic world.

Too often, social scientists, activists and journalists look at a particular
part of society, frozen in time, and demand action to remedy a problem. But we
need to understand the process by which economic and social change happens.
We worry, for instance, about 40,000 layoffs announced by AT&T, failing to
notice that American companies created 2 million jobs in the preceding 12 months,
incrementally, day by day, company by company.

In this, NTIA’s third snapshot report on Internet access, journalists are
urged to look at a single point in time, about seven months ago, in a rapidly
changing field and judge the distribution of computers and Internet access at
that point. But information technology is spreading more rapidly than any new
technology has spread in history.

Historically, new technologies spread slowly. First, the rich get them, then
the middle class and the poor — but eventually everybody gets television,
telephones and so on. Today 98% of Americans have televisions, and 94% have
phones. The newer the technology, it seems, the more rapidly it spreads.

As Michael Cox and Richard Alm point out in Myths of Rich and Poor, it took
46 years for a quarter of the population to get electricity and 35 years for
the telephone to spread that far. But it took only 16 years for a quarter of
American households to get a personal computer and only seven years for Internet
access.

When you look at the process, not the snapshot, the progress is amazing. It
is sheer scaremongering to write reports about “information haves and
have-nots.” The reality is a little less exciting: have-nows and have-laters. Families
that do not have computers now are going to have them in a few years.

The statistics you didn’t hear

Another flaw apparent in the report is that of statistical manipulation. You
can prove anything with statistics.

The NTIA tries to prove that despite the fact that overall access to
information technology is “soaring,” nevertheless “a digital divide … is actually
widening over time.” Specifically, the report says, “The digital divide has turned
into a ‘racial ravine.’ … With regard to computers, the gap between white and
black households grew 39.2% (from a 16.8 percentage-point difference to a
23.4 percentage-point difference) between 1994 and 1998.”

But let’s go to the data (Chart I-15). In 1994, 27.1% of white households had
computers, and so did 10.3% of black households. In 1998, whites were up to
46.6%, and blacks to 23.2%.

One way to read those numbers is the way NTIA did: The gap grew from 16.8
points to 23.4 points. Another interpretation is this: In 1994, whites were 2.6
times as likely as blacks to have a computer; in 1998 they were only 2.0 times
as likely. And here is another way: From 1994 to 1998, computer ownership by
whites increased 72%, while ownership by blacks increased 125%.

That is good news all around, with black ownership rates increasing faster.
NTIA picked the reading that would justify claiming the existence of a “racial
ravine.”

What is really happening is that computer ownership and Internet access are
spreading rapidly through society, with richer households getting there first.
On average, whites are richer than blacks, and they have more computers.

The NTIA plays down the fact that Asian households at every income level are
more likely than whites to have a computer, and The Washington Post and USA
Today ignored Asians in their front-page stories on the racial divide. Why?
Maybe the fact that some racial minorities are more likely than whites to have a
computer would make the “racial ravine” seem a little less sinister.

Similarly, when “a child in a dual-parent black family is almost four times
as likely to have [Internet] access as a child in a single-parent black
household,” the problem is not a digital divide. The problem is that too many black
children are growing up in single-parent households. Whatever the solution is
for that problem, it will not be found at the Federal Communications
Commission.

Free enterprise is the answer

One of the themes of this report, coincidentally, is also one of Al Gore’s
campaign themes: putting more computers with Internet access in the schools.
American schools do have a lot of problems, and we ought to solve them. But
inner-city schools in poor neighborhoods already spend lots of money; money is not
their problem.

Schools need to teach children to read and write, and they do not need
Internet access for that. Children, especially poor children, would be better off if
we bought McGuffey’s Readers for every school. Internet access will not help
children who cannot read, write and calculate. But the education establishment
is shortsighted and overly responsive to fads and politics, so this is its
latest lament: How can you expect us to teach kids if we do not have the latest
technology?

I am not a Luddite. I think market-driven schools would use technology
intelligently. I have every confidence that soon the free-market revolution and the
technological revolution will bypass the government-monopoly schools, and
we’ll see technology revolutionizing the delivery of education. But when that
happens, it will be delivered by free enterprise, not politics.

This article was originally posted at IntellectualCapital.com on July 15,
1999.

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                                                March 6, 2004

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Cato Senior Fellow Steve Moore will join the roundtable discussion on HBO’s
“Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday at 8:00pm ET/PT, followed by a taped
replay at 11:30pm ET/PT.

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