JC: Generally, the digital divide has been designated as the issue of access to technology. The digital divide has been perceived as a kind of have and have-not within the U.S. And around the world the United States, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden, Finland have been the have countries and Africa still remains very much a have-not where the Internet is concerned. So the digital divide has been the justification for a lot of policy in the United States to make sure that there’s equal access to technology and its benefits.

We’ve been arguing at the center in our work on the Internet that access to the Internet is just one aspect of the "Digital Divide," and as I said one that’s being dealt with. There’s now another issue as you wire every school, as more and more people have access. Some people understand what to do with the technology. Some people know what information is, where to find it and most importantly how to discern good information from bad. Some of us know how to look at information and to tell whether it has political motivation, whether it’s inferior research, whether it’s biased in some way. Others of us don’t. And there’s this kind of divide between understanding information.

SB: I know from your research at the center that you also see the divide as the difference between broadband service and modem.

JC: While all of us have access, increasingly the people who had access to the Internet first, the people who have created the sense of a digital divide, are now the ones moving very quickly to broadband, the high speed Internet. And the high speed Internet changes our entire relationship with the Internet. It changes how often we’re on. It changes when and where we go on, how long we stay on and most importantly what we do with the kinds of information we can download. With broadband we’re much more likely to download music and videos and there is very much still a digital divide on broadband, at least from home, because broadband on top of all of the other costs of the Internet, can cost forty/fifty dollars a month. So there’s very much a digital divide.

Now recently the new chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, when asked about the digital divide, felt that it would take care of itself, but not necessarily so that everybody was included. Not everyone feels that everyone must be part of that, but Powell, had also said, not facetiously, that making the point that not everybody gets everything, that in the United States there is a Mercedes Benz divide. And he wishes that he could afford a Mercedes Benz and I suspect he could, but he implies he couldn’t and that that’s just a fact of life. There will always be, and if you gave everybody Mercedes Benz there would be, a million-dollar house divide. I mean, there are some natural forces of economics that determine. This is not a socialistic state, according to Powell. And I’m taking Powell’s argument a little further than he took it, arguing that some of us will always have access to the newest toys, the biggest cars, and the biggest homes. I think the Clinton administration argued successfully that access to the Internet was not a luxury. It was very much a necessity in today’s life and, therefore, I think that’s why they made sure everyone had access. So the "Digital Divide," as we originally perceived it, I think is going away. New issues such as knowing a kind of a literacy of the Internet, and then some new permutations such as broadband will continue to develop.

SB: So I guess you don’t feel that the "Digital Divide" will further create a socioeconomic divide?

JC: I think there’s still a "Digital Divide," but there’s pretty good evidence that the issue of access will diminish and be gone in a couple of years. Then the next issue, as I said, is some people will know what information’s there and how to get it. I think the people who are concerned will move to making sure that people understand the information as you describe is there. But right now, our research shows that 67% of Americans have some form of regular access to the Internet. And almost everybody has access if they need it for job information. They can go to another person’s house, a school, someplace. It’s, of course, a lot easier and nicer to do that at home at the time of your choosing or as often as you want, but there’s very, very few people who want to look at the information on the Internet who do not have access. Of that 33% or so of Americans who aren’t online a few of ‘em, we don’t know exactly how many, would like to go online and will as soon as practical, but many of them have no interest of going online. The lack of access is not because they can not afford or get access, it’s because they don’t have any interest in access.

The Internet began at UCLA on Labor Day weekend, 1969.

SB: How do you compare the introduction of television on society to the introduction of the Internet?

JC: Television and the Internet share some similarities and some real differences. Television is the one mass medium everybody knew was going to be a mass medium. When publishing and printing presses were developed it took a hundred years before people figured out what the potential of printing presses was. Certainly no one saw it as an industry that was going to lead to newspapers and magazines and books. When film came on the scene, around the turn of the century, it was thought to be a kind of scientific toy, but no one saw a major industry. It took twenty years or so. And radio, same thing. Radio was seen as this amazing scientific tool that allowed ships to communicate with shore and wireless communication, but no one saw a radio in everyone’s home in the beginning. That took three or four years. Television, everybody knew was going to be a mass medium. Before the first television signal was sent people knew that everybody would want a television if it could be perfected.

