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.
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