Plugging in to the revolution

By BBC News Online's Jane Black

Think of Silicon Valley and you think of the information revolution. Technology has created hundreds of young millionaires in the Valley and brought an epic boom to the rest of the United States.

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But such riches have not reached everyone. In East Palo Alto, the area bordering the tech-rich Stanford University campus and the corporate HQs of multi-billion dollar companies such as Yahoo and Oracle, more than 17% of the population lives in poverty. Only 14% have a four-year college degree and less than one out of five families has a computer in the home.

Even in America the digital divide is wide. But as technology increasingly becomes a part of everyday life, and the political debate, a new awareness is emerging that the benefits of technology will not filter down by themselves.

"It's taken a while for mainstream culture to understand how it would make their lives easier - and what their lives would be like without it," said Magda Escobar, the Executive Director of Plugged In, a community project that aims to bridge the digital divide. "It is also a very sexy issue. And it's politically advantageous for everyone - liberal or conservative - to focus on it."

Plugged In is leading by example in East Palo Alto. The non-profit organisation offers residents state-of-the-art computers and courses to build their literacy and computer skills, work on their CVs or make money as Web designers.

Plugged In Enterprises, a teen-run Web page design business, is one of the centre's most dynamic and talked about programmes. Each year 36 teenagers learn cutting-edge business skills and earn money working on projects for real clients including Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.

PIE, as it is known, is run by John Mireles, a 17-year-old from nearby San Jose. Formerly a graffiti artist, John's own projects include transferring his own highly-charged images into digital form and pushing the medium to its limits. His goal: to earn a good living that leaves him plenty of time for his own art.

Plugged In also runs a programme called Community Kids which hosts 55 children each day after school and involves them in hands-on arts and crafts and computer projects. The Plugged In Community Technology Centre, a mixture of a café, copy shop and library, is a resource for teenagers and adults to work on their CVs or get career advice.

But there is still much work to be done. The latest report from the US Commerce Department, Falling Through The Net, reports that the digital divide widened between 1998 and 1999.

Black and hispanic households are approximately one-third as likely to have home Internet access as households of Asian/Pacific Islander descent, and roughly two-fifths as likely as white households, according to the report.

The disparity does not only follow racial lines. Even at the lowest income levels, those in urban areas are more than twice as likely to have Internet access than those in rural areas.

"We need to keep up the pressure to keep up with the technology," says Ms Escobar. "There's a risk that people will just dump equipment into poor areas. This is a long process."