MEASURES OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

I have been thinking about whether the Digital Divide is opening or closing. Some of my friends focusing on access to radios and televisions feel that it is closing. I look at orders of magnitude more spending on ICT in rich counties as compared with poor countries, and feel it must be opening. I suppose “where you stand depends on where you sit.”

Mass Media

In terms of mass media, let me suggest that a figure of merit might be useful. One element would be the portion of the waking day that one has access to the media. In the United States, people listen to the radio in their cars and while walking or jogging. They sometimes have access to TVs in their cars and offices as well as in their homes. In developing countries, people may only have access to a fixed radio (shared with other people). And indeed, that access may be reduced by power outages, or by broadcasts that are only available for limited periods of the day.

The figure of merit should also take into account the quality of the medium access. More credit should be given for access to visual media (TV, video cassette, DVD) than to just audio (radio, audio cassette, CD). Perhaps marginally more credit should be given for color than for black and white TV. For the deaf, credit would be given for access to captioned video.

It seems likely that there would be decreasing returns to scale. The increment in value of going from 15 to 16 hours a day would be less than that going from no access to one hour per day, of from a half hour to one and a half hours per day.

Credit would be given only for access to content in a language the user understands.

A second facet of the figure of merit would be the range of choice available in programming. Cable TV, and 100 channels would be valued more highly than broadcast TV, with five or ten channels. Satellite digital radio, with 100 stations would be valued more highly that broadcast AM radio with only a few stations. It seems likely that here too there would be diminishing returns to scale. The benefit of going from one to two radio stations would presumably be greater on the average than that of going from 100 to 101 stations.

Ideally, a figure of merit would also take into account the quality, diversity and relevance of programming available. If all that is available is a government propaganda station, having a radio won’t do much good. If all the stations focus on music for the urban audience, they will have less development relevance than having also stations oriented to a farming audience providing programming targeted to the needs of that audience.

Telephone Service

A figure of merit for telephone services might also be constructed, and indeed, the ITU has gone a long way in this direction with the indicators it collects worldwide now. Still, as telephone services expand with the convergence of technologies, more complex telephone indices might be developed.

The first element of such a figure of merit seems obviously to be connectivity – how many fixed line and mobile telephone connections are there. One might modify the indicator to take into account line failures and bandwidth. Where mobile phones don’t support Internet service and fixed-line telephones support DSL, there is obviously a difference in the service.

One might also seek to differentiate between personal telephones, fixed telephones serving a family or office, and community phones serving a village or neighborhood.

In the case of telephones, there are well known network economies. For each added person to the network, the people who benefit are the n existing members of the network. The benefits from extension of the network will tend to increase with increasing size of the network. In poor countries, with sparse telephone networks, per phone benefits for new lines may well be less than in rich, fully connected networks. One the other hand, the benefits to a rich family of having one more phone added to the several it already has may be much less than the benefits to a village of providing its first public telephone.

One could, and I may go on to think about personal computers and more complex and expensive ICTs, but this is enough for now!