Book review: The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisk or Creating a Myth by Benjamin M. Compaine

to jolt readers into an appreciation of an idea (which has some merit-we do create and sustain increasingly complex technologies, after all) by stating it as an extreme. There may even be satiric intent in the passage, since, through exaggeration, McLuhan actually seems to be parodying a determinist position. A reader gets the sense that Levinson is working out his own ideas, rather than reinterpreting McLuhan for a new generation of media. This is perhaps most true of his passage on DNA which, while convincing that it is a medium of information, does not convince that the genetic material merits consideration within McLuhan's framework of ideas. This is a shame. As he has shown in previous books such as Mindat Large and The SofiEdge, Levinson's ideas are provocative and fertile ground for thinkers in a variety of disciplines. It's not that Levinson's ideas in DigitalMcLuhan are any less insightful; it's just that an analysis of the thought of Marshall McLuhan may not be the most appropriate setting in which to frame them. they have developed over the past several years in the United States, although readers might feel uncomfortable with Compaine's conclusions that, given, declining consumer costs and a high adoption rate, the digital divide will be, in a few years, a moot point. attempted to measure the digital divide. Included here are key reports on the digital divide, including excerpts from the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration. They produced the first high-profile study in 1995, with the release of Falling Through the Net. Measuring household telephone, computer , and lnternet penetration rates to determine who owned telephones and personal computers and who accessed the Internet at home, the study revealed that access was related to socioeconomic and geographic factors, with the information have-nots disproportionately found in rural and central cities. NTIA's 1999 study, Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divid~, revealed that while more Americans are accessing the Internet, significant discrepancies in access exist, and in some instances, have widened considerably. Race, education, income, and marital status are factors in determining who has access to the Internet. Donna Hoffman andTom Novak's research on the relationship of race to Internet access was also a key source in defining the digital divide, and is included here. The term 'digital divide' reached popularity in the mid-1990s as a way to describe the disparity between those who have access to the …