Media Lab

Helping Bridge the World Wide Divide

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Had Randal Pinkett stayed on track to complete a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it's doubtful he would have gotten the time and support to base his graduate studies around "digital divide" issues.

It's also unlikely he would have paired with one of the college's urban planning graduate students to secure $200,000 in major foundation funding to build a special computerized database for a public housing project in Boston's mostly-Black Roxbury community.
But as a Ph.D. candidate in MIT's prestigious Media Laboratory, Pinkett, who is African American, has melded his extensive engineering and technology expertise with his passionate interest in community development.
"We're trying to come up with new thinking about the role technology can play in building a community," Pinkett explains.
But Pinkett's is just one of several assignments the lab's pioneering scientists have embarked upon that adds a rarely exploited and often overlooked multicultural dimension to the multitude of high-tech research being conducted today.
With cutting-edge projects, a crucial social consciousness and a growing cadre of top-tier scientists of color, MIT's Media Lab is redefining academe's role in bridging the growing chasm between the society's tech-savvy elite and its digital underclass.

The Funding Controversy
Last month, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation tentatively agreed to fund Pinkett's dissertation project to create an asset-based community development database on the Internet. In addition, the $200,000 grant will enable residents at a 100-unit housing project to get personal computers, training and wiring for low-cost Internet access to use the database as an empowerment tool.
Pinkett, a former Rhodes scholar, credits the Media Lab for having the faculty and resources to allow him to pursue his interests.
"I never thought I could do a Ph.D. in the community and combine that with engineering," he says.
The work that Pinkett and his advisers pursue in the media lab's Epistemology and Learning Group have given the renowned department something of a socially-conscious profile among high tech academic research centers. But that profile is just one of many for the multifaceted research lab.
Since the early 1980s, the lab has occupied a unique place in American higher education. While its interdisciplinary research environment has fostered significant breakthroughs in multimedia and computer technology, the basis of its funding and scholarship has been a source of controversy.
Ninety-five percent of its $30 million operating budget in 1999 came from corporate sponsorship, according to Media Lab officials.
"The chief accomplishment of the media lab is its own existence, which was against all odds and not in keeping with traditional academic funding or scholarship," says current director and co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.
"Many innovations have resulted, leading to more usable and less expensive computers and network access. Current research is very broad, with interests ranging from health to opera, from cars to toys, from biotech to media," he adds.
Negroponte, who is an architect by training, is world famous as an expert on, or some say, a prophet of digital technology's capacity to transform society. His leadership of the lab has made it an attractive place for individuals such as Pinkett to pursue digital divide research.
The media lab, however, has not been as successful with attracting women and underrepresented minorities as faculty members. The lab hired its first full-time African American faculty member in 1997, more than a decade after its founding. Eight women are on a faculty  and research staff of 47.