Computing in the ‘90s: THE GREAT DIVIDE
Marty Slusser believes computer skills are vital to a successful future for himself and his children.
Aqeela Sherrills believes the same.
The Slusser residence in suburban east Orange has two PCs, two cellular phones, a fax machine and a high-speed modem. When Slusser’s daughter Haley had to do a report on rock collecting earlier this month, the 10-year-old plopped down in front of her dad’s Pentium-powered machine and whipped herself up a multimedia presentation.
The Sherrills’ apartment in a Watts housing project has a decade-old Apple II and a telephone that plugs into a wall. The computer is too creaky to be of much use to 11-year-old Terrell, who sometimes must wait in line at the public library to use one of two computers there when he has a homework assignment. But usually he just does it by hand.
“There’s a sign-up sheet and we only have 30 minutes,” he says. “That’s a pretty short time to do stuff.”
The two households are on opposite sides of several traditional social divides: The Slussers’ annual income is about $75,000, the Sherrills’ is less than $30,000. Marty, who is white, is a college graduate. Aqeela, who is African American, is not.
But the families also reflect a new digital-age determinant of who is likely to get what in American society: access to technology.
Those who have it, experts say, are far better prepared to compete for jobs, affluence and power than those who do not.
And the high-tech revolution--which conjured utopian visions of digital democracy and a playing field leveled by the egalitarian properties of cyberspace--has so far mainly benefited those who are already the nation’s most privileged.
Only 22% of Southern California households with annual incomes of less than $25,000 have personal computers, compared with 69% of those with incomes of more than $50,000, according to The Times Technology Poll. Of respondents with a high school education or less, 22% used computers at home, compared with 57% of college graduates.
“Two-thirds of all new jobs in the near future will require some knowledge of computers,” says Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson. “If these kids graduate and are not computer-literate, what chance do they have?”
Wilson’s recent book, “When Work Disappears,” traces the widening gap between America’s haves and have-nots to the decline of high-paying blue-collar jobs in the 1970s and ‘80s, when a college degree began to make a significant difference in expected income.
“The technological revolution will widen that gap further, because the people who have access to computers tend to be those from the more advantaged families,” Wilson says. “Inner-city families are not going to have computers at home, and it’s a very serious concern.”
Not surprisingly, income and education are the most significant factors in determining who owns a personal computer, according to the telephone poll of 1,200 randomly selected Los Angeles and Orange county residents that was conducted for The Times by Mark Baldassare & Associates.
Whereas the vast majority of those polled said that keeping up with new developments in computers and telecommunications is important, only 38% of those with incomes of less than $50,000 felt they were keeping up, compared with six in 10 among those earning more.
About 13% of those earning less than $50,000 use a modem, compared with 41% of those earning more than $50,000.
Ethnicity is also a factor in the technological divide. Compared with Latinos, twice the number of non-Latino whites polled said they own personal computers.
Such disparity, experts say, is especially striking in Southern California.
“What is so dramatic here is the way in which the poor neighborhoods of the region are just totally cut off from the potential benefits of an economy that integrates such vast scientific skill,” says Los Angeles historian Mike Davis.
David Guizar, 23, of Los Angeles felt that contrast keenly at a jobs seminar he attended recently at which he met a film studio executive who described the Internet to him.
“I’ve heard how useful it is and that you can find information within minutes that you would have to go to a library for hours to look up,” says Guizar, who works as a community organizer. “But I’ve never had a computer, and most people in my community don’t even know what the Internet is.”
At the unemployment office, he has been asked several times whether he knows how to use the computer program Wordperfect. The answer is no.
Francesca Badami, 13, knows several word-processing programs, and she’s learning how to program. She was something of an America Online junkie before she got bored with it earlier this year. And her parents have promised her a pager if she makes the honor roll this semester.
Everyone at her Hollywood middle school has one, it seems.
“It seems to have become a standard of communications for a lot of younger people,” says her father, 50. “They like to be in touch.”
