Are we still building a bridge to close the Digital Divide?

So its been a long while and I'm back. Sorry the writing is so sporadic but life has been crazy for me for 2009 - 2010. Since my last entry, I have relocated from NY to Atlanta, and started working full time again as a UI Engineer at a, shall I say, pretty well established company that will soon be saturating the enterprise level social networking market. Which brings me to the title of this post...

During my orientation for my new gig, my team had a chance to sit and chat with the big guy, the big kahuna, the holy grail of the company. He shared some wonderful insights on his goals and expectations for our new team, the direction the company was going in, his incredible rags to riches story, etc. During this moment he asked us if we had any questions for him. One of my colleagues rose to the challenge and asked him his thoughts on helping to bridge the digital divide. He couldn't answer the question. He skated around the issue, drew some similarities to other issues, but he never answered the question.

After that exchange I began to wonder, with all the social networking, mobile computing, and high Apple sales going on in the world, is there still a digital divide? Is anyone even talking about this anymore? Does anyone even care anymore? What are the major tech companies doing , if anything, to continue building the bridge? For the life of me, in my middle class world, I saw no evidence that the gap is indeed still present. Until......

Until I walked into an Apple store last weekend and saw something rather strange. I don't know if anyone else perceived what I believed I was perceiving. As I looked around at the store patrons, I couldn't help but notice the number of minority children standing in front of the display iMacs and Macbooks doing nothing more than listening to music on youtube and browsing facebook. Oh no ...they weren't shopping here....It is quite clear that these children were passing the time in the Apple store to access the internet to stay connected to their little tween worlds. At least that's what I concluded. If that's the case who really knows?

But for arguments sake let's assume it was the case. This would mean that the lack of internet access in largely urban environments have led those without access to seek non-traditional ways to stay connected via the internet. Where the library probably used to be a person lacking access' first stop, may have now turned into a trip to the Apple store in the mall.

Case in point, the young man in this Youtube video is clearly at the Apple store in the mall, doing a lip synced rendition of a Black Eyed Peas Song:



Why couldn't this young man do this at home? Could he possibly be in the percentage of minorities without internet access in the home? Well technically since he achieved the goal of making his video and broadcasting it to almost a million viewers, he has access right?

SO does this mean the gap has been closed because the internet can be accessed, even though it is not in the home per say? Has the criteria changed for what qualifies that gap and the need to keep building the bridge changed at all?

Well I'm going to do a little research and report back my findings. Stay tuned!