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"A lot of people are saying that technology can level the playing field, that it can create opportunity. That doesn't just happen by itself. It takes a lot of hard work. Our job is to realize that change for our community."

In a small, windowless room, in a gritty old armory building on the North Side of Chicago, a half-dozen high-school-aged students are arguing: One girl has stolen another's boyfriend. The two of them -- one white, one Latina -- look as if they're about to come to blows. "Okay," an African-American girl calls out. "One, two, three, action!" And a boy with a video camera begins taping. These teenagers are creating their own video about conflict resolution. With a little help from Shalona Byrd, 24, who coordinates the center, these teens will use computers to edit and to produce the video, which they will then distribute at their high schools. "We let them know that what they say and what they do are important," says Byrd. "It's crucial to have your own voice."

Every Wednesday night, in an old warehouse on Jefferson Boulevard in Central Los Angeles, a group of local teenagers sits in a classroom. These teens are learning about what they'll need to get ahead in life. Teachers show them how to use the computers that are before them. But techno-skills are just part of the curriculum. Senior-citizen volunteers also teach these kids the social skills needed to land a job -- such basic lessons as punctuality. "We tell them that if they're not on time for class, they may as well turn around and go home," says Luke House Jr., 74. "We try to teach them professionalism, the kind of thing that they're going to need in the real world. Without that, their chances of succeeding are slim."

In East Palo Alto, a 43-year-old former drug addict is staking his future on an Information Age tool -- not a PC, but a computerized saw. He wields that saw every day on the job, cutting wooden parts for a closet manufacturer. It's his ticket to a better life -- one that he discovered the day he took his 3-year-old granddaughter to a drop-in center that had computers. He was just out of drug rehab, and all he knew about computers was that they scared him. But he needed a job, and the center had everything he needed: computer classes, a fax machine, and an approachable staff. "They were always there to do whatever they could to help," he says. Thanks to the staff, he was able to find his job, which was posted on the Internet. "They took me through the steps and were right there with me."

Much is made these days of the "digital divide" -- that growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots in the new economy that's being driven at warp speed by computers and computing. The concern is a familiar one and an honest one: Technology creates change -- economic change, certainly. But, even more than economic change, technology drives social change, and it does that less visibly. And, just as the Industrial Revolution threatened to unravel the social compact of the United States at the beginning of this century, so the Information Revolution is threatening to undo society in the century's waning years. Those with access to computers and with skills at computing -- and their children, and, perhaps, their children's children -- stand a chance of cashing in on an economy that amply rewards the techno-educated, and relentlessly punishes the techno-illiterate.