Jeffrey James just got me thinking about a couple of topics relating to the "digital divide". More of a slogan than a scientific term, "digital divide" is now the topic of a large body of literature. The ICT4D community page of the Development Gateway links to more than 350 items labled "digital divide". I think there are several digital divides, and that people often don't recognize their variety. Here is a short essay on the topic:
About mobile versus land lines:
The market for mobile telephones has expanded rapidly in poor countries, and in many countries there are now more mobile phones than land lines. Some people have suggested that this revolution has reduced the telephone access divide. In contrast, I think the main effect of the mobile revolution may be to increase the telephony divide. I suspect that the affluent are adding personal phones to their home and office phones, more than the poor in developing nations are getting a mobile phone to substitute for an unavailable land line. The difference between one who is fully networked at all times by a variety of media and the totally disconnected is greater than the former difference between those who had land lines and those who didn't!
About the dimensions of the digital divide:
James suggested, and I think he is right, that there are various dimensions of the digital divide. The divide most discussed is the access divide, and it of course differs according to the technology. Thus there is still a radio access divide, a television access divide, several telephone access divides, a computer access divide, an Internet access divide, etc.
I sometimes distinguish physical access, availability, and affordability. Thus there may be a public phone in a village, but it may be locked up most of the time. Or phone calls may be priced so high as to be out of the reach of the poor for all but the most urgent communication. So there are differences among these divides as well.
Eszter Hargittai did some work a while back on an ICT skill gap. That too that is form of a "digital divide". Long ago I looked at some heavy Internet users, and discovered that they were not only on the Internet a lot, but they used many other programs -- word processors, spreadsheets, presentation managers, etc. Two people can have equal access to the Internet, but have totally different experiences if they differ greatly in their facility in using the technology.
I remember back -- in ancient times -- to when I was a teaching assistant in an electronics lab at the University of California. Each semester, the first day of class showed a radical difference in behavior of the foreign students and the students from the United States as the entered the lab for the first time. The former would clump in the middle of the isles, as far as possible from the equipment; the latter would be all over the equipment, playing with it! I suggest this illustrates a cultural divide. Those who come from homes, communities, and societies full of digital devices (as the Americans did) may find spill-over from skills and attitudes that they have developed beneficial as they find new technologies or new applications. Those who come from digitally deprived environments (as did the majority of the foreign students) will not be so lucky.
There is a networking gap. We know that there are networking economies, and the more people are on a communications network, the greater the benefits are for each member. What good is a telephone if you don't know anyone who has a phone? Two people with equal access to telephones, don't have equal access to people to call if one is in a sparsely networked society and the other in a richly networked society.
Similarly, there is a content divide. In rich countries, the stock of content on the Internet has been building for more than a decade. Some of this content is useful in all of cyberspace, but a lot of its value decays with distance. I went looking on the Internet for a print shop yesterday, for example. I found a dozen locally. Indeed, Google local mapped them for me. I didn't want to find one in another country. In much of Africa, even if you got access to the Internet, I don't think you could expect to find many of your local businesses in cyberspace, and the websites you did find might well be sparsely furnished (and perhaps poorly designed).
There is also a language divide. We are lucky to speak the major language of the Internet. UNESCO recently published some work on the languages on the Internet that indicated that the domination of English content is diminishing. But if one is limited to one of most of the world's 6,000 spoken languages, cyberspace is pretty barren. Similarly, there is work going on to produce office software suites in many languages, but there are huge numbers of languages with no available software.
There are divides in terms of what you can do even if you are connected, speak the language, and know how to use the technology. One can shop by phone or Internet only if there is a payment system and a delivery mechanism you can trust. You can conduct business with the government electronically only when the government in question provides the e-government service you need. You can use accounting software or tax preparation software only if such software exists tailored to the accounting or tax laws that apply to you. (And it the market for such software is small, the cost is going to be high.)
James mentioned, and he is right, that there is also a divide in the benefits people receive from the digital. Bill Gates gets more economic benefit from the information revolution than anyone else, not because he is the most connected and most adept, but because he has property rights over a bigger portion of the profits from the industry than anyone else.
Many digital divide studies miss the most important divides!
Rich countries spend more per capita on ICT than do poor countries, in part because they have more money to spend. Some developing countries spend a larger portion of GDP on ICT than do some rich countries, but there is a tendency for rich countries to spend a larger portion of their GDP on ICT than do poor countries.
I suggest that the demand for some ICT saturates, and as spending on ICT increases, the pattern of spending changes. The rich don't simply buy more phones, radios, televisions, computers, etc. They do buy more, but they also buy differently.
One thing that rich countries do with their greater ICT buying power is to buy technology that creates comparative advantages in international commerce. They buy the ICT that goes into building their competitive advantage in high-tech fields, including manufacturing of microchips, aircraft, and pharmaceuticals, as well as ICT-intensive services that are increasingly traded in international commerce.
So there is a economic digital divide in the competitive advantages that different countries are creating with ICT!
There is comparably a social digital divide as some nations are much better able to take advantage of the technology to educate and inform their peoples. These same countries are more able to wire their social and political institutions. Knowledge and understanding have intrinsic value. They also have instrumental value, and the countries on the right side of the social digital divide will probably be better governed. If we are lucky, they will be more humane, but don't count on it!
And I will not even mention the military digital divides, like that which made the Iraqi military sitting ducks when attacked by the coalition.
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