Exactly!

This article -- Cyberspace and Race -- does a wonderful job of expressing how I feel about the digital divide as it pertains to race and class issues. My favorite bit:

"...many of the forum's minority participants-both panelists and audience members-didn't experience cyberspace as a place where nobody cared about race. Often, they'd found that people simply assumed all participants in an online discussion were white unless they identified themselves otherwise."

Perfectly stated. When you read your classmates blogs, how do you envision them in your head? Some amorphous blob? If you think about who they are, do you assume they are like you (whatever you are like)? If you disagree with them, do you assume something different?

Sad to say, I've found that those who most appreciate the Internet as a transforming technology are also the most likely to fall into the color-blind trap of wanting to find in the Internet a non-discriminating utopia. As the article puts it:

Perhaps when early white Netizens were arguing that cyberspace was "color-blind," what they really meant was that they desperately wanted a place where they didn't have to think about, look at or talk about racial differences.

...

In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us-white folks and people of color-will have to shed the defensiveness that surrounds the topic of race.

The article also refers to a point I tried to make in my previous post-- that simply bridging the digital divide does not necessarily mean we have made any real progress. Jenkins writes, "...equal access is not the same as equal participation. Giving everybody broadband is a problem of a very different order than broadening our minds." Exactly. If we really want to do something to broaden participation, let's talk about measures like offering websites in Spanish, real changes that will encourage underrepresented communities to join up.