The Internet sort of crept up on us. Actually, the first node of the Internet was here at UCLA. Leonard Kleinrock, professor of computing science, was one of the fathers of the Internet. The Internet began at UCLA on Labor Day weekend, 1969. A lot of other universities were involved. We didn’t invent it single-handedly here, but we were the first node. And basically the Internet began with not some grandiose vision. It began because the federal government did not want to fund an expensive computer at every university. So it tried to find a way that universities could share computing resources. This was the Advanced Research Project Agency, ARPA, and out of that this notion that we’ll put a couple of big computers in a few places and everybody else can share through a network was the beginning of the ARPAnet. And it was thought of as simply a way for universities and high level researchers to communicate with each other. It was a very elite group. It remained that way for about twenty years. Email came online. But the fathers of the Internet never had any vision that we would be exchanging recipes, pornography, and basic communication. If they did they probably would have shut it down immediately. And so basically this started as a research tool that then became an important asset to the public. But it’s important to remember that this is 2001. In 1994, America Online still existed as a proprietary service. You’d dial up America Online and you’d have access to all of their private information. It was in ‘94 that America Online opened its service, gave its members access to the Internet, to the screams of the Internet community who didn’t want the masses clogging up their incredible tool. And it wasn’t until 1995 that Congress released the ban on commerce on the Internet, selling things on the Internet. It was illegal until 1995 because this was started as a government project without any commerce.

So television and the Internet have very different histories. The question is whether they’re also fundamentally different in some important ways. Television is mostly about leisure and entertainment, a little bit of educational function, but not much in the United States. The Internet is about work, school and play, and has the ability to transform the workplace. I would argue that that’s already beginning to happen. The Internet has the ability to transform how we play and get information about playing. That I think has already happened. And the most significant one, it has the ability to transform how we learn, both formally and informally. That has not, I don’t think, begun to happen in significant ways yet. So the Internet potentially is about everything. Television is mostly about leisure and entertainment. And in the year 2001, 98.3% of American households have television. If you look at households below the poverty level it is 99.7%. Basically everybody in America who wants a television has it. PC penetration in America runs somewhere in the mid 50’s and Internet penetration from home runs about 46%, according to our work, and access to the Internet runs at about 67%. The Internet, and generally technology, is assumed to have made it when it reaches 30% of the population. So the Internet, on that standard, is well past where it needs to be. The Internet is not quite as pervasive as television and ultimately television and the Internet may, and probably will, converge in significant ways.

SB: Do you see the Internet as being something that everybody below the poverty line will have?

JC: Yes, I do. I think that eventually the Internet will reach 100% penetration. I think there will be certain tasks that either will be much more expensive to do offline than online.

There are a lot of similarities between ATM cards and the Internet. Many people were afraid to use those cards. The ways the banks got people to use them was to make it cheaper to do services through ATMs than it was to walk into the bank and use a teller. So that the poorer you were, the more the ATM saved you money. I think the same thing is going to happen with the Internet. This week American Airlines announced that it’s now going to charge $10 extra if you want a hard ticket. They also give you better specials on airfares online, you save the $10 and you save for the ticket and you get better deals. I think there’s going to be a lot of things that you can buy online or do online, or a lot of services we pay for already that will be cheaper. For example, if you get your bills on the Internet they will take a dollar a month off. Those are modest things now, but I think long term the less money you have the more you’re going to use the Internet and the more you’re going to need the Internet because you can save money. And there are certain things you’re only going to be able to do online. To do them offline they’re going to be very awkward, expensive or difficult. No, I think eventually we’re talking about 100% of American households having access to the Internet and even the homeless having access through public terminals because that will be how we communicate. But America is going to take longer than most industrialized countries.

SB: Like European countries?

JC: European countries will do this faster than Americans. We found this small group of Americans who are not online because everybody else is online, who like not being part of this because everybody else is part of it. That’s an American quality for whatever reason. We may reach 90% penetration in 3 years, 6 years, 8 years, but the last 10% is going to be very tough. We’re almost going to have to force people to do things online, not that we’re going to create policies to force. But to get to 90% fairly quickly, the last 10% is going to take a generation.

SB: How do you define the "Digital Divide" on the international level?

JC: We don’t technically have a second world anymore with the fall of Communism. I mean, all the obvious countries, Western Europe, lots of parts of Asia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, United States, Canada, are on. Australia and New Zealand are on. I’m sure I’m leaving a few countries out. We’re on one side of the divide, countries that have developed economies, which have developed infrastructures. And then you have parts of the world where penetration is below 2% for computers and the Internet. The good news, though, or the potential long-term good news is that the Internet and technology may allow certain countries, particularly the African countries, to leap frog. They have not even built strong telephone infrastructures, which are immensely expensive because you have to put wires and poles underground. And they may bypass that whole structure and go completely wireless. If you look at Sweden and Italy right now there are now more wireless phone lines than there are wired phone lines and those are industrialized countries. Normally for poorer countries in Africa to catch up to where the U.S. is they would have to build these massive infrastructures, billions upon billions of dollars of wires. Wireless technology may allow them to bypass that and catch up much faster than we had hoped. It is still not going to be cheap, but it will be faster and cheaper. So there’s some hope there.