Frank Badami uses an electronic personal organizer to store his schedule and name-and-address file, and a laptop on which to do his work. The television producer began using computers six years ago. He multi-tasks, getting up-to-the-minute sports scores via the Internet while he designs mission statements and budgets for his investors.
And he visits the Rodney Dangerfield World Wide Web site for the joke of the day, every day. No techno whiz, Badami nonetheless believes his adaptation to computer technology has helped him get ahead.
“I literally don’t know how I ran my life or my business before I used a computer,” he says.
Victoria Olan, 54, fears that a failure to adapt to the computer age could have dire consequences. The Santa Ana nurse’s aide has been told that she will soon have to use a computer at work. If she can’t do it, she may be out of a job.
“I wish I could have one at home, but it’s very expensive. I have payments for my car and my son has payments for his car, and we have to send the payments to my other kids in Mexico,” Olan says.
She hopes to go to night classes next year, but attending school after working long days at the hospital is a daunting prospect.
High-tech partisans argue that technology cannot be blamed for highlighting social disparities. In fact, they say, electronic communication has already aided the disadvantaged, providing a new method for grass-roots organizing and enabling inner-city schools to link to museums and scientists around the country.
And as prices for computers continue to decline, some contend that the high-tech gap will close. A new PC costs about $2,000 today. But several firms are developing stripped-down “network computers” that would cost less than $500.
“The American economic system has for years been developing structural forces that tend to marginalize segments of the population,” says Phil Agre, assistant professor of communications at UC San Diego. “How big a nail technology is in someone’s coffin is a big question to me.”
The advantages conferred by access to technology may well pale against other more mundane forms of privilege--access to better schools, nutrition and physical safety. But sociologists note that education has long been a key determinant of social position, and familiarity with and access to computers is becoming an important factor in educational performance.
“The way our society is built today, your fate in life is very strongly connected to how you do in school,” says Claude Fischer, a sociologist at UC Berkeley who is the senior author of the forthcoming “Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth.” (“The Bell Curve” is the controversial 1995 book arguing that race is a determinant of intelligence.) “Parents who can provide their children with computers at home give them an important advantage.”
The Educational Testing Service, for example, is moving to computerize the SAT and other tests it administers, Fischer says.
“Say two kids come in to take their SATs. One had a computer at home and spends two hours a night sending e-mail or playing games. Another has one hour a week in their school lab. Now you come into this situation where your life flashes before your eyes. That’s just one example in which computer skills will make the well-off better off and the poorly off worse off.”
Paradoxically, even volunteer efforts to wire the schools, such as Net Day, which took place in California in March and was launched nationwide last week, have helped rich schools more than poor ones.
John Cradler, policy specialist at WestEd, a regional educational research laboratory, says better-equipped schools with students from higher-income families tend to be the ones that benefit from various government and industry technology aid programs simply because poor schools have more pressing needs.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt has long championed a system of universal service for electronic communication, which would require communications providers to contribute to a fund that would be used to wire schools and libraries.
But a board of state and federal representatives charged with designing such a system under the 1996 Telecommunications Act is split over whether such initiatives should be publicly regulated or left to the private sector. A recommendation is scheduled to be sent to the FCC for review next month.
“I think it would be unconscionable for the United States to say the information highway is only for those who have the equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz,” says Hundt. “But there is a serious division on the board.”
Aqeela Sherrills isn’t waiting. He’s seeking out groups to donate computers for a neighborhood computer laboratory that can teach kids such as his son how to design World Wide Web sites. Some days he’s optimistic. Others he’s not.
“Everything’s moving so fast. Five years from now, it will be so far ahead that the kids from the inner city won’t be able to catch up,” Sherrills says. “They’ll be locked out of high-tech just like they’re locked out of a lot of other fields today. Except worse.”
