From Kentucky and the New Economy/Challenges for the Next Century: The
Conference Proceedings
p. 43-50, published 2001
Moderator
Panelists
Kevin Fields, President of Urban Technologies, Inc.
Johnathan Holifield, Vice President for Electronic Commerce,
Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce
Jim Nelson, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives
Doug Robinson, Governor’s Office for Technology
I’m Ernie Yanarella, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky, and it was my pleasure, seems like ages ago for those of you who are part of the Kentucky Leaders for a New Century, to be involved in that particular activity at Shakertown and at two of the earlier sessions that we had at Kentucky State Parks. I’m absolutely delighted that the group has held together, that it is involved in doing precisely what we hoped that this new group of leaders would be doing, fomenting public issues and trying to promote social change in the new millennium. I hope you will look at this panel on bridging the digital divide as something quite continuous with the conversation that this group began not too long ago and will be carrying forth over their entire careers and public lives.
We are very fortunate today in having a number of very highly qualified people on our panel who are going to assist us in ventilating a set of issues relating to the problem of the digital divide and perhaps giving us some insight on how we find solutions to that problem in Kentucky and perhaps elsewhere. I’ve known several of these people for awhile and I have just met some others, and so, I would like to give each of them an opportunity to provide to you their names, their affiliations and, perhaps in a few words, as a prelude, why they are interested in the issue of the digital divide. Let me say at the outset that we are extremely fortunate in having a substitute for one of our panelists, Ben Richmond, President and CEO of the Louisville Urban League, in the form of Kevin Fields, who was called in at a very late hour and was gracious enough to come in and serve as a substitute. Kevin, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and why and how your particular interests bring you to the issue of the digital divide.
Kevin Fields
Good afternoon. Again, my name is Kevin Fields. I’m President of Urban Technologies, Inc. We are a Louisville-based consulting group that provides support services to various organizations, primarily nonprofit organizations as well as units of government. We became very interested in this issue of the digital divide a couple of years ago. In a previous career, I worked with the Housing Authority of Louisville, was there for the past 14 years and working with various issues relevant to low-income housing communities. As this issue began to surface in terms of increasing access to technology for low-income people, I began to get very actively involved in it. Most recently, on behalf of the Urban League, I’m engaged in a project that is now operating under the name The Great Equalizer. We’re emphasizing the fact that the new Internet economy creates a new set of opportunities for all people and we’re looking at the Internet as that level playing field that allows all people the opportunity to get in and take advantage of it and improve their socioeconomic conditions. So, based on that, we’ve got interests in this whole issue and we’ve got an active project going where we’re talking to the community to learn what the obstacles are for accessing technology.
Jim Nelson
My name is Jim Nelson. If you’re from Kentucky in any way, I’m your State Librarian and Commissioner for Libraries and Archives. I would hope that when I mention the word library that you would understand that that’s the business that we’ve always been in as bridging divides between the haves and have-nots, in terms of information. In fact, that’s why I got in the business initially. I was working for Louisville Free Public Library, as a matter of fact, beginning my career, and I looked around at all the resources and said, boy, this really levels the playing field. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, how much you’ve got, or who your parents are, or anything else: you can use these resources to help yourself and your families and that’s what motivated me. And when I came in 1980, the Department of Libraries had been merged in 1974, I think, with the State Archives. So we do the archives and public records work as well. And, of course, the other piece of this is that, if somebody is not attentive to preservation of critical government information, government is no longer accountable nor is the history of government business kept available to the public. So, those are my two pieces of orientation towards today’s program. I look forward to hearing from the other panelists and contributing my opinions.
