Editor’s Corner:
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD FOR EVERYONE

It’s nice to see that entrepreneurs who are concerned about poverty setting up web sites to raise funds for charity. It’s disheartening to realize that those without money and the means to go online will probably never see these charitable web sites.

Meanwhile there are other studies that show small businesses are going online at a rapid pace and gaining access to information and services that allow them to compete with the giants. In business, yes, the playing field is being leveled for everyone.

Not so in the consumer world. The "have nots" in the digital revolution weaken the present and future for all of us. The "haves" will always be weighted down by the non-digerati. For every great digital option we create for the vast wired majority, those non-users will need something invented for them too.

Sometimes the juggling of platforms can be done slickly. For those callers who do not have a touch tone phone, why they just say "one" and speech recognition technology does the rest.

But I don’t think we’ve found a good alternative for a kid without a computer. Even if every business in America (about 10 million companies) donated just one computer to the "have nots" would we have solved the problem. Yet it would be a start.

It’s our use of technology that helps create cultural and social class barriers. Yet it’s technology that can link communities around the globe and send ships into outer space. Our vision can be so vast and so myopic at the same time.

I hope we can do more than collect pennies here and there for a worthy cause. Cyberspace gives us a chance to raise each other’s consciousness about the imbalance of things and also a chance to work on fixing it.