by River Ginchild

About the author: River Ginchild is a civil rights attorney and a member of the community advisory group for the Berkeley Public Library’s Internet Project. She is the founder of the Digital Sojourn website at http://www.digitalsojourn.org.

You can now confidently say “Welcome to the planet” to anyone who has not heard of the Internet. Nearly every household in the country has been bombarded by shrink-wrapped diskettes and CDs offering “free trial access” to the Net, as it’s commonly called. Yet in spite of the heavy media coverage of online culture and the business world’s newfound obsession with Internet-related companies and activities, fewer than 10 percent of North Americans actually have any kind of meaningful access to the...