Doug Robinson
I am Doug Robinson with the Governor’s Office for Technology and I’m the Executive Director of the Office of Policy and Customer Relations. Obviously, with that title, I’m intimately involved with IT policy issues and planning issues with respect to state government and one of those is electronic government. If you were in the last panel on the New Economy, you heard a lot about initiatives in e-government. Clearly, addressing the digital divide, the challenges of that in creating what I’ll call digital opportunities is somewhat of a function of state government. I’m not at this point clear whether that is clearly a holistic role. We have bits and pieces to play and I don’t think that state government alone obviously is going to address the digital divide and bridging that gap. It needs to be addressed by public/private partnerships and community-based organizations, such as Kevin mentioned, and a host of others in the education community; but clearly state government does have a role and should have a policy agenda, which we are working on. The other thing that we’re clearly interested in and is probably selfish is the fact that we have an e-government framework. We have a need to deliver our services for efficient and effective government in electronic fashion. We desire to do that. We need our stakeholders ready, and by that I mean not only citizens but businesses as well. We need to have them connected. We need to have them digitally involved. We need to have them embrace this connected world that we live in in order to do that effectively. So we have a challenge in that respect in that Kentucky has not been a state that has embraced information technology in a general sense. We’d like to see what policy initiatives that we might be able to bring forth that would transcend the divide that we have today. We can bring some statistics to bear on that and some of the challenges that we have, I think, later in our discussion.
Johnathan Holifield
Good afternoon. My name is Johnathan Holifield, Vice President of New Economy Enterprise, Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. Recently, we have begun planning our regional technology initiative, whereby we will look to discover ways in which we can accelerate the growth of the technology sector of the Greater Cincinnati economy. With that is a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to develop policy initiatives and pursue objectives where the barrier to entry in this economy is minimal. In the industrial age, the barrier to entry was quite significant. I’m from Michigan originally and all of my relatives are employed in the auto industry. The intense capital required to build that sort of industry is no longer a barrier to entry; knowledge is, education is. As we examine these issues, my interest is to assure, as best I can, that barrier to entry is low to nonexistent. It’s a wonderful opportunity. As was described earlier, it is the great equalizer. The most meritocracy that we’ll ever achieve will be technology-driven and with that I look forward to the discussion.
Ernie Yanarella
Johnathan, Doug, Jim, and Kevin, thanks so much. I’m not going to try to hamstring these panelists, but I did bring an agenda which I hope that we can work around over the course of the next 50 minutes or so. One issue that I think is really quite crucial to our considering is the issue of the digital divide itself in Kentucky. How big is it? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Is it a differentiated problem? What is the nature of this particular animal that we’re dealing with and we’re trying to grapple with?
Secondly, and this is an issue that Joe Washington helped to smoke out among our panelists over the last week or so, we know in some sense it’s a state policy issue, but is it more? What are its different facets? Is it cultural problem? Is it an educational problem? Is it a technological problem? Is it a socioeconomic problem? Are all of these different facets of the same problem that we’re dealing with? If it is, then does that say something about the kinds of strategies we’re going to have to engage in over the course of the next 20 years or so to deal with it?
Thirdly, as you can see from the diversity of people who are here from different professions and backgrounds, we have another issue that surfaces and that has to do with the issue of the proper roles of different social institutions in our Commonwealth. What are those proper roles for government, for business, for schools, and for civic and faith-based organizations in communities in responding to the problems associate with the digital divide?
The fourth issue that I’ve suggested here has to do with strategy. Do different groups have different needs that must be responded to in developing a comprehensive and multifaceted strategy for addressing the digital divide? No less important, for those of you who were here at the previous session: the digital divide was a continuing, nagging issue that not merely stood in the background, but kept being pushed forward as people were raising questions about the role of Kentucky in the New Economy. We’ve got a tremendous high school dropout rate in Kentucky. Are there higher priorities? Are there complementary needs that should be addressed in advance by the Commonwealth as we are trying to shrink that chasm that goes by the name of “digital divide”?
And, finally, we may want to suggest some examples, some exemplars in the Commonwealth. A lot of things are going on. I spent two or three hours several days ago surfing the Net and coming up with a number of very fascinating projects that have been started and initiated by different organizations around the Commonwealth that seem dedicated to playing their part in closing that digital divide. So without being too much of a disciplinarian as chair of this panel, I hope that we can work within this broad ambit and perhaps then turn to the larger audience here for additional questions and perspectives on this extremely knotty problem. Doug, from your point of view, from the Governor’s Office, what do you see in the way of statistics that lend some insight into this first question, the question of the size of the digital divide and the trends that are operating within this broad issue?
