Bridging the Growing Digital Divide

Abstract

That portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web has been riding an exponential growth curve since 1994 (Network Wizards, 1999; Rutkowski, 1998), coinciding with the introduction of NCSA’s graphically-based software interface Mosaic for “browsing” the World Wide Web (Hoffman, Novak, & Chatterjee, 1995). Currently, over 43 million hosts are connected to the Internet worldwide (Network Wizards, 1999). In terms of individual users, somewhere between 40 to 80 million adults (eStats, 1999) inthe United States alone have access to around 800 million unique pages of content (Lawrence & Giles, 1999), globally distributed on arguably one of the most important communication innovations in history.