The digital divide refers to the gap between those who can effectively benefit from information and computing
technologies (ICTs) and those who cannot. The term is a social construction that emerged in the latter half of
the 1990s after the Internet came into the public domain and the World Wide Web exploded into history's largest
repository of human knowledge. For those who can both contribute and retrieve information from the Web, ICTs
hold the promise of broad collaborations in science and technology, transparency in government, rationality of
markets, and shared understandings between peoples. Sadly, this utopian promise applies only to an elite few.
As of 2003, only seven percent of the world's 6.4 billion people have had access to the World Wide Web
(NielsenNetRatings, August, 2003). While information poverty is rarely blamed as a direct cause of human
suffering, the digital divide raises ethical questions of universal access. Like access to food or clean
water, access to essential information has moral and ethical implications that merit consideration in the
formation of public policy.
The digital divide is a problem of multiple dimensions. Kling (1998) sees the divide from (1) a technical aspect referring to availability of the infrastructure, the hardware and the software of ICTs, and (2) the social aspect referring to the skills required to manipulate technical resources. Norris (2001) describes (1) a global divide revealing different capabilities between the industrialized and developing nations; (2) a social divide referring to inequalities within a given population; and (3) a democratic divide allowing for different levels of civic participation by means of ITCs. And Keniston (2003) distinguishes four social divisions: (1) those who are rich and powerful and those who are not; (2) those who speak English and those who do not; (3) those who live in technically well-established regions and those who do not; and (4) those who are technically savvy and those who are not.
From a global perspective, we see that concentration of access to ICTs abounds in the North America, Europe and the Northern Asia Pacific while access is restricted in southern regions of the globe, most notably in Africa, rural India and the southern regions of Asia. The poorer nations, plagued by multiple burdens of debt, disease, and ignorance are those least likely to benefit from Internet access.
The entry costs to secure equipment and to set up services are far beyond the means of most third-world communities. Startup costs and expenses of technical maintenance compete with resources needed for essential human survival. Policy makers are challenged to find justification for investment in ICTs when local and national resources are limited and where the urgent needs of people for basic nutrition, health care, and education remain unsatisfied. If ICT development is justified in these countries, it is on the belief that ICTs are instruments to be wielded in order to meet essential human needs.
One formidable obstacle to ICT diffusion is language. There is a self-perpetuating cultural hegemony associated with ICTs (Keniston, 2002). By the year 2000, only 20% of all Web sites in the world were in languages other than English, and most of these were in Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. But in the larger regions of Africa, India, and south Asia, less than ten percent of people are English-literate while the rest, more than two billion, speak languages that are sparsely represented on the Web. Because of the language barrier the majority of people in these regions have little use for computers. Those who do not use computers have little means to drive market demands for computer applications in their language. Left simply to the market, this Anglo-Saxon hegemonic cycle will continue unhindered.
If we were to view the digital divide purely as a technical problem, the solution is within our reach. Western Capitalism has the means to intervene where market forces lack the power to bridge the divide. It is not an unrealistic task to tie every nation, every tribe, and every community, no matter how isolated, into a common interconnected information infrastructure. It is within our technical means to manufacture low-cost, durable computers for wide distribution. It is within our fiscal means to distribute these devices to places where computers are most lacking. Gifted programmers and translators can be recruited to convert existing online resources into many different languages.
While such technical solutions can be conceived, the problem of the digital divide is not primarily a technical problem. Expenditure of monies for ICTs comes with no guarantee that problems which plague the world's poor will be addressed. Policy makers cannot simply thrust technology into people's hands with any expectation that it will be used. Experimentation has shown that new initiatives tend to fail unless they are built from existing social and economic structures (Warshauer, 2002). ICT projects must be conceived from an assessment of actual needs defined locally by target populations. Planners must pay attention to existing human networks and social systems, taking into account local language and cultural factors, literacy and educational levels of users, and institutional and social structures of the community.
M. S. Swaminathan, one of India's best-known scientists, suggests that if technological and information empowerment is to reach the unreached, then policy makers must focus their attention to the poorest person (Swaminathan, 2001). This concept, coined by Gandhi as antyodaya, provides a model for technical development using a bottom-up approach. Digital initiatives of the Swaminathan Research Foundation have demonstrated how ICTs can change the lives of the poor in remote villages by strategies that enlist local involvement from their inception. Projects begin from assessments of specific local needs and by instituting practices that rely entirely on local villagers rather than distant agencies and technical experts. Including the excluded in the empowerment brought by knowledge and skills is the most effective approach to harnessing technologies in the interests of the poor. The divide may never be fully closed, but where a bridge is to be spanned, it will be constructed by active participants from both sides.
Title: The Digital Divide
Author: Martin Ryder
Keniston, Kenneth. (2004). Introduction: The Four Digital Divides. In K. Keniston and D. Kumar (Eds.) IT Experience in India. Delhi: Sage Publishers.
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Norris, Pippa. 2001. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Swaminathan, M. S. (2001). Antyodaya Pathway of Bridging the Digital Divide. Lecture delivered before the Tilak Smarak Trust, Pune, India, August 1, 2001. Available online: http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/B-SPAN/docs/antyoday.pdf accessed Oct 2, 2003.
Warschauer, Mark (2002) Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide. First Monday (7:7) http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/warschauer/ accessed Oct. 2, 2003.