Doug Robinson
Given, if you take one dimension of the digital divide, and I will characterize the digital divide as you’ve already stated, I think, in the second bullet, it’s multidimensional. It’s not just an access to technology. If you take that measure of access to technology as both home ownership of computers as well as access to the Internet, clearly in the last four years, the divide is narrowing; it’s shrinking in those categories. Kentuckians are adopting technology at a higher rate, certainly above the $50,000 household income level, and it’s much higher above the $75,000 household income. Above 76 percent have home computers and access to the Internet. I think the growing divide is that big gulf between the middle and upper income and the under $15,000 household income levels where we have the 10 to 12 percent level.
So, overall, the divide has been closing with more and more Kentuckians getting online, more and more Kentuckians having ownership of personal computers at home, but we still don’t have that shift happening in the lower income brackets. This is a problem and I think can best be addressed in many cases as recognizing that, in fact, the digital divide is clearly a socioeconomic issue first and the strongest predictor is income. So, if you look at that, the second problem in Kentucky is education. Age and ethnicity is not as strong a predictor as it is in other areas, but we are no different than the rest of the south. The south itself is behind the rest of the country. Kentucky is probably positioned in the middle of those states in the south in terms of adopting this.
Ernie Yanarella
In looking at some of the tables and figures that emanate from the William Daly, Secretary of Commerce, series of studies, titled something like Falling Through the Net, I came across two tables which I’d like to use perhaps as a point of departure. One focuses on the issue of telephone subscribership. Obviously, getting onto the Net presumes some kind of Internet service provider and, for the time being, most of it will be driven by modems, and this implies telephone service. If we look at the bottom 15 and the top 15 states, you can see where Kentucky stands relative to the bottom 15. Right about the middle of that. In addition, in terms of household computer use, we can look again at these statistics drawn from these studies and we see once more that Kentucky stands within the bottom 10 states for household computer use, contrasted with those at the top. Where does this lead us, then? Who are those targets that need to be considered in terms of policy if we are to bridge that digital divide? Who are those groups within our society who are most in need of motivation, assistance, and so forth, in terms of gaining access? I want to focus most particularly on the issue of access first and then get us to the more knotty question and that is, is access enough? Anybody on the panel want to make a general comment about who are those target populations that we’re looking at right now? Kevin.
Kevin Fields
Sure, I’ll take an initial stab. I think most of it has already been said. Education, I think, is a critical issue, so the groups that have been undereducated in terms of utilization of computers in one part are certainly a group that are to be targeted. However, I think a bigger issue, if we look at it in real practical common sense terms, many of us that use computers on a day-to-day basis have had some reason to begin using them. In a lot of cases, it had to do with either being in the educational setting or an employment setting and a lot of the growth in our utilization came from that experience. Groups that have not had that opportunity, either through education or employment, to have that firsthand experience to begin using computers and then the Internet are the groups that I think need to be targeted. Because we are looking at the use of computers much differently with the advent of the Internet than we had in the past, if we can put our finger on that group that will be one group to go.
Johnathan Holifield
Yes. I agree that most of the core issues have been identified. It is an economic issue more than anything else. A study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, frankly an African-American think tank, confirmed that blacks, for example, are slightly below whites when it comes to overall Internet usage. That would include access on the job, at home, etc., but blacks with household incomes over $90,000 use the Internet more than whites. So, clearly, it is a socioeconomic challenge.
Secondly, it is a cultural challenge, mostly, for minorities and lower-income people. I will briefly share a story with you. Some of you may recall during the early to mid-seventies a TV sitcom by the name of Goodtimes with J.J., Florida, James, and the rest. Well, it’s in syndication and it runs reruns from time to time. I saw an episode a couple of months ago where J.J. had a new job and everything was looking up. He was falsely arrested and, you know, the family was in turmoil. Well, by the time they sent the daughter to check on the job, the job had already known about his arrest. You know what the family said? “Those damned computers.” The father wanted to buy a gift for his son’s 18th birthday. His credit wasn’t any good. The father was upset. He said it used to be a man’s word meant something. You know what the retort was? “Those damned computers.” So clearly there is a cultural challenge with the embrace of technology, which probably extends back, particularly for African-Americans, as long as they’ve been in the United States.
