Information Age Have-Nots? Let Them Read Books

To hear the technocrats talk, America is busy creating the underclass of the future. The rise of the “information superhighway” means a new kind of poverty. The modem-less masses and the data-deprived will huddle beneath the highway’s overpasses, shut off from the multimedia mainstream. Without government intervention, they say, the Information-rich will get richer and the information-poor will get poorer.

“We are trying to figure out a way to maintain service to everyone,” one senior White House official recently told Business Week magazine. “The danger you run is creating a society of information haves and have-nots.”

No. The real risk we run is re-creating a welfare state ethic in cyberspace. Of all the misconceptions surrounding multimedia innovation and digital superhighway metaphors, none is more misguided or misleading than the belief that access to new telecommunications technologies is somehow central to determining wealth and poverty in the Information Age. This is a pseudo issue that better reflects the paternalistic pretensions of a public policy elite than compassion for the less fortunate.

It’s bizarre that certain pundits and prognosticators want to focus on high-tech network access subsidies for the masses barely three months after the Department of Education published a survey claiming to show that fully half of American adults are close to functionally illiterate. What does network access mean to them? Or is network access really a condescending euphemism for “Gee, poor people have a lot of time on their hands. Let’s let ‘em watch ESPN, MTV and CNN for free”?

Telecommunication does have a populist role to play. No one argues, for instance, that telephone “lifeline” services are not essential to guarantee everyone--no matter how poor--immediate access to police, fire and other local calls. Lifeline subsidies are as essential as the services they provide. Indeed, there’s no denying that America’s success providing universal telephone service throughout the country was a direct result of policies and regulations that promoted cross-subsidies.

On the surface, expanding this system of telecommunications subsidies to include new telecommunications services seems a noble goal. In practice, however, the more you examine the idea, the sillier and more convoluted it becomes.

Just what do we want to subsidize here, and why? Is it really, as the White House official said, information access? If that were true, it would be far more logical and cost-effective to give people subsidies for newspaper and magazine purchases and keep the public libraries open longer. We would also run our society as if we cared about literacy.

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What fundamental changes are occurring that, all of a sudden, make multimedia technology subsidies such good public policy? The coming convergence of cable TV and local phone companies? That’s simply ridiculous: Is access to CNN or C-SPAN an essential public service, like dialing 911?

Ted Turner may disagree, but it’s not. We may decide, in the interests of fairness and equity, that we want to subsidize the cable television viewing of our compatriots. But let’s not try to justify that subsidy on the grounds of creating economic opportunity for the information have-nots.

So maybe the real policy concern here isn’t mere information access, but technology access. Well, while we certainly subsidized the growth of telephone systems, we chose not to subsidize sales of radios and television sets or VCRs or telephone answering machines.

Has that promoted a two-tiered society of communications rich and poor? Should we now subsidize purchases of personal computers and modems to ensure access to interactive media on the networks?

Of course, this is a fully competitive marketplace where prices have been plummeting for years. You can go out today and buy for less than $200 a 14.4 high-speed modem--a technology that cost more than $1,000 barely three years ago. You can get a slower, 2,400-band modem for under $80. And they will get cheaper yet.

So do we buy the high-performance Porsches for driving on the information highway, or do we buy the clunky jalopies? Where do you draw the line? In an environment of constantly declining prices, what subsidies make sense? Or should we expect people to buy $500 computer-TV sets out of their own pockets?

It is completely understandable that digital do-gooders and the computationally compassionate care about the segments of society that literally cannot afford to be early adopters of new technologies. Then again, look at the tremendous penetration rates of discretionary, unsubsidized media technologies such as radio, television, Walkmen, video games and VCRs.

If we’re honest, we’ll acknowledge that access to the latest media technology isn’t nearly as important as access to the latest health care technology. The real problem isn’t access; it’s some pundits’ insistence that issues of social equity and economic opportunity are better shaped by investing in technology than in people. That’s a bad idea, and it leads to bad policy.