What is the dig­i­tal divide, and what impli­ca­tions for soci­ety and the indi­vid­ual are seen to arise from this?

A rather broad topic, per­haps, but use­ful, nonethe­less. Warn­ing — it’s fairly long.

Update: Now in pretty PDF form!

What is it?

The term ‘dig­i­tal divide’ refers to the dis­par­ity in terms of access that has emerged fol­low­ing the advent of elec­tronic infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion mech­a­nisms in the realm of con­sumer tech­nol­ogy. Notably, this notion of ‘access’ applies to more than mere phys­i­cal prox­im­ity and avail­abil­ity of resources — Mark Warschauer’s text, Tech­nol­ogy and Social Inclu­sion¹ argues that the pri­mary bar­rier to be over­come in terms of equi­table access is not sim­ply imple­ment­ing the tech­nol­ogy in the first instance, but imple­ment­ing it in a way which does not sim­ply view infra­struc­ture as the first and only bar­rier to be over­come, instead heed­ing the issue of train­ing and skills devel­op­ment as an inex­tri­ca­bly con­nected aspect of the same problem.

In light of this, the ‘dig­i­tal divide’ is beyond res­o­lu­tion through sim­ply attain­ing (or donat­ing, with regard to aid efforts) appro­pri­ate resources — ongo­ing, con­sis­tent efforts are required, at least for a period suf­fi­cient to rec­tify the sit­u­a­tion in the medium term. That is to say, until indus­try and, per­haps more impor­tantly, edu­ca­tion, exist and are well estab­lished in what­ever demo­graphic the dis­par­ity was evi­dent in (be that geo­graphic, racial, or oth­er­wise), such that this indus­try and edu­ca­tion may be self-sufficient, to sus­tain and pro­mote the growth of Infor­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­ogy (ICT) lit­er­acy in that region.

Hav­ing iden­ti­fied that need (although per­haps not hav­ing jus­ti­fied it), what is required? Clearly, infra­struc­ture is. In many places, how­ever, this need has already been ful­filled through aid dona­tions from ‘cor­po­rate cit­i­zens’, aid organ­i­sa­tions, and gov­ern­ments — note this does not nec­es­sar­ily mean for­eign gov­ern­ments — it is impor­tant not to view the dig­i­tal divide purely geo­graph­i­cally, and, even if it is, the geog­ra­phy of an indi­vid­ual state may cre­ate a inequitable cli­mate in terms of access — Aus­tralian rural areas are an exam­ple of this, as recog­nised in the NET*Working 2002 Voca­tional Edu­ca­tion con­fer­ence².

It is now com­monly under­stood in cir­cles where the ‘dig­i­tal divide’ is of holis­tic con­cern (that is, not as much the realm of elec­tronic con­tent cre­ation — which may be aware of and actively work­ing to rec­tify the divide, even though they are not aware of issues asso­ci­ated with it which do not directly impact their activ­i­ties) that train­ing and recog­ni­tion of non-physical issues as nec­es­sar­ily a part of any approach to over­come said con­cern. Under­stand­ing this, then, pro­vides nec­es­sary ground­ing for under­stand­ing what the ‘dig­i­tal divide’ is.

Impli­ca­tions for society

The dig­i­tal divide, viewed at a soci­etal level, is not with­out a degree of ‘prior art’ that may be applied in order for objec­tive, con­tex­tual, exam­i­na­tion to occur. In this instance, the ‘prior art’ is found in the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion which occurred glob­ally from the eigh­teenth cen­tury onwards — this is still occur­ring in many con­tem­po­rary states, such as (provinces of) China and other nations (pri­mar­ily in Asia).

What, then, is the pic­ture pre­sented from this ‘prior art’? Is the por­trait painted one of bleak defeat and grow­ing soci­etal and eco­nomic dis­par­ity? Or, in this real-world sce­nario, is a res­o­lu­tion of this ‘divide’ some­thing that is attain­able, and, if it pro­ceeds along the same lines as the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, the nat­ural out­come to which events shall point?

The Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion first occurred in any real form in Britain and the United States, and then prop­a­gated to var­i­ous Euro­pean nations and, to a lesser extent, colonies, in the nine­teenth cen­tury. Prior to this rev­o­lu­tion, it has been noted that China and Japan were at a sim­i­lar point in soci­etal devel­op­ment to that of West­ern nations, how­ever indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion did not occur there until much later. Rea­sons attrib­uted to this have ranged from prox­im­ity and capac­ity for com­mu­ni­ca­tion of ideas (as opposed to the type and rate of ideas and how rapidly these were being explored) to mere geog­ra­phy, how­ever this is largely irrel­e­vant to the present dis­cus­sion. Of greater con­se­quence is the Meiji Restora­tion in Japan in the late twen­ti­eth cen­tury, dur­ing which they achieved in less than 40 years an indus­trial capac­ity that had taken west­ern nations two cen­turies to develop. If ever there were a suc­cess story with regard to rapid indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, Meiji Japan was it.