Technology has always driven a certain socioeconomic response. However, this one is different than anything ever before in the history of the United States; as opposed to the cotton gin, which arguably promoted institutional slavery at a higher level; as opposed to the migration of the southern families to the north to work in the pits of the auto industry, for example. This technology is the great equalizer. It does not displace. It empowers with knowledge and opportunity unlike anything before it. So it is fundamentally different and I think must be treated fundamentally differently than the technological advances the United States and the world have experienced.
Ernie Yanarella
Excellent perspective on this. We have several people in the audience that I want to ask to offer some perspectives on this. One is Mr. Kentucky Demographics, Ron Crouch. Anyone who knows Ron knows that he is someone who has his finger on the pulse of Kentucky, not only now, but also even into the coming future. He certainly played an absolutely fundamental role in the whole Shakertown process with these young new leaders in providing some important insight into the kinds of policy issues that are coming down the pike and that are going to absolutely have to be addressed if we are going to move forward.
Ron Crouch
I have just a couple of comments. Basically, one of my concerns is, in teaching kids to use computers, are we also teaching them to think? One of my concerns is a lot of kids know how to use computers now, but they don’t know how to think with computers. Can they understand the data once they get it off the computer? You know, we’re showered with more and more information. The issue is going to be not getting more information in the future; it’s going to be getting the right information. How do we do that? Another issue of the digital divide is that the latest data from the Census actually shows Kentucky’s, as well as the nation’s, poverty rate for kids is going up, not down. The other issue is the out-of-wedlock rate. In Kentucky now, one in three kids is born to an unmarried mother. Dan Quayle not only could not spell “potato,” he couldn’t analyze data when he talked about Murphy Brown being the poster child for out-of-wedlock babies. The state of Kentucky out-of-wedlock rate for women who have not finished high school is 52 percent regardless of age; high school only, 29 percent; education one year beyond high school, 10.6 percent. So we’ve got a growing divide about basically kids being left behind in single-parent families that’s growing and that’s going to be a big issue for the future.
Jim Nelson
Let me follow up just a little bit, please. I think Ron makes a good point. I think, from the perspective certainly of the library profession, there’s a presumption that people understand that information can help them in some way, or they understand how to gather it, and how to recognize good information from bad. Obviously we all know that the big problem on the Internet is the lack of authentication for the resources or for the source of the information. I mean, there’s some kid in the garage, even as we speak, who’s putting something on the Web and somebody might use it in research at Purdue or Harvard and the whole of knowledge drops a dip. (Laughter) So that’s a significant concern, but I think part of the divide is that issue of intelligence and education as to how to think about the technology and the context. My fiancée is a school librarian and she tells many stories about the kids who want in and want to get on the Internet to do a project for school. Frequently what they need is a piece that she knows how to get in about two seconds out of World Book Encyclopedia, but if they aren’t on the Net and looking at all these different things, then they aren’t happy. So a big challenge in this divide is how you can help people understand the value of information to what they’re trying to do, either in their personal or professional lives and that can lead them to either a computer or a book.
Ernie Yanarella
Spoken well of a librarian, indeed. I want to turn to Jeanne Hibberd. Jeanne, we’re trying to identify certain target groups in Kentucky that are important for our trying to close this digital divide. I know that you and Don Harker, to your left, have certainly been very much involved in looking at issues like these in eastern Kentucky. I wonder if you would say a word or two about the sorts of ideas and strategies that you folks have been involved with in terms of addressing the problems of digital divide for our rural population in eastern Kentucky?
Jeanne Hibberd
Thanks, Ernie. I’m actually doing work a whole lot more at the national level right now, but the person who took over my work is sitting right to my right. So, I’m going to pass it to Matt because he’s been doing a whole lot of work here lately about MACED strategy for working with the digital divide and I think it wouldn’t be fair if I talked instead of Matt.
