A Decade Of Efforts To Close The Divide

To understand the new opportunities to close the digital divide, let's consider how governments and the private sector evolved as they attempted to grapple with this issue. They passed through four phases:

First Phase: An Ideological Schism

At first corporations and governments tried to pass the buck. Reformers in governments and reformers in big corporations found each other, setting the stage for alliances that disrupt the status quo.

The Digital Divide first loomed as a public-policy issue in 1996 in the debates surrounding the passage of the US Telecommunications Act. Back then, the Digital Divide issue was caught in an ideological friction between public and private sectors. Politicians argued the private sector should pay costs of bringing the poor into the information society. The private sector disagreed. Companies insisted that governments should subsidize technological infrastructures and deregulate the telecom sector so that prices could drop. Both sides were right, in a way. Corporate lobbyists and regulators saw the Digital Divide issue as an extension of the 50-year old debate over "universal service," in which governments and telephone companies postured over who should pay the high costs hooking up rural folks.

Second Phase: a role for Multinationals

In the 1990s, the big multinationals tied to the digital revolution overcame their defensive stance and turned the matter of closing the Divide to their philanthropic offices. The big multinational IT companies poured $2 billion a year into such philanthropic efforts in the late 1999s as their way of allaying the public's concerns and assuring wary government officials of their concern. Few such projects survived the dot-com bust of 1999. The crash in tech stocks lightened public pressure on the companies enormously, and most CEOs in advanced countries stopped making speeches expressing their concern about the concern about digital divide.

Third Phase: Reformers within Governments and Corporations see the Digital Divide as a Wedge Issue Forcing Internal Reform.

But the battle ground over Digital Divide didn’t go away. After the dot-com bust, the focus of efforts to close the Digital Divide moved from the advanced countries and towards the developing world. The debate over whether government policies should encourage tech-friendly market forces or rein them in had only just begun. In places like Brazil, China and India, new ties emerged between reformist government officials and managers of multinational corporations. Their common cause was the promotion of “disruptive technologies,” which challenged entrenched interests. These form the basis of the reform alliances encouraged by DigitalDivide.org.

Though the shift towards public/private alliances to close the Digital Divide seems sudden, it has evolved gradually. By looking at government's effort to close Digital Divide, and then looking at the private sector's parallel efforts, we can see that both sides evolved through four phases. To understand the changes in governments that sets the stage of its full-out encounter with the private sector to close digital divide, click here. To understand the changes in the private sector that sets the stage for its encounter with the private sector to close digital divide, click here.

Fourth Phase: Bringing the Web 2.0 “User Revolution” to the masses.

Since the User Revolution (Web 2.0) emerged as a new factor in technology design since 2004, the emerging new phase of the movement to close the Digital Divide regards how to bring the user revolution to the masses in emerging markets, particularly in Asia. Anthropologists are revisiting the technique of ethnography to determine what users want in remote, traditional locations. But the deeper matter is to design learning processes the uplift traditional practices while returning to the fundamental spiritual principles and values. Thus, designers must go beyond ethnography to study the imbedded spiritual traditions in traditional societies to consider ways to truly empower users in emerging markets. Thus, the long journey to closed the Digital Divide ends in the embrace of meaningful technologies, helping users find the meaning that lies within their own cultures. See meaningfultechnology.org and spiritualcomputing.com.