DIGITAL DIVIDE

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 (Web) exploded into the largest repository of human knowledge that has ever existed. 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, less than ten percent of the world's 6.4 billion people have had access to the Web (NielsenNetRatings, February 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.

Differing Divides

The digital divide is a problem of multiple dimensions. In 1999 Rob Kling summarized the problem from (a) a technical aspect referring to availability of the infrastructure, the hardware, and the software of ICTs, and (b) a social aspect referring to the skills required to manipulate technical resources. Pippa Norris (2001) described (a) a global divide revealing different capabilities between the industrialized and developing nations; (b) a social divide referring to inequalities within a given population; and (c) a democratic divide allowing for different levels of civic participation by means of ITCs. And Kenneth Keniston (2004) distinguished 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;
4. those who are technically savvy and those who are not.

From a global perspective, a high concentration of access to ICTs is observed in North America, Europe and the Northern Asia Pacific while access is noticeably sparse in the southern regions of the globe, particularly 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 poor 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.

Overcoming Divides

One formidable obstacle to ICT diffusion is language. There is a self-perpetuating cultural hegemony associated with ICTs (Keniston 2004). By the year 2000, only 20 percent 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 10 percent of people are English-literate while the rest, more than 2 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 the digital divide is viewed purely as a technical problem, the solution is within reach. European and North American 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 technical means to manufacture low-cost, durable computers for wide distribution. It is within 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.

Beyond Technical Issues

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 that plague the poor of the world 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 2003). 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, p. 1). 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.

MARTIN RYDER

SEE ALSO Information Society;Internet;Networks;Poverty.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Keniston, Kenneth (2004). "Introduction: The Four Digital Divides." In IT Experience in India: Bridging the Digital Divide, ed. Kenneth Keniston and Deepak Kumar. Delhi: SagePublishers, pp. 11–36. This book examines the history of the "digital divide" as seen from observers on both sides of the abyss. A collection of essays from social scientists, policy analysts, and technologists, the book lends special focus to the social and technical problems that emerge with introduction of new technologies in remote and impoverished regions. It reviews the fundamental issues facing policy makers whose decisions impact the balance between expert direction and local control, between modern goals and traditional values, and between future hopes and immediate needs.

Kling, Rob. (1999). "Can the 'Next Generation Internet' Effectively Support 'Ordinary Citizens'?" The Information Society 15: 57–63. Rob Kling (1944–2003) was professor of information systems at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. This article was originally delivered as a white paper in 1988 to the Clinton Presidential Advisory Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet (NGI). Kling advocated a focus on social value in planning and resource allocation for the NGI. Policies should privilege methods of Internet access for ordinary people over exotic media advances that benefit only technological elites. NGI initiatives should seek to reduce cost and improve value for ordinary citizens and strengthen IT infrastructures for the public commons.

Norris, Pippa. (2001). Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pippa Norris is Associate Director of Research at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. This book examines the digital divide from case studies involving Internet access of users from 179 countries. Norris describes the ways in which people in different cultures make use of the Internet for information and civic engagement and she attempts to provide a descriptive model to explain patterns of participation on the Internet. Norris reviews the manner that institutional entities have created or enabled opportunities for public engagement and she analyzes how the various publics have responded to these opportunities.

Warschauer, Mark. (2003). "Demystifying The Digital Divide." Scientific American 289(2): 42–48. Mark Warschauer teaches Informatics in the Department of Education at the University of California at Irvine. He has conducted qualitative research on technology adoption in Egypt, China, India, Brazil, Singapore. In a three-year longitudinal case study in Egypt, Warschauer examined the steps that governmental agencies took to introduce ICTs in the schools and he observed the various impacts that were manifested from those initiatives. From his observations, Warschauer concluded that policies which promote the mere presence of new technologies in schools without a corresponding emphasis on social mobilization and transformation can squander limited resources while leaving problems of sociotechnical inequities in tact.

INTERNET RESOURCES

NielsenNetRatings. (2003). "Global Internet Population Grows an Average of Four Percent Year-Over-Year"" Available from http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_030220.pdf. Nielsen NetRatings provide ongoing measurement of Internet usage. Detailed information collected by Nielsen is intended primarily for commercial use, however summaries are published monthly and may be accessed at http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp?section=dat_gi.

Swaminathan, Monkombu Sambasivan. (2001). "Antyodaya Pathway of Bridging the Digital Divide." Available from http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/B-SPAN/docs/antyoday.pdf. (Lecture delivered before the Tilak Smarak Trust, Pune, India, August 1, 2001.) Through his involvement in hybrid grain research in the 1960s, geneticist Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan played a principle role in the introduction of high-yielding wheat varieties that significantly contributed to India's "Green Revolution" (1967–1978). In 1987 the celebrated scientist created the Swaminathan Foundation, with the aim of supporting fledgling technological development projects that directly address hunger, poverty and environmental concerns. The foundation is known for its emphasis on bottom-up participatory approaches to economic development where local control is the key element to the introduction of new technologies.