Matthew Trail
Well, just to really sort of echo, I think, what’s been said so far, I think the issue is access. It’s about use of the information gained online. It’s also about content, I think. It’s about providing tools that people can use. It’s about helping communities identify for themselves what tools that they need to bring their communities together and to create sustainable economies and sustainable communities for the future. So, MACED has been working in eastern Kentucky in the digital divide area to bring access by putting computers out there in country stores, in libraries, in places where folks visit every day in a very casual, informal way. But we are also giving them training in providing a website, a portal, that will allow them to figure out where to go to start getting that information. I think that what we’ve discovered is that there’s a tremendous amount of interest and excitement even in rural Kentucky where computer saturation is very low still.
One of our informal studies in the mountain “hollers” in eastern Kentucky suggested that there were about 8 percent of residents of a holler that had a home computer. We think that’s really significant, but we’ve also found that, when we talked about computers that the public could use, or when we created the laptop computer lending program where people could borrow laptop computers and play with them for a couple of days, they get on the Net. The level of interest and excitement is tremendous. There are cultural issues out there. There is the issue of, as you pointed out, telephone saturation, but folks want to know, they want access, but they also want content that answers their questions and helps them do the things they need to do every day.
Johnathan Holifield
From the big tech crash of April of 2000, I think there are wonderful lessons there. Arguably from 1994 to the year 2000, we became so charmed by the technology that businesses were built to serve the technology as opposed to technology being built to serve fundamental business practices. The same may be true when you’re talking about educating some of the lowest income folks in the United States in various regions. Will the education be developed and built to serve the technology and perhaps suppress creativity among people? Or will it be used to empower people? Will the technology be used to enhance education rather than education to enhance the technology? I think you find wonderful parallels when you look at what has happened in the economy and now there’s an emphasis on profit, earnings, sustainability, etc., the same challenges, although metaphorically, you’ll find in education.
Ernie Yanarella
Does anyone want to speak to the issue of the elderly and the effort to deal with the elderly as a target population for closing the digital divide? Ron or perhaps anybody else?
Ron Crouch
One quick thing I don’t think we mentioned: I was in the last group and asked how many people in the audience were under 40 and how many people were over 40. And guess what? The majority of us are over 40. All the growth in the state of Kentucky is over 40. After 2010, 10 years from now, for a 20-year period, all the growth in the state of Kentucky is 65 and above, two thirds of all the growth in the nation. The great news is we’re living longer. The bad news is we’re living longer. The workforce of tomorrow is the same workforce that we’ve got today, just 10 years older. We need to make sure our aging workforce is trained and skilled in the digital divide as well as our young population.
Questioner
Ernie, I think if you look at the latest data from the Department of Commerce and their Falling Through the Net digital inclusion report, you’ll see that the fastest segment of Internet users are the age group over 50. They still have the longest way to go, but they’ve experienced the most significant percent increase in the last two years. I’m not sure, again, if we’re addressing them. I think that’s an issue. It may be a challenge, but I think we need to look at the socioeconomic issues and Jonathan’s comment about the cultural issues, and I know the work that MACED is doing. We have a cultural issue that we still have to overcome in terms of just the adaptation of technology and the adoption of technology, and by that I don’t mean information technology, but technology in general. When Long-Term Policy did the survey in 1996 and I worked with them, they characterized a great segment of Kentucky as technology pessimists and I think we still have a segment of technology pessimism today in Kentucky’s cultural adaptiveness. We are slow. We are very slow to move to technology in general. Forget personal computers and Internet access, we have very low usage of ATM machines. We have very low usage of direct deposit, as an insurer, if electronic funds transport has been around for 30 years. We have a very low usage of a lot of technology. I think that’s just beginning to catch up with the state. So, I think, home computer and Internet access issues probably are just a manifestation of the fact that Kentuckians, in general, don’t like a lot of change and we are slow to move to that change. That’s my cultural evangelism speech.
