The focus of the September 2001 issue of Computers and Society, the newsletter of the ACM’s special interest group on computers and society, is the digital divide. It contains three papers on this topic, which were also presented at a panel at the 2000 American Anthropological Association annual meeting. This paper serves as the introduction to this special issue, and to those papers.

The topic of the digital divide has received considerable attention in the US and elsewhere. The popular press has typically focused on statistics, often derived from several massive reports, entitled “Falling through the Net,” released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. These reports are rife with tables, graphs, and statistical distributions, and so coverage is often devoid of human issues, but rich in numbers. Thus this introduction, and the papers it introduces, attempt to put a human face on the people who have little or no access to the Internet.

The term “experience-near explorations” is strange, but then I am not a social scientist, as are the authors of these papers. These authors are concerned that real-world experiences of real people are frequently misplaced in the welter of statistics associated with the social phenomenon called the digital divide. They are ordinary people, young and old, poor and not so poor, white and non-white, rural and urban, who face lack of access, and the possible consequences of this. Money to bridge the divide is--or should be--being spent on these people, and the papers in the newsletter help to make them real.