But right now, the year 2001, there is a real "Digital Divide" from an access standpoint. There are, depending on who you talk to, anywhere from 200-to-400 million people online, dominated almost completely by industrialized countries. China is moving pretty fast, although China still has a tiny percentage of its population. But based on its sheer size a lot of people in China have access. But there’s a real digital divide internationally.

SB: Back to the information idea, how do you define good information?

JC: Well, good information is in the eye of the beholder. But what we would say is objective or relatively objective information as distinguished from biased information. There is information that doesn’t have political motivation. There is information that’s not overtly biased. Is there such a thing as pure, objective information? Of course not. But most of our major media, despite what we say, is relatively reliable. We have very little of our major media, very little of our network television, of our major newsmagazines, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, that are overtly, hugely biased. Is every piece of information in every issue absolutely objective? Of course not. But there’s generally not a political bias. There sometimes can be a subtle one.

There’s generally a high standard of accuracy. If lies are brought to the attention of the editors or factual errors, in almost every instance they are corrected. And to create a magazine in America that looks like Time or Newsweek costs millions upon millions of dollars. On the Internet, to create a web site that looks like Time or Newsweek’s web site doesn’t cost millions of dollars. It costs next to nothing if you have some time and some ability. I believe a lot of Americans have routinely been able to accept much of the information we have access to through other media as fairly accurate. You hear all the qualifiers here. And I think we’re going to transfer that reliance or that credibility to the Internet. And on the Internet if you’re going to U.S. News or Newsweek or The New York Times web sites, their actual product is in their virtual product. But there’s also going to be a lot of other information on the web site from places we haven’t heard of or whose motivations or ownership we may not know, that may be closer to propaganda, that may be politically motivated.

Ultimately I think this will be a good thing. Ultimately I think it’s refreshing to be able to see these things, but we’re going to have to be able to discern what is reliable information or what’s a good source from what’s questionable or a bad source. In that process we may get badly burned. We may see the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal on certain web sites belonging to organizations that we trust. Whether it’s the Catholic church, whether it’s the Baptist church, or whatever church, or whether it’s a university, or whether it’s some neutral agency, or Ralph Nader’s group, it will certify certain things as being fair and accurate. And the seals that I go to may be different from the ones you go to. My vision of truth may be different from your vision of truth. But nevertheless we may see something like that develop. Right now there are bad newspapers, but if you open the top ten newspapers in America you’re going to get relatively good information. Same thing if you listen to the network news on television. But if you go to the Internet you may or may not get good information and you may or may not know that it’s good or bad information. And it’s going to look very professional. Generally the competitors to the New York Times and Newsweek don’t look so professional. You can tell the Marxist or the far right stuff generally. It’s not printed very professionally. Those differences don’t exist on the Internet.

SB: Which actually that brings me to an interesting point about the Internet, which is how English is seen as being the dominant language on the Internet, which is one of the causes for the "Digital Divide."

JC: English is the dominant language on the Internet. English, whether people like it or not, has become the dominant language in the world. Well, not the most spoken language. The most spoken language is still Chinese. But English is spoken in most places. If you had to have one language, if you’re traveling, English would be the one. I’m not saying that’s good or bad. It certainly makes it easy for Americans who don’t learn languages. There’s no question the Internet is largely in English, to the great consternation of the French, who see it as yet another invasion or encroachment into French sovereignty. There’s nothing that stops an Internet site from being in languages other than English. Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Laboratory, said two years ago that in ten years or within eight years from now, most of the Internet would be in Chinese. I don’t agree with that.

What will happen is that if you are in Sweden and you have a web site that you want only to be read by Swedes you will indeed put it in Swedish. The problem with Swedish is that it is spoken almost nowhere else on earth except in Sweden. So if you want an international web site that will be read by people other than just your home country it will be in the native language and everyone’s second choice is always going to be English, with rare exceptions. So English is probably going to remain the most dominant language on the Internet. Any entity that wants to be read internationally is going to be in their language and English.

SB: How do you see that tying into American cultural dominance?

JC: When you look at films around the world, television, music, that battle has largely been lost a long time ago. The Internet is another piece of that. But it doesn’t have to be American. It will be in English. It doesn’t mean that American web sites will dominate the world. It means that if the Chinese want to communicate with the rest of the world they’ll have to do so in English. So it has to do with the dominance of English, not necessarily the dominance of America. Although right now America dominates both language and content. That will change. We will see millions upon millions of web sites pop up in China and other places, many of them in English and something else.

SB: Do you see technology as a liability or as something that will enhance our lives?

JC: We asked that question on our survey. The last question was: overall, do you think all of this communication technology has made the world a better place or a worse place? And from the survey the vast majority, two-thirds of Internet users, thought it made the world a better place. And that doesn’t mean that the other third thought it made it a worse place. So clearly the public is very optimistic about this technology. They think that email has gravely enhanced their social networks.

