The Digital Divide, framing and mapping the phenomenon (original) (raw)
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Re-Conceptualizing the Global Digital Divide
2011
The article seeks a re-conceptualization of the global digital divide debate. It critically explores the predominant notion, its evolution and measurement, as well as the policies that have been advanced to bridge the digital divide. Acknowledging the complexity of this inequality, the article aims at analyzing the disparities beyond the connectivity and skills barriers. Without understating the first two digital divides, it is argued that as the Internet becomes more sophisticated and more integrated into economic, social, and cultural processes, a "third" generation of divides becomes critical. These divides are drawn not at the entry to the net but within the net itself, and limit access to content. The increasing barriers to content, though of a diverse nature, all relate to some governance characteristics inherent in cyberspace, such as global spillover of local decisions, regulation through code, and proliferation of self-and co-regulatory models. It is maintained that as the practice of intervention intensifies in cyberspace, multiple and far-reaching points of control outside formal legal institutions are created, threatening the availability of public goods and making the pursuit of public objectives difficult. This is an aspect that is rarely addressed in the global digital divide discussions, even in comprehensive analyses and political initiatives such as the World Summit on the Information Society. Yet, the conceptualization of the digital divide as impeded access to content may be key in terms of ensuring real participation and catering for the longterm implications of digital technologies.
Social Science Computer Review, 2003
This article concerns the comparative dimension of the digital divide, the global digital divide, assessing processes of various sorts that shape this differentiating feature and mapping its trends of change. The authors (a) "map" the global digital divide with multiple indicators to find patterns of varying degrees of differentiation between countries worldwide and between blocs of countries and (b) assess the various national characteristics that contribute to the level of IT connectedness. The authors compare the effects of these various social national conditions on the pervasiveness of IT. Their preliminary results indicate that it is neither political nor economic national characteristics that are the determinants of IT connectedness but that cultural features are the prime causes. In this sense, the global digital divide is more a product of networking into global society than it is a mere reflection of local economic capabilities.
Digital Divide or Internet Usage Inequalities
The digital divide is one of the main topics in the internet and media research. During the last 20 years, the internet became to be one our main tools of our life. This work will try to focus on the fact that not every internet user has the same skills level in the usage of the internet and its applications. This paper will focus on the different usages of the users for different purposes and will try to claim that the term " digital divide " is not the best term in modern digital developed world.
(2004) The Global Digital Divide – Within And Between Countries
IT&SOCIETY, 2004
The diffusion of the Internet (and its accompanying digital divides) has occurred at the intersection of both international and within-country differences in socioeconomic, technological and linguistic factors. Telecommunications policies, infrastructures and education are prerequisites for marginalized communities to participate in the information age. High costs, English language dominance, the lack of relevant content, and the lack of technological support are barriers for disadvantaged communities using computers and the Internet. The diffusion of Internet use in developed countries may be slowing and even stalling, when compared to the explosive growth of Internet access and use in the past decade. With the proliferation of the Internet in developed countries, the digital divide between North American and developed countries elsewhere is thus narrowing, but remains substantial. The divide also remains substantial within almost all countries, and is widening even as the number and percentage of Internet users increases, as newcomers to the Internet are demographically similar to those already online. People, social groups and nations on the wrong side of the digital divide may be increasingly excluded from knowledge-based societies and economies.
Journal of Informetrics, 2003
First, we look at various measures of the digital divide and develop a refined view of global patterns of access to information and communications technologies (ICTs). We confirm a rather obvious divide in per-capita access to telecommunications and the Internet that, historically, has widened in absolute terms. However, in relative terms developing countries show faster rates of growth in network
Examining the Global Digital Divide: A Cross-Country Analysis
Communications of the IBIMA, 2015
Despite the development of the information society and the widespread diffusion of information technology, the disparities between groups of countries in terms of accessing and using information and communication technologies (ICTs) are still valuable. This disparity is defined as the term of digital divide. Although there are several different views about measuring the digital divide, in this study, International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) ICT key indicators are used to measure the global digital divide. The cross-sectional data are collected for 145 countries in the world, for year 2011. One-way ANOVA and regression analysis are applied as statistical methods to analyze global digital divide. According to the results, variables related to development levels, income levels, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) membership and continental differences are highly associated with the digital divide.
Antecedents of the Digital Divide at the Macro Level
2011
This paper reports the results of two studies that investigated factors that influence the digital divide at the macro level. We propose a telecommunications infrastructure index as a measure of the country-level digital divide that is composed of five primary indices that define a country's ICT infrastructure capacity. The first part of the analysis identifies economic, socio-demographic, political, and cultural factors that differentiate 86 developed and developing countries. The second part of the analysis examines factors that differentiate ICT penetration rates for 21 Arab nations. Overall, results show that for the 86 countries political variables are the most important factor that influences the digital divide. Cultural differences, specifically gender disparities in literacy, influence the digital divide in the 21 Arab countries. The availability of secondary data published by official government sources is a serious limitation. Nonetheless, this research has practical a...
From origins to implications: key aspects in the debate over the digital divide
Journal of Information Technology, 2007
Defined as the differential extent to which rich countries and poor countries benefit from various forms of information technology (IT), the global digital divide has been extensively measured and described in national as well as international debates. The problem, however, is that the topic is highly fragmented in the literature, with few attempts to put the parts into a coherent analytical framework. More precisely, there has been no specific attempt to pinpoint the main issues that influence one's view of the importance of the digital divide and the policies demanded by the different points of view. The goal of this paper, accordingly, is to fill this important gap in the literature in an analytical schema that recognizes the ways in which the impact of innovations depends heavily on how they are generated and diffused. At each stage of this sequential process are key issues that influence one's view of the digital divide. It matters a great deal for instance on whether t...
Quantifying and Mapping the Digital Divide from an Internet Point of View
2007
Quantitative knowledge of the magnitude, extent and trends of the Digital Divide are critical to understand and identify the regions most in need of help, to make rational decisions on how to address the problems and to make cases for executives, funding agencies and politicians. We report on a project (PingER) to measure the Digital Divide from the point of view of Internet performance. The PingER project has been measuring Internet performance since 1995 and with the increased emphasis on measuring and tracking the Digital Divide, it now covers over 700 hosts in over 150 countries that between them contain over 99% of the world's Internet connected population. In this paper we will describe the how PingER works, it deployment, the data analysis, and presentation. We also introduce a new PingER visualization tool (ViPER) that provides a more appealing interactive visualization of the PingER data and also works on mobile PDAs. We will also show results from PingER that illustrate the magnitude, extent and trends for the Digital Divide, and also compare PingER results with some human development and technology indices.