DIGITAL DIVIDE: What It Is and Why It Matters

What It Is

"Digital Divide" refers to the gap between those who benefit from digital technology and those who do not. (See www.itu.int/ITU-D/digitaldivide)

It took digital-divide researchers a whole decade to figure out that the real issue is not so much about access to digital technology but about the benefits derived from access. Examining the situation more closely, it turns out that upper-to-middle classes have high-quality access to digital technology because the “80/20 factor” (in which eighty percent of profit is made by serving the most affluent 20%) causes technology designers to work hard at creating "solutions" specifically for the affluent. The poor are ignored because market forces assume that designing solutions for them will not be profitable*. The result is that even where the poor are provided access to digital technology, it is low-quality and merely “localized” versions of products and services intended for the rich. Furthermore, the digital technologies they do have access to, such as those that lure innocent villagers into vapid pop culture, could be harmful rather than beneficial.

This harm widens the digital divide. Get it?

Consider, for the example, cyber cafés. Years ago, many pointed to their spread as an example demonstrating that the digital divide was shrinking. But when a local youth in a Cambodia village ignores his school work and instead spends his evenings playing violent videogames with his peers, he is not really benefiting from digital technology. Thus giving to the poor digital technology that has been designed for the rich may actually add to the causes of poverty and accelerate the exodus of the rural poor into cities already bursting at the seams.

The new view is that closing the digital divide will be most effectively achieved through a two-pronged approach, one that is direct and the other that is indirect: The direct approach will be for governments and businesses to work together to change the incentives that shape digital markets. The indirect approach will be for them to team up on public private partnerships that extend rural health care and quality education to the poor. Through these two approaches, the poor will be able to reap many of the same benefits from digital technology now derived by the wealthy.

Why Closing the Digital Divide Matters

1) Closing the Digital Divide is a precondition for reducing poverty.

Many antipoverty experts believe that closing the Digital Divide is not a top priority, arguing instead that the poor need clean water and jobs before they need computers. However, what they do not realize is that access to digital technology greatly enhances the effectiveness and affordability of efforts to improve the water supply, improve rural health and education, generate jobs and address any of the other interrelated problems of poverty. Closing the digital divide is not a silver bullet for reducing poverty. But there is a much lower likelihood of large scale and sustainable poverty reduction without doing so.

2) Closing the Digital Divide is a precondition for resolving terrorism.

Even those who are unconvinced by the antipoverty argument may be convinced by the anti-terrorism argument. It is that the digital divide contributes to terrorism in three ways:  

1. The broadest correlation between digital divide and terrorism has been made by University of California sociologist Manuel Castells (sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/castells). He argues that religious extremism is a rational response made by those who are either left out of the digital revolution or who are being forced to accept modernist influences on terms that they perceive as undermining their core values. 

    

2. The areas where terrorism might be incubated -- rural Pakistan, Central Asia, pockets of rural Indonesia , Mindanao (Philippines island where Muslims predominate), and Southern Thailand -- are areas mired in poverty and not well served by digital networks. Terrorists are sheltered by villagers in these areas partly because the villages themselves have little stake in the globalized cultures intruding on them.  

3. It is difficult to implement most antiterrorism or cyber security efforts in such rural areas, whether focused on educational or military solutions, without the aid of broadband telecommunications networks.

3) Closing the Digital Divide is a precondition for achieving sustainable world markets.

After the dot-com bust in the late 1990s, many came to believe that digital "information industries" had lost their central role in the world economy. They were wrong. This bust merely showed that technology purchases were slowing in saturated economies. Today, Europe and North America no longer are as dominant in technology as they once were. The emerging market countries of Asia are now major drivers of the digital economy and, in that vast region, the spread of wireless networks is stimulating all other dimensions of economic growth. In fact, the biggest technological growth is occurring outside big cities in these countries. As broadband networks spread into the countryside, costs throughout the supply chain will drop. By adjusting their policies to close the digital divide, the major IT and telecom companies are achieving innovations that could spur growth in the advanced countries as well.

 

* For a good assessment of this issue, see the archive of World Development Reports of United Nations Development Programme, http://hdr.undp.org/reports/. Also see International Telecommunications Union's reports on the subject, www.itu.int/ITU-D/digitaldivide)