Of course, indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion does not occur (and has not occurred) with­out sig­nif­i­cant soci­etal strain. The Meiji Restora­tion in Japan resulted in sig­nif­i­cant social tur­moil, espe­cially in terms of their class-structured soci­ety, but also in the sud­den con­cen­tra­tion of pop­u­la­tion in urban areas. The time period in which this occurred, in con­trast with that of West­ern nations prior to it, accen­tu­ated the effects of this change process — whilst indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion enabled inter­na­tional com­pet­i­tive­ness (espe­cially in terms of high-value silk exports) and eco­nomic ben­e­fits, the speed with which this was achieved lead to soci­etal suf­fer­ing greater than that expe­ri­enced in West­ern nations, where urban facil­i­ties could be devel­oped in step (or at least closer) with the influx of new pop­u­la­tion from rural areas.

Today, Japan is a glob­ally recog­nised force eco­nom­i­cally and indus­tri­ally, and a lead­ing inno­va­tor in the fields of elec­tronic and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy device man­u­fac­ture and adop­tion. It boasts one of the high­est stan­dards of liv­ing in the world, and one would be hard-pressed to find any remain­ing dis­ad­van­tage with which Japan is bur­dened as a result of its (com­par­a­tively) late industrialisation.

Clearly, late adop­tion is not a bar­rier to sub­se­quent achieve­ment and even restora­tion of sta­tus. Rud­yard Kipling’s Cities and Thrones and Pow­ers may also be cited, if poetic rather than historical-political ref­er­ence is desired — the point stands. Achieve­ment at one point does not guar­an­tee con­tin­ued sta­tus, and late adop­tion does not require the con­tin­u­a­tion of any detri­ment that may be found in that, either.

A view of the Dig­i­tal Divide should, per­haps, be akin to this — but pos­si­bly not. This ‘prior art’ has shaped the direc­tion and nature of the world, as has the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion which fol­lowed it — of which debate is now held. The world, though, has not yet fully indus­tri­alised. Nations may be devel­op­ing, or sim­ply not hold­ing either the desire or the resources to develop — sev­eral small Pacific islands are an exam­ple of this. Iron­i­cally, some of these have achieved a sta­tus of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment (albeit at a nation-state level, rather than for the gen­eral pop­u­lace) with­out ever expe­ri­enc­ing indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, as a result of exploita­tion on an inter­na­tional level of their domes­tic legal sys­tems — sev­eral such islands are now used for the pur­poses of money laun­der­ing, etc.

Inher­ently, this only serves to accen­tu­ate the point that ‘first achiever’ sta­tus is non-essential. Viewed holis­ti­cally, how­ever, this ren­ders any such prior art incon­se­quen­tial — nations did not achieve an indus­tri­alised state through for­eign abuse of inter­nal policy.

The dig­i­tal divide, then, may be likened to past events and linked with past poli­cies, yet these do not clearly encom­pass its scope or the man­ner in which the world must pro­ceed in order to achieve res­o­lu­tion to the present sit­u­a­tion — par­tially because there is no estab­lished path to trouble-free indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, and as such it is impos­si­ble to ascer­tain such a path for pro­gres­sion in terms of ICT adop­tion and imple­men­ta­tion. Clearly, nations that are gen­er­ally con­sid­ered ‘pros­per­ous’ and ‘devel­oped’ are more likely to fall on the ‘devel­oped’ side of this dig­i­tal divide, and, given wise inter­nal pol­icy, are likely to stay there through con­tin­u­ing change. Hav­ing said this, how­ever, even within nations there are fac­tors that may affect the access of spe­cific groups to resources, such as geog­ra­phy (speak­ing of net­works, for a moment, there is a clear lim­i­ta­tion that arises in terms of the qual­ity of resources, more than any­thing, as a result of phys­i­cal dis­tance) and regional demographics.

