The American digital divide isn’t as wide as it used to be for Latinos and other minorities, but the disparity between those groups and white, affluent people still exists, albeit in a more complicated form. That’s the conclusion of a report by the Pew American and Internet Life Project released yesterday.
The good news: 56% of Latino adults and 60% of non-Hispanic blacks go online. Although the ratio for non-Hispanics whites is 70%, that’s still the majority of minority groups.
The bad news: only 29% of Latino adults have a broadband connection at home, compared to 43% of white adults and 31% of African American adults.
This broadband digital divide is keeping minorities from fully participating in the creation of Internet content by making it far more difficult to create blogs, post videos, maintain social networking pages at MySpace and so forth. Because of this, Pew associate director Susannah Fox says that the digital divide has become a “digital dimmer switch.”
Unfortunately, this gap between Hispances and minorities and non-Hispanic whites won’t narrow anytime soon. Language barriers, poor education levels and low household incomes will keep the dimmer on low, raising the importance of publicly available broadband connections at schools, libraries and other public access points.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:44 AM|Comments(0)
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