the digital divide

     the divide 

The notion of the digital divide - information rich v information poor, those with skill sets and big pipes v those with few skills and infrastructure with the performance characteristics of jam tins & string - is profoundly important. 

Alas, it is proving increasingly elastic as 'digital divide' becomes a mantra to justify a range of practical initiatives and digital pork barrelling.

The statistics highlighted on the demographics page of this guide suggest that around 67% of Australian households are not connected to the net (the apparent discrepancy in NOIE and other figures reflects access via work) and that users are young, male, earning in excess of $75,000, employed, and living in metropolitan areas. 

Those

     books and studies

Apart from reports noted earlier in this guide, the divide's attracted increasing academic and community attention. 

Herbert Schiller's Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis In America (London, Routledge 96) and Information & The Crisis Economy (New York, Oxford Uni Press 86) and William Wresch's Disconnected: Haves & Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick, Rutgers Uni Press 98) offer a perspective from the left. 

There are useful essays in Public Access To The Internet (Cambridge, MIT Press 95), a volume edited by Brian Kahin & James Keller as part of the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, and in Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency & Policy In The Information Society (London, Routledge 98) edited by Brian Loader. 

Competition In Telecommunications (Cambridge, MIT Press 00) by Jean-Jacques Laffont & Jean Tirole and Milton Mueller's Universal Service: Interconnection, Competition & Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System. (Cambridge, MIT Press 96) examine universal service regimes.

High Technology & Low-Income Communities: Prospects For The Positive Use Of Advanced Information Technology (Cambridge, MIT Press 99), a collection of essays edited by Donal Schoen, Bish Sanyal & William Mitchell, and Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism & Social Revolution (London, Verso 97) edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl & Michael Stack are other views from the left. Erik Brynjolfsson's 1995 paper on Communications Networks & the Rise of an Information Elite: Do Computers Help the Rich get Richer? (PDF) is a detailed study by the eminent MIT economist. 

Manuel Castells' The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring & the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford, Blackwell 89) highlighted the significance of divides within cities - most people, after all, don't live in the bush. In the US the Urban Research Initiative  on information technology and the future of the urban environment is producing a series of excellent research reports and maps.

Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York, PublicAffairs 99) offers insights into the technolibertarian 'let them eat cake' approach: just throw enough PCs and broadband at any problem and it will go away.

The October 2000 London Business School paper (PDF) by Hammond, Turner & Bain on Internet Users versus Non-Internet Users: Drivers of Internet Uptake is suggestive, as is The Evolution of the Digital Divide: How Gaps in Internet Access May Impact Electronic Commerce, a cogent 2000 paper by Donna Hoffman & Thomas Novak.

     in Australia

As noted earlier in this guide, the 2000 'NATSEM' report for Telstra on Sociodemographic Barriers to Telecommunications Use argues that the Australian 'digital divide' is one of income and social situation, not geography - questioning the government's concern with supply to rural areas. 

The report builds on the Access to electronic commerce and new service and information technologies for older Australians and people with a disability report by the Australian Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission and the landmark 1999 report (PDF) on Web Sites for Rural Australia: Designing for Accessibility by the Rural Industries Research & Development Corporation (RIRDC). 

The latter highlighted issues relating to regional use of the web, including uncertain (and expensive connections), slow download times and older machines or browsers. 

NATSEM's significant because it highlights the divide within metropolitan and regional Australia, in contrast to federal government initiatives focussed on 'the bush' (and Tasmania). 

The Digital Divide page of the National Office for the Information Economy makes interesting reading, highlighting 

regulatory initiatives to encourage greater competition in the telecommunications market; grants programs to fund the development of telecommunications infrastructure, community access facilities and training; a range of educational skills development initiatives; and providing government services electronically in ways that enable access for all sectors of the community, including the disabled

in line with the January 1999 Strategic Framework for the Information Economy (StratF). 

At the national level those initiatives include:

• the Networking the Nation (NTN) program and associated Social Bonus programs, with $592 m from Telstra's sale to upgrade regional, rural and remote telecommunications 
  
  
• a 5-year, $70 million rural transaction centre program of the Dept of Transport & Regional Services to help small, rural communities establish 'community access centres' as gateways to basic services such as banking, post, phone, fax, the net, Medicare and of course Centrelink.
  
  
• an Education & Training Action Plan for the Information Economy with funding of up to $5 million for an Information Technology & Telecommunications (IT&T) Skills Exchange and a Computers for Schools initiative through which " surplus Commonwealth and State government computers are donated to government and non-government schools .... To date, approximately 18 000 computers have found their way to deserving schools." Undeserving ones buy their own?
  
  
• the Government Online Strategy, a whole-of-government approach for wiring the federal bureaucracy, reflects the Prime Minister’s commitment that the Commonwealth will bring all appropriate services online via the Internet by 2001

NOIE's October 2000 E-Commerce Across Australia report, arguing that e-commerce will neutralise the tyranny of distance and place us all on a level footing in the global marketplace, is problematical but does offer a detailed analysis of the potential impacts on regional Australia. 

     and offshore

The 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 earlier parts of this guide, 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.

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."

The UK National Working Party on Social Inclusion (INSINC) with support from IBM produced a report on The Net Result - Social Inclusion in the Information Society, arguing that new technologies will address the divide if all citizens must have "access to the latest electronic communication channels", information "considered vital for participating in society" is free and there's a substantial investment in information handling skills.


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