DJ_Zarathustra
February 1st, 2005, 07:23 PM
From an article at cio.com, apparently intended to be serious:
The racial schism that rips through every aspect of American society has found firm footing on the Internet.
As it is often described, the “digital divide” separates the haves—members of the middle class, primarily white, who are plugged into the Information Age—from the have-nots—members of the lower classes, often black or Hispanic, who are missing out on the educational, employment and cultural opportunities that the Internet has to offer.
Most solutions to the digital divide focus on giving PCs to low-income families and finding other ways to provide the nation’s poor with access to the Internet. While these efforts are clearly important, they fail to address one pervasive reason many minorities users stay offline: The Internet is just too white.
A recent Department of Commerce study found that while income levels are responsible for a gross disparity in computer ownership and Internet use, income is not entirely to blame. In households of similar income levels, white families are still much more likely to use the Internet than are black or Hispanic families, leading some observers to look beyond income for explanations.
In an editorial in The New York Times, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University, argues that in the same way that blacks in the 1920s began to buy records only when Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington started making them, it will take content geared specifically toward an African American audience to coax black users online.
“Few African Americans have been compelled to sign on to a medium that offers little to interest them,” writes Gates. “The growth of Web sites dedicated to the interests and needs of black Americans can play the same role for the Internet that race records did for the music industry.”
Many of Gates’ readers disagreed. One letter to the editor reads, “I gasped when I read Gates’ article. Little to interest African Americans? The World Wide Web is the greatest source of information that ever existed. Everything is on the Web. Type in Malcolm X or Hank Aaron and you will undoubtedly be hit with a tidal wave of information.” The Internet, this reader argues, is color-blind.
But isn’t the reader missing something crucial about the Internet? Millions of users plug into the Web not only for the raw data it contains but for the sense of community, culture and customization it provides. Chat rooms and personalized pages are all the rage because users want to feel like the Web is their Web, targeted to their needs and populated with people just like them.
For African Americans, the Internet does not yet provide the same sense of community it offers whites. Patrick McElroy, president of The Freedom Group, parent company to EverythingBlack.com, a portal to Web sites of special interest to African Americans, argues that in a society dominated by a white middle-class audience, so-called general interest sites are, in reality, special-interest sites designed for the white middle class.
African American users need sites that will recognize them as a special interest group and provide the culture, community and information relevant to their own lives. “If you’re looking for information on black college sports, you’re probably not going to find it on ESPN,” says McElroy. “We know where to find that information, and we know how to give it the cultural context an African American audience desires.”
Sites like EverythingBlack.com and Netnoir.com are slowly beckoning African American users online. But until we recognize that going online is about more than hardware, and that the white culture that dominates politics, business and popular culture also pervades the Web, the digital divide, or what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls “cybersegregation,” will be alive and well online in America.
It's racism, yet again. There couldn't be any other explanation.
The article was dated 11/16/99. EverythingBlack.com and Netnoir.com no longer exist. Probably hacked to death by vicious rednecks, just when a flood--no, a tsunami of black users was about to be "beckoned online". Tragic.
The racial schism that rips through every aspect of American society has found firm footing on the Internet.
As it is often described, the “digital divide” separates the haves—members of the middle class, primarily white, who are plugged into the Information Age—from the have-nots—members of the lower classes, often black or Hispanic, who are missing out on the educational, employment and cultural opportunities that the Internet has to offer.
Most solutions to the digital divide focus on giving PCs to low-income families and finding other ways to provide the nation’s poor with access to the Internet. While these efforts are clearly important, they fail to address one pervasive reason many minorities users stay offline: The Internet is just too white.
A recent Department of Commerce study found that while income levels are responsible for a gross disparity in computer ownership and Internet use, income is not entirely to blame. In households of similar income levels, white families are still much more likely to use the Internet than are black or Hispanic families, leading some observers to look beyond income for explanations.
In an editorial in The New York Times, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University, argues that in the same way that blacks in the 1920s began to buy records only when Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington started making them, it will take content geared specifically toward an African American audience to coax black users online.
“Few African Americans have been compelled to sign on to a medium that offers little to interest them,” writes Gates. “The growth of Web sites dedicated to the interests and needs of black Americans can play the same role for the Internet that race records did for the music industry.”
Many of Gates’ readers disagreed. One letter to the editor reads, “I gasped when I read Gates’ article. Little to interest African Americans? The World Wide Web is the greatest source of information that ever existed. Everything is on the Web. Type in Malcolm X or Hank Aaron and you will undoubtedly be hit with a tidal wave of information.” The Internet, this reader argues, is color-blind.
But isn’t the reader missing something crucial about the Internet? Millions of users plug into the Web not only for the raw data it contains but for the sense of community, culture and customization it provides. Chat rooms and personalized pages are all the rage because users want to feel like the Web is their Web, targeted to their needs and populated with people just like them.
For African Americans, the Internet does not yet provide the same sense of community it offers whites. Patrick McElroy, president of The Freedom Group, parent company to EverythingBlack.com, a portal to Web sites of special interest to African Americans, argues that in a society dominated by a white middle-class audience, so-called general interest sites are, in reality, special-interest sites designed for the white middle class.
African American users need sites that will recognize them as a special interest group and provide the culture, community and information relevant to their own lives. “If you’re looking for information on black college sports, you’re probably not going to find it on ESPN,” says McElroy. “We know where to find that information, and we know how to give it the cultural context an African American audience desires.”
Sites like EverythingBlack.com and Netnoir.com are slowly beckoning African American users online. But until we recognize that going online is about more than hardware, and that the white culture that dominates politics, business and popular culture also pervades the Web, the digital divide, or what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls “cybersegregation,” will be alive and well online in America.
It's racism, yet again. There couldn't be any other explanation.
The article was dated 11/16/99. EverythingBlack.com and Netnoir.com no longer exist. Probably hacked to death by vicious rednecks, just when a flood--no, a tsunami of black users was about to be "beckoned online". Tragic.