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How the Poll Was Conducted
The Times Technology Poll was conducted by Mark Baldassare & Associates of Irvine. The random telephone survey of 1,200 adults--600 in Los Angeles County and 600 in Orange County--was conducted Aug. 1-7 in English and Spanish. The survey results are statistically weighted to reflect the population distribution of residents in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For Orange County and Los Angeles County subsamples, it is plus or minus 4 percentage points. For subgroups such as individuals using home computers, the margin of error is larger.
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Where are you on the techno pole?
How those surveyed ranked themselves in terms of knowledge:
A Techie
You know the difference between ISDN and IBM.
11%
Coping
You’re no expert, but you’re keeping up.
30%
Struggling
You’re somewhat knowledgeable, but you’re falling behind.
42%
A Disconnects
You have little to no involvement with computers.
17%
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User Profiles
Those perched atop the technology pole in the Southland are wealthy and young. A look at how home computer users compare:
Computer owners
Techies: 68%
Coping: 65%
Struggling: 42%
Disconnects: 10%
*
Income
Income less than $50,000
Techies: 34%
Coping: 42%
Struggling: 60%
Disconnects: 76%
*
$50,000 or more
Techies: 66%
Coping: 58%
Struggling: 40%
Disconnects: 24%
*
Age
18-34
Techies: 51%
Coping: 45%
Struggling: 46%
Disconnects: 34%
*
35-54
Techies: 36%
Coping: 44%
Struggling: 32%
Disconnects: 17%
*
55 or older
Techies: 13%
Coping: 11%
Struggling: 22%
Disconnects: 49%
*
Feel computers make life better
Techies: 74%
Coping: 69%
Struggling: 65%
Disconnects: 35%
Source: Times Technology Poll and a 1995 Times-Mirror Survey
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Can Computers Cure Isolation?
Residents in Orange and Los Angeles counties are less optimistic about the ability of computers to bring people together than are Americans as a whole, and they are split over the wisdom of a law granting universal access to the Internet. (Results are for Orange and Los Angeles counties unless otherwise noted. National results are from a 1995 poll.)
* Do you think computers do more to isolate people from their communities and others around them, or do more to bring together people with shared interests, no matter where they live?
Bring people together
O.C./L.A.: 48%
U.S.: 67%
*
Isolate people
O.C./L.A.: 34%
U.S.: 23%
*
Don’t know
O.C./L.A.: 18%
U.S.: 10%
* Would you favor or oppose a law requiring computer networks to allow everyone to have some access to Internet features such as electronic mail regardless of their ability to pay, just as telephone companies are now required to provide telephone service to people who cannot afford it?
Favor: 44%
Oppose: 44%
Don’t know: 12%
* In general, do you feel as though you are keeping up or falling behind in your knowledge of computers and telecommunications?
Keeping up: 47%
Falling behind: 42%
Don’t know: 11%
Sources: Times Technology Poll, 1995 Newsweek Poll
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Techno Status
Technology is creating new divisions among residents of Los Angeles and Orange counties. The most technology adept are overwhelmingly male and highly educated. “Techies” tend to believe strongly in the importance of technology and are more likely to be at least partly self-employed. A profile of users and nonusers:
*--*
Techies Coping Struggling Disconnects Sex Men 68% 45% 51% 43% Women 32 55 49 57 Education College graduate 56 45 33 19 Some college 17 32 23 21 High school or less 27 23 44 60 Employment status Employed by other 52 58 54 28 Completely or partly Self-employed 38 25 20 13 Not employed 10 17 26 59 Have in home: Desktop computer 63 59 39 7 Portable computer 33 20 12 4 Home computer use: Modem 49 29 12 0 E-mail 44 22 8 0 Chat 24 14 4 0 Very likely to buy computer in the next year 35 26 21 8 Know about Internet 95 93 81 52 Consider it very important to stay informed about technology 74 54 41 20 Computers’ impact Bring people together 52 53 49 33 Bring families together 58 49 43 37
*--*
Source: Times Technology Poll
