![[rss]](http://ubi-learn.com/wp-content/themes/k2_1.0.3/images/feed.png)
From Susan P. Crawford in The New York Times:
FOR the second year in a row, the Monday after Thanksgiving — so-called Cyber Monday, when online retailers offer discounts to lure holiday shoppers — was the biggest online sales day of the year, totaling some $1.25 billion and overwhelming the sales figures racked up by brick-and-mortar stores three days before, on Black Friday, the former perennial record-holder.
Such numbers may seem proof that America is, indeed, online. But they mask an emerging division, one that has worrisome implications for our economy and society. Increasingly, we are a country in which only the urban and suburban well-off have truly high-speed Internet access, while the rest — the poor and the working class — either cannot afford access or use restricted wireless access as their only connection to the Internet. As our jobs, entertainment, politics and even health care move online, millions are at risk of being left behind.
The experience and opportunity gaps between rich and poor are a problem worldwide, both within and between communities and nation states. As the often unreal cyberworld becomes evermore the world in which real events transpire, access to digital information and to participation in educational, economic, and political processes is unfairly distributed. This is startlingly true in the United States where the Internet was originally conceived and created.
