Rethinking the Digital Divide

T he contrast between the egalitarian ideals of many netizens, who see cyberspace as a radically democratizing environment , and the real limitations of access for most of the world continues to haunt the Net. In many ways, the domination of information technology has reinvigorated hierarchies of power, concentrating resources in the First World and contributing to the widening global economic gap between the haves and have nots, categories defined more than ever along axes of race, gender , nation, and ethnicity. At the same time, not all the dreams of free and universal access to publishing and information have been for naught. It matters that the Net provides a home for many sites—good, bad, and indifferent—produced by all sorts of people with all kinds of politics. In the weeks after the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, for example, many peace activists complained bitterly that the mainstream media suppressed critical information about US policy. But dissent flourished on the Net, with e-mail position papers, listservs like Professors for Peace, and sites like that of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghani-stan providing a vigorous counternar-rative. In some ways, the Net makes markers of gender, race, class, nation, language, and age hypervisible, but the old protocols of publication are, if not gone, certainly reconfigured. The Net offers real opportunities for progressive scholars, teachers, computer scientists, philanthropists, and even corporations that want to use it to make a difference. We arrived at these observations while thinking about how to structure a distance-learning program in Inter-net computing and women's studies to reach a nontraditional group of students in Arizona: rural, homebound, or incarcerated women. We seek to provide these students with both critical thinking skills through women's studies courses and a range of technological skills by doing the coursework. We hope that such a program might teach across the digital divide, filling a gap in access to higher education and technology skills. The students we hope to reach have marginalized educational opportunities for several interconnected reasons. A profoundly rural state, Arizona contains many extremely underfunded public school districts. These impoverished districts serve communities that are disproportionately Mexican-American and Native American—an unsurprising situation given the uneven distribution of poverty in the US. Further, the community college system does not serve the people in these rural communities well. Its facilities, while extensive, tend to concentrate in more populous areas. The …