This book comes from a ten-year-long study of the digital divide in Austin, Texas, that gradually turned into a broader inquiry into Austin’s history as a segregated city, its turn toward becoming a technopolis, what the city and various groups did to try to address the digital divide once it was identified as a major issue in the 1990s, and how various groups and individuals were affected by those programs, as well as by the larger history of Austin.

Austin is widely admired and emulated as a successful example of a technopolis. Often, however, too little attention is paid to...

The formation of Austin, Texas, as a technopolis has built upon a complex and frequently overlooked history of purposeful racial structuration of the city in the early twentieth century (Giddens 1984; Cohen 1989). Austin’s history of top-down (de Certeau 1984) planned development is not limited to its plans to attract high-technology industries. Until roughly the mid- to late 1970s, Austin took steps to maintain racial segregation in the face of an expanding legal environment of civil rights. Despite an outside, top-down attempt by the federal government to restructure educational segregation via mandated school closings and busing, and legal challenges to...

In 1623, the writer Campanella described a utopian city of science and technology, the Civitas Solis, or city of sun. It is a mythical place designed and governed by wise scientists where all citizens benefit equally from technology. Campanella’s Civitas Solis has a modern equivalent in the technopolis, a city whose economy is based primarily on information management (Smilor, Kozmetsky, and Gibson 1988). While the idea of the technopolis dates back thousands of years, its modern incarnation has been traced to Japan’s national and local efforts in the 1970s to convert towns with largely industrial economic bases to an economy...

This chapter examines the economic consequences of the technopolis development strategy adopted by Austin, Texas. It concentrates on inequality, the digital divide, and labormarket outcomes for low-income people, with a focus on the tech boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Austin, often considered a paradigmatic example of the “new economy” high-tech metropolis and of the (successful) deliberate reinvention of a city. In particular, I will examine the theoretical assumptions that structure the technopolis strategy and proposed remedies to negative economic outcomes caused by the digital divide such as job training, and how these play out within the...

This chapter will recap the digital divide debate at the federal and state levels that arose in the 1990s and will cover both critical and market-based approaches. Understanding the digital divide debate is critical to understanding how technopolis cities like Austin, Texas, as well as the United States as an emerging information society, tried to respond to the crises in the technopolis and information society described in Chapter 4. There was a realization that not all people were advancing in such economies, despite what scholars like Daniel Bell (1973) had predicted. The digital divide debate was one way to understand...

Since the early 1980s, leaders in Austin, Texas, have made deliberate efforts to strengthen the local economy through developing the high-tech industry, as discussed in Chapter 3.¹ Leadership from the city government and the University of Texas (UT), as well as business leaders in the region, have been particularly dedicated to ensuring Austin’s success in this sector. Equally dedicated and powerful efforts have been initiated to address the digital divide in Austin’s socially and economically segregated communities, between those who benefit from and have access to computer or Internet technologies and those who do not. During the tech boom there...

One of the critical policy issues raised both by academic critics of the information society (Herman, McChesney, and Herman 1998; Mosco 1996) and by the Clinton administration (NTIA 1999) in the 1990s was the growth of a digital divide between information haves and have-nots. In the United States, the divide cut between rich and poor, urban and rural, and, particularly, the ethnic Anglo majority and the Latino, Native American, and African American minorities (NTIA 1999). Differential access to computing resources, telephone connectivity, and the Internet was found to be most related to ethnic group affiliation, geographic location, household composition, age,...

Many recent efforts to close the digital divide have focused on broadband access, as broadband is increasingly seen as a key resource in unleashing the potential of the Internet (Horrigan 2010).¹ The prospects of high-speed connectivity have been with us for more than a decade, but currently the service reaches only two-thirds of the U.S. population. As part of a spectrum reform agenda, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has expanded the unlicensed spectrum with a policy goal to foster innovative applications delivering high-speed service to all. Wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) increasingly serves as the underpinning technology for public Internet access, public...

Much of the debate about the digital divide has centered on the question of who has access to computers and the Internet, as described in Chapter 5. However, as we and others (e.g., Warschauer 2004) have called for, we need to rethink the idea beyond mere access to the capabilities required to be interested in such tools and to use them. In this chapter we document our research efforts to understand the social and cultural barriers that remain in place when most conventional remedies, such as public access centers, Internet-connected schools and libraries, and computer-skills training, became fairly widely available....

This book has examined some important questions, both for those studying digital inequality, technology, and urban development and for those attempting to make policy about it or simply live and work more effectively in one of the many rapidly emerging technology cities, or technopolises, of the world (Boucke et al. 1994). Why did Austin, Texas, try to become a technopolis? What were the problems it had to face, particularly as a city where education had very recently been racially segregated? How broadly have gains actually been shared in terms of jobs, income, education, and social mobility under Austin’s emergence as...