People are very hopeful that are online. They feel more politically empowered, feel they can better understand politics. People even argue that there may be some role in the Internet changing ethnic warfare as people can better understand each other. We haven’t seen whether it plays a role in warfare. Although it was fascinating to see that the negotiations between the United States and China over the surveillance plane and the settlement were in English. Which led the Chinese to be able to tell their population, their people, what the settlement said, what words were used in Chinese. Well, it turns out they used a very generous, to them, interpretation of the settlement. But a lot of Chinese got access to it in English through the Internet and have now been distributing what it really said, which clearly was a much bigger success for the U.S. than China. So we’re just beginning to see how this may change international relations. We just learned last week, the Internet makes it difficult for the Chinese government to fool the Chinese people. And that’s just the beginning. Does that mean a weakening of the Chinese government? We have no idea.

Is it an asset or a liability? Clearly it is an asset in many ways. The ability to communicate, work becomes more productive. I could go on and on and on, the information available to you, the ability to shop, to do things 24 hours a day. But there are some real liabilities as well. The most important is the fear of privacy and the fact that what we do many people feel is being tracked. Employees feel that their use of the Internet at work is being tracked. I would argue that email, despite all of the great joys and benefits of email, has become a huge burden for most of us. This technology does make us more productive. I think the net result of that is we’re all working a lot more than we ever did. We’re doing a lot more work at work because we’re more efficient at the work we do. And then we’re coming home and we’re working at home, whether it’s formally doing our actual office work at home, or it’s just answering emails on Saturday morning, Sunday night, New Year’s Eve. We know that some of this invades some of our free time. We know some people are addicted to the technology and use it more than they should. Is television an asset or a liability? It has provided incredible entertainment at low cost to millions of people and it has negative effects as well. Clearly the same is true of the Internet, but I think overall it has been an asset.

SB: How much do you think culture influences the divide? Certain cultures like Latino families, have family oriented views and may be not as prone as, say a young, white male boy to get on the computer and spend 4 hours of their Saturday?

JC: I think in the long-term culture is not going to have a big impact. You mentioned Latinos and how family oriented they are. Many of them have families in other places and will use this technology to communicate, to send pictures, as a way to build family when family is not possible. And we know a lot of Latinos are immigrants from other countries and first generation immigrants. So I think generally people like to communicate with other people. People like to know what other people are doing. One of the things we were able to show is that almost half, 47% of households, say they go online together at least once a week. It’s not a solitary activity. 85% of households say they go online together at least once a month. 17% say they never go online together. So I don’t think being family oriented interferes with this at all. It’s a great way to communicate with your family, to interact with your extended family. There are cultural differences that tie into economic differences that have kept certain groups from being online first and those things I think are going away. I think the advantages of technology cut across culture.

SB: How fast are things changing?

JC: I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the phrase "Internet years." That’s slowing and accelerating. I mean, things are changing quickly. Compared to any other technology things are changing quickly. But they’re not changing so quickly that people can’t catch up with them. And the U.S. is behind the rest of the world in some areas. Wireless we’re behind Europe. But things are changing fast and the overall pace of change is still pretty fast.

SB: How do you think today’s Kindergarten students will access the Internet by the time they’re in high school?

JC: I think pretty much the same way we access it today. But I don’t think it will be PC’s. I think PC’s have peaked. I think many people are buying PC’s who don’t need PC’s. People are buying PC’s to access the Internet, send email. The problem with PC’s is they need to be upgraded every two to three to four years. So I think we’re moving closer to a network device where there’s very little guts inside. It’s just a keyboard and a monitor that connects to some central server. It may be through our television. But I think the Internet that we access will largely be the same Internet. We’ll just do it through a less expensive device that doesn’t have to be replaced. The other way it will change is we’ll see Kindergartners, by the time they get to 3rd grade, will be using wireless Internet. But the wireless Internet, at least at the moment, is a subset of the real Internet. I’m talking about a wireless Internet on a cell phone screen or a palm pilot screen; you can’t surf the way you surf now. You can’t look at full web pages. You’ll be able to go to a real small subset. You’ll be able to go to the airlines and make reservations, stocks and look at prices or trades. You’ll be able to get small, discrete textual information, maybe small pictures. Someday we may see a foldable screen so you can have a screen the size of a book that folds into the size of a dollar and you can carry it. That’s not on the horizon quite yet. So I think by the time Kindergartners graduate they’ll be very proficient at the wireless subset of the Internet and they’ll be accessing the Internet the same way we do now except through a different kind of hardware.

Click here to read Jeffrey Cole's bio.

For further information about the Internet Project visit the UCLA Center for Communication Policy at http://ccp.ucla.edu.