Here's a sobering fact to keep in mind while pondering the dizzying pace of the information revolution: Today more than half the people on the planet have yet to place their first telephone call.
In 1990 India had only about 5 million telephones for its population of about 850 million people; that's less than 1 percent. A relatively modernized Latin America doesn't fare much better: Only about 7 percent have phones.
The Digital Revolution almost certainly will exacerbate the stratification of global and American society into the haves and the have-nots.
On a global scale, whole regions of the world risk becoming irrelevant to the rarefied global economy that increasingly trades in ideas and information.
Though exploited, colonial Africa once was integral to a global economy that needed its raw materials and labor. Today many African countries find themselves almost completely out of the loop of the global economy and detached from the global telecommunications network. In light of Rwanda and Somalia, "out of the loop" is beginning to look as bad as "exploited."
Some countries will be able to leapfrog into the Digital Age by taking advantage of recent technological advances in fiber optics and wireless communications. They actually have some advantage over developed countries that already have huge investments in more outdated analog phone systems with their copper wires.
China plans to install 80 million new telephone lines -- four times its current number -- by the end of the decade. By the end of this year, all 26 regional capitals outside of Tibet will have high-capacity fiber links to the world.
That's not to say that we'll see Chinese peasants sending e-mail anytime soon. And we'll most likely see many other Third World countries mired in a technological Stone Age while a tiny caste of wired elites tap into the global network.
At home, we face the very real danger of a two-tiered society, with one block taking advantage of the technology while the other remains mostly disengaged. The big questions are where the dividing line will fall and how big the techno-underclass will be.
But access to technology ultimately will not hinge on cost, which is the major focus of our current debate. Digital technologies will almost certainly become so cheap that everyone will be able to afford them.
Think of the television. In 1960, less than 1 percent of all U.S. homes had at least one color television set. Today the figure is 98 percent. You can walk into any apartment in the poorest inner-city neighborhood and find a color TV. And that happened without any government subsidy or private philanthropy. Everyone bought televisions because the prices dropped enough and, for better or worse, they were considered essential to living in our society.
We're already approaching the point at which a new personal computer or its equivalent will cost as little as a color TV. Over time, they will become increasingly essential to our lives.
So we shouldn't worry too much in the long run about getting the new technologies into the homes of the poor.
The dividing line between the information haves and have-nots in this country will be defined by such intangible factors as upbringing, culture and education. How a child fares in life will be much more dependent on attitude, values and mentality.
Those intangibles certainly are affected by a family's economic status, government policies and the entire society's sense of responsibility. But the division won't be determined as much by whether a family is rich or poor as by whether a family is engaged in the Digital Age.
The technology will be there. How an individual fares will largely depend on how he or she chooses to use it.
