It is fine for people to associate with whom they please, but not when the venue becomes the real center of influence and decision-making in the world. The online society will increasingly become the place where most things happen, and those who are not there will be excluded from the opportunities that the rest of us exploit. Children in poor communities, marginalized by a lack of technology training and access to computers, will grow up unable to participate in the stabilizing center of society. This has already happened. Unemployment rates among adult black males are extreme.
Homicide is the major cause of death among young black adult males.
For the net, a new force in society, one which has only begun to transform society, a moral course has not yet been set. In the eighties, until and for some years after my marriage, I spent an hour or more a day on Compuserve. It is a place to shed loneliness and find acceptance, to seek free and eager counsel from others about one's problems, and where we reinforce each other's sense of humanity and of belonging. There is no reason why we cannot extend the amity and welcome of the net into the nation's poorest communities. There are bright children there, who will love computers and the community of the net, if given a chance.