Tell the voice box next to the TV what you want and up it comes on the screen. The Information Age may have dawned a decade ago, but Talkback TV is its only benefit for these kids. Their school has no computers to link them with the rich, wide world of digital information. Nor does the local library. Not only in the ghetto but also in the suburbs, community networking still is struggling.
Information is neither cheap nor easily acessible.
Computer networking advocates are haunted by this vision of the future. They fear that without more firm federal support for grass-roots computing, too many people will get priced out of the information market. Federal dollars built the backbones linking the nation's main computer networks. But now that big business has awakened to telecomputing's potential, Washington wants out of the contruction business. Fortune 500 companies by the score are opening gateways to the mega-tendriled Internet, that worldwide web of interconnected computer networks that began as a tool of scientists and now is used by an estimated 10 million people ranging from schoolkids to President Clinton.