Society should be concerned if and only if there isn’t the means for the African-Americans to get connected to the Internet. For a lower class family to invest so much into getting online, it means getting a computer that costs about $700 and subscribing to an online service that can be as much as $25 a month not including the costs on the phone lines. Some people may just not have the means. If they don’t have the means it speaks to the levels of education that is required for the better paying jobs. It has been proven that African-Americans have a low level of high school and college graduation rates. The vast majority of the better paying jobs require at least a GED. With this basic level of education unreached, the next best jobs are service jobs that pay by the hour instead of being salaried. At $6 an hour 40 hours a week, that would be $960 without taxes taken out. Basic needs take precedence; food, water, power, shelter and clothing can take out ¾ to all of a month’s pay. There is nothing left for a computer, let alone the phone service and online service needed to connect to the Internet. If society really wants to improve the digital divide by way of useful contributions made to webpages, then it needs to encourage education and not let those who are the most financially vulnerable slip into the point of no return.

However, African-Americans have ample opportunity to be exposed to the Internet. The Free Public Library is connected to the Internet. If someone really wanted to get on the net, the process is as simple as going to the nearest library and going to an empty terminal and start surfing. The fact that they are not doing that doesn’t speak anything about society in general at all. Instead, it’s more of an issue of what African-Americans hold most important socially. There is a webcommunity online by African-Americans for African-Americans, blackplanet.com. It’s a service that many of the teenaged African-Americans know about and use. While it isn’t explicitly for the younger generation, there isn’t a similar community for the older generations of African-Americans. In the future, I foresee that this situation will be corrected because the younger generation will make a service for African-American adults. By then, the digital divide should remain steady if not get smaller. Both situations are much better than the greatening of the gap that has occurred in the past decade.