“It wasn’t so long ago that people worried about a digital divide, in which online access would be a luxury good that left the bottom half behind”

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It wasn’t so long ago that people worried about a digital divide, in which online access would be a luxury good that left the bottom half behind. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses. The poor spent more time online than the rich, and it’s the elite — the Silicon Valley elite, in some striking cases — that’s more likely to limit the uses of devices in their homes and schools, to draw distinctions between screen time and real time.

Ross Douthat, “The Virtues of Reality”, The New York Times (21 August 2016), SR11.

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