Home Internet Use in Low-Income Families: Is Access Enough to Eliminate the Digital Divide?

The 20th century closed with a flurry of activity surrounding the issue of the “digital divide.” The term was first used by Lloyd Morrisett, former president of the Markle Foundation, to refer to the division between the information haves and have-nots-between those who have access to digital technologies and those who do not (Hoffman & Novak, 1999). From the moment the digital divide entered the public consciousness, countless resources, both human and monetary, have been poured into reducing it, primarily by increasing access to technology (Benton Foundation, 1998; Coley, Cradler, & Engel, 1997; Cooper & Kimmelman, 1999; Harmon, 1997; Keller, 1996;Roberts, 1997;Sheppard, 1997). These effortswere motivated in part by a recognition that digital technologies are increasingly important to educational and economic outcomes in the information age (Beaupre & BrandWilliams, 1997; Educational Testing Service, 1999; Morrisette, 1999; Rutkowski, 1998; Schon, Sanyal, & Mitchell, 1999), and in part by the assumption that the digital divide is fundamentally an economic divide (Hoffman & Novak, 1998; National

Telecommunications and Information Administration [NTIA], 1995, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002). Thus, once access to digital technologies is assured, the divide will essentially “go away.”