Let Them Eat Web Pages

No, this isn’t a piece of satire from The Onion. The U.S. government, in its tireless effort to reduce poverty and homelessness, has created a new resource for homeless people: a website. The site, announced on July 20, contains links to a number of Department of Labor programs designed to help the homeless, such as its CareerOneStop service. But it doesn’t give any suggestions as to how the homeless – few of whom, presumably, own computers – are supposed to get to the site in the first place. Given the inconsistencies across the nation in homeless people’s access to public Internet terminals, it’s reasonable to wonder whether this latest example of e-government will be accompanied by new efforts to close the (very real) digital divide.