Ernie Yanarella
How do we address this? How do we address this as a cultural problem, as a technological problem, as a socioeconomic problem? Let me pass this back to Jeanne Hibberd.
Jeanne Hibberd
I think one of the things is that we are promoting technology for technology’s sake. Most people are not going to adopt the technology until they see how it will change their lives, how it will serve their organizational mission, or how it will serve their business goals. We’ve not been real good at helping people understand how it can do those things and make their lives better and give them different choices. I think, once people learn that, it’s not about whether to adopt the technology, it’s how and where do you get the resources to do it.
Questioner
I think part of that same issue is if they have good success with the use of technology and are not frustrated by it. I mean, if they can relate it to their lives and what their problems are that they’re trying to solve, then there’s a much better chance that it will succeed. I notice most of the states that you had ranked are on the top ten for computer use. A lot of these states are these very rural western states where technology is the only way a lot of these people have of relating to each other and the rest of the world. So there is some very practical use of that, but I think the fact that people don’t perceive yet what or how it can help them in their own lives is a big issue. The good news here is that it creates an environment for partnerships or just plain working together that’s never existed before because technology blows away political, geographic, and jurisdictional boundaries. So you can work with different agencies, different organizations––public, private, museums, and video––and all can work together in this environment. Because once you digitize and bring your own resources and your own audiences and your skills to reach those audiences to this environment, you have a better chance for success, I think.
Ernie Yanarella
One of the audience holdovers from the last session is Brian Daly and I’d like to pass the microphone over to him for a second. Brian, tell us where you’re from.
Questioner
OK. Brian Daly and I am from the McConnell Technology and Training Center in Louisville and this really brings us, I think, to the crux of the question. In Louisville, we have 118 Internet service providers, of which 18 are local, and 12 are free services offered in Louisville. Now we are working with eight counties in eastern Kentucky and, interestingly, all we could find was one service provider for those eight counties and, believe me, it was not free. What sort of things is the state doing to help bridge this real problem that we have? We have the clusters of technology, but we really don’t have the ability in some of our areas of the state to have technology available; in particular, eastern Kentucky where there aren’t the free services that we can offer in central and western Kentucky.
Jim Nelson
Briefly, if you follow the Gates library initiative, besides a nifty way to get Microsoft software into more places than ever before, he was following the image of Dale Carnegie. Mr. Carnegie really attributed his use of the public library to his success in life and committed himself to that and built over 2,500 public libraries, many of them in this state. I worked in one downtown in Louisville. Bill Gates said sort of the same thing, that it’s an equalizer, a way that you can improve yourself on your own terms and so forth. So that’s why he was putting his first major contributions into public library access to the Internet, and, in this state, every public library facility has public library Internet access. There’s been a combination of the Gates’ program; Empower Kentucky, which provided computers so we could access government services and information; and then there’s the Library Service and Technology Act that has had federal funding into this and the e-rate. And, of course, the schools in Kentucky have really hit the e-rate hard, over $50 million. A lot of the school investment has been interior wiring and access and the public libraries. There is a huge commitment across the country and here in Kentucky to have the infrastructure to use, so I think the infrastructure itself is not a problem. I think these other issues are what are more of a problem.
Ernie Yanarella
Doug, before you begin, just at the risk of there being maybe two or three people who don’t know what the e-rate is, I’d like Jim to just give us a quick thumbnail.
Jim Nelson
Just a quick thumbnail description, in 1996 the Telecommunications Act had a provision for universal service. You see it on your telephone bills because the telcos obviously want to make sure that you know that your money is being charged there and it’s going to these causes. Libraries and schools can use this money to improve their technology. It’s not money going to them. It’s money the fund pays to the vendor selling services to libraries and schools and that has allowed, like I said, $50 million going to public schools in this state and probably $4 or $5 million going to the public libraries. It has made a tremendous difference to being able to provide these services and it was that philosophy that we could support equity of access through this kind of a program that drove that public issue.
