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North
American digital divides
This
page looks at digital divides in the US and Canada.
the USA
US government has established a Digital Divide office (DD)
to deal with policy questions and awareness at the national
level. In other advanced economies responsibility tends, as
in Australia, to spread across the bureaucracy.
The Benton Foundation has established the Digital Divide Network
(DDN)
as a nongovernment resource for US initiatives and issues.
As we noted in the Metrics,
Economy and Being Digital
guides, the Divide's a major preoccupation of US state and
federal government agencies. The federal Department of Commerce
(DOC) and
national Telecommunications & Information Administration
(NTIA)
reports on Falling Through The Net provide a detailed
picture of who's online, analysing the 'telecommunications
and information technology gap in America'.
The October 2000 Falling Through The Net: Towards Digital
Inclusion report (PDF)
concentrates on "access to technology tools", measuring
the extent of digital inclusion by identifying households/individuals
with a computer and internet connection.
The State of the Net 2000 report
is a snapshot by the US Internet Council (USIC) of access,
ecommerce, traffic and other Internet statistics. While some
of the figures are suspect, the report is a useful compilation.
USIC's 1999 report
is also online. It should be read in conjunction with studies
such as The Evolution of the Digital Divide: Examining
the Relationship of Race to Internet Access & Usage Over
Time (PDF),
a 2000 report by Donna Hoffman & Thomas Novak.
At a global level the October 2000 conference in Seattle (of
course) of the Digital Dividend Organisation (DDO)
noted that there are more telephones in New York City than
in all of rural Asia, more internet accounts in London than
all of Africa. As much as 80% of the world's population has
never made a phone call. The net connects 100 million computers,
but that "represents less than 2% of the world's population".
Around the same time the US Consumers Federation of America
and Consumers Union released their Disconnected, Disadvantaged
& Disenfranchised report (PDF),
based on a detailed national survey of 1900 respondents and
claimed to present "the first direct comparison of a
broad range of commercial, informational, educational, civic
and political activities of individuals in physical space
to those in cyberspace."
For a contrarian view US business group the Employment Policy
Foundation (EPF)
blithely says "where's the beef?" in a January 2001
report (PDF).
It predicts that "the Divide" will disappear of
its own accord by 2009, with almost all upper income households
and 95% of lower income households owning computers. Some
of the more challenging questions of use and access costs
are skated over; as we've noted throughout this guide ownership
of a personal computer does not necessarily equate with information
literacy or a low-cost internet connection.
The Packard Foundation's 2001 Children & Computer Technology
report
for example notes that 70% of US households with children
aged 2 to 17 have computers. 52% have an internet connection,
although only a small propertion have broadband and charges
vary considerably. Only 22% of very low income households
have computers, compared to 91% of upper income households.
The 1999 report
by James Casey, Randy Ross & Marcia Warren Native Networking:
Telecommunications & Information Technology in Indian Country
remains of value, as does The Native Digital Divide: A
Review of Online Literature (NDD)
by Evans Craig.
Canada
William Birdsall's provocative 2000 First Monday paper
on The Digital Divide in the Liberal State: a Canadian
Perspective argues that divides won't be cured through
market or government intervention, as they're an integral
part of "North American social wealfare policy".
There's a somewhat more positive account in The Dual Digital
Divide: The Information Highway in Canada (PDF),
a distance learning study from the same year.
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