The New York Times reported last week that the digital divide may be closing for African Americans, and that story has been picked up by lots of other folks around the Internet.
An interesting fact concerning these new findings about African Americans and the Internet is that, as the Marketing Profs point out on their blog, "the falling price of laptops, more computers in public schools and libraries, and the newest generation of cell phones and handheld devices that connect to the internet have helped more people to gain access the internet."
To me, this is highlights two important facts: 1) it illustrates the interconnectedness of race and class; and, 2) it demonstrates the shift from the locked-down "desktop" model of the Internet to the mobile-computing, ubiquituous model that Howard Rheingold sketched out in his prescient book, Smart Mobs.
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This is a great project with the purpose of educate minorities as well as kids. Nowadays, computers as well as internet have been used as an educational tool despite of the negative things these devices can create. In the New York City Health Department most specifically the WIC program (Women, Infants and Children) is running a campaign providing computers to low income families from the upper Manhattan. The program consist in provide those families with the devices such as the computer, printer, scanner, web cam, microphone and speakers. The internet service at very low cost and the most essential, training; those computers were designed with a special system in which the user can explore it easier that a conventional computer. Those PCs have special links such as the shortcut to send emails to the peer counselors from the health department and more.
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