Doug Robinson
Brian wants the state to provide free Internet access in rural counties. I’m not sure that that’s an appropriate public policy statement. It’s a complex issue. State government, I think, in our role is to as best as possible not intrude on the marketplace in a nonregulatory environment and Internet service provision is not regulated by the Public Service Commission. So I’ll leave that up to them as to determine what they want to do, but certainly we understand that the issue in the state is not access, it’s affordable access. There is access everywhere for the most part. Affordable is a key construct there. I’m not sure what the state can do intruding on that marketplace because, again, it’s down to a question of economics. It is marketplace-driven. If you have economies of scale, enough customers in a given area, they will demand competition. You have that, obviously, in the urban areas. You have cherry picking going on with various services. You’re not going to have that in rural areas. We have many counties that only have one Internet service provider.
What the state has done in terms of acting as a catalyst is with our investment in the information technology in the telecommunications infrastructure with local exchange carriers. We can at least push digital services and digital switching, which we have done, to all the counties, to all the central offices so that all of our public telephone companies in our independence that operate as a consortium at least have the infrastructure in place. What we’re finding is, even with that infrastructure in place, some of it is not being utilized, it’s not being exploited. In other areas, they’re not really marketing or building out their information Internet service provision because the market’s not there. State government’s role, I believe, in this debate, is probably to understand that some of the best work that’s going on is at the grassroots level. It’s local community-based organizations, that community of interest, there’s the MACEDs, the people that understand, that are there. State government, I don’t believe, should intrude on the marketplace in force. Internet service providers provide lifeline rates to the Internet. Now there are some people that argue differently that we should be in that space. I would not. I believe that, over time, the marketplace will take care of itself. We may not have free access like we have in Louisville and Lexington because the numbers aren’t there yet, but, at some point, the relevancy of that access will take place in someone’s household and they’ll get online. I mean, that’s the studies we have done. The grants that we’ve given to school districts have found that, once people understand how it can make a difference, they do get connected. They go home and then make that investment, but I think that relevancy in many households hasn’t taken place yet.
Johnathan Holifield
The best role for government in this whole debate is to maximize its current role; i.e., education. Education in Kentucky, just like the other 49 states, is compulsory. Every school in the state of Kentucky, just like the state of Ohio, must have this sort of access. That is clearly a state government responsibility. It is a no-risk investment. There will be a return on that investment because commerce, education, communication as we know it is evolving. The bandwidth will be used. There will be a return. There’s a guaranteed return. That is what I think the state government role is, any state government.
Ernie Yanarella
We’ve had, as our major concern up to this point, the issue of access. How do we address expanding access? How do we bridge the digital divide? Let me see if we can follow through on this trajectory a little bit and address the issue of why. What beyond access do we want in trying to address the issues of the digital divide? Is access enough or do we clearly have to move beyond that question to address a whole host of other issues that have to do with questions of the use, the training, and so forth? Anyone care to offer a perspective on this issue? Kevin?
Kevin Fields
I think access is certainly critical. In public housing, when we began this issue of access to technology, one of the things that we did was to install a learning center in each one of Louisville’s five large public housing developments. With that, we had the ability to create training programs, and make that close to home for the residents there. I think when we talk about access, on one hand you have that tangible piece of access of having the ability for people to get their hands on a computer. Affordability is probably the biggest hurdle for a low-income community in terms of having access to computers. So, where there’s a community-based initiative that enables that access to be available to individuals in a community setting, I think that creates the opportunity for some momentum to occur in terms of interest. I think what’s critical from an individual standpoint is there has to be that natural interest and motivation to want to have access, but sometimes it takes the experience of having your hands on it to gain the interest. So, when we talk about access, on one hand we’re talking about the access to the Internet, having it affordable. Having it free is ideal, but I think prior to that people have to be motivated and the motivation takes several forms. One, it takes being able to get your hand on it, being able to use it, and then to create that natural desire to want to touch it. So from a community standpoint again, where there is that opportunity through churches, community centers, or schools to create that learning environment that’s different from the traditional learning setting for individuals to come in and use technology, I think that creates a little wave of momentum.
(The rest of the Question and Answer session is not presented here due to technical difficulties with the recording equipment.)