At a soci­etal level, then, ICT adop­tion in terms of the emerg­ing divide can­not sim­ply be likened to a past rev­o­lu­tion of tech­nol­ogy, even in the man­ner dis­cussed above. Viewed in greater detail, the poten­tial par­al­lel col­lapses even fur­ther, as the ICT “rev­o­lu­tion” occur­ring at present is in terms of access to infor­ma­tion, restruc­tur­ing soci­ety and, ulti­mately, cre­at­ing hor­i­zon­tal net­works, which is per­haps the reverse of the out­come of the Indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion (the cre­ation of hier­ar­chi­cal net­works) in its con­se­quence, and entirely dif­fer­ent in process — the Indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion being about inno­va­tions in pro­duc­tion and indus­try, result­ing in the cre­ation of a new class and a restruc­tur­ing of soci­ety (evi­dent in the social tur­moil dur­ing the Meiji Restora­tion period in Japan)? through the process of ‘deskilling’ in which the capac­ity for inde­pen­dent thought is renounced, rather than actively pro­moted as with the free­dom of expres­sion inher­ently a part of this ICT revolution.

ICT can be seen to sim­i­larly result in the restruc­tur­ing of soci­ety, how­ever in doing this, it dam­ages or alters class struc­tures, and cre­ate a new degree of equal­ity in the poten­tial it gives for use to achieve com­mon com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Con­versely, lim­ited adop­tion of ICT, as evi­dent in the dig­i­tal divide, could be seen to have another effect — the widen­ing of divi­sions within soci­ety, not into class, but into a new class sys­tem of access.

A com­mon mis­con­cep­tion would have this new class sys­tem being labelled as binary in nature (pun unin­ten­tional, unde­sired, and unrelated) — that is, that it could sim­ply be split into two cat­e­gories of ‘have’ and ‘have not’. Whilst cur­sory exam­i­na­tion of the mat­ter may result in this under­stand­ing of the divide, any attempt to delve deeper will quickly result in an under­stand­ing that there are many lev­els within this seem­ingly binary divide.

Many fac­tors com­bine to form this multi-faceted divide, the main aspects being:

• Phys­i­cal access to technology
• Qual­ity of technology
• Usabil­ity of technology
• Internationalisation/localisation of tech­nol­ogy (specif­i­cally soft­ware platforms)
• Access to training
• Pres­ence and impact of regional infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy sec­tor facil­i­tat­ing fur­ther per­sonal and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment in terms of IT usage

Clearly, these fac­tors can­not be con­densed into sim­ple cat­e­gories of ‘have’ and ‘have not’ — representation of these in terms of the degree of access on a lin­ear scale would like­wise fail — a two-dimensional mod­el­ling of a six-dimensional issue (those six being the key fac­tors out­lined above) is overly sim­plis­tic and prob­a­bly not advan­ta­geous in its mod­el­ling of the problem.

At a soci­etal level, the prob­lems that result from this divide are wide­spread and com­plex, and often beyond any attempts at visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion in this regard, if not in scope alone. Analy­sis of the impact of the dig­i­tal divide, and indeed the impact of ICT gen­er­ally, at a soci­etal level, is pos­si­ble in a vari­ety of forms focussing upon a vari­ety of spe­cific issues, how­ever, for the pur­poses of the task to which this essay relates (namely a cre­ative piece explor­ing the afore­men­tioned issue), it appears more pru­dent to exam­ine the role of ICT in rela­tion to the indi­vid­ual within the con­struct of soci­ety, rather than the same in rela­tion to soci­ety as a stand­alone issue; this lends itself to cre­at­ing a deeper under­stand­ing of the require­ments of char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion within this text, rather than sim­ply explor­ing envi­ron­men­tal require­ments, them­selves shaped largely by the expe­ri­ence and inter­ac­tions of the indi­vid­u­als which exist within them.

Impli­ca­tions for the Individual

The indi­vid­ual within this new envi­ron­ment brought about by the (lim­ited) pro­lif­er­a­tion of ICT resources is simul­ta­ne­ously bur­dened and empow­ered. In one sense, tech­nol­ogy inher­ently comes with prob­lems, as adop­tion of this becomes wide­spread; it is a col­lec­tive action prob­lem in which, for a time, the tech­nol­ogy offers ben­e­fit to its users — but as adop­tion becomes wide­spread, the poten­tial neg­a­tive effects of this tech­nol­ogy or action are realised. In an arti­cle enti­tled “Tech­nol­ogy Bites Back“³, Dr Rob Spar­row from Monash University’s Cen­tre for Human Bioethics cites the exam­ple of stand­ing on seats at a rock con­cert to gain a bet­ter view: “The first per­son who does it gets a great view, but if every­body does it, no-body sees any bet­ter than before. They’re worse off, in fact, because they’re stand­ing rather than sitting.”

The com­pet­i­tive advan­tage offered by mobile phones ten to fif­teen years ago is now neutered by wide­spread adop­tion — and now an unprece­dented expec­ta­tion of con­stant con­nec­tiv­ity and reaction/response exists, plac­ing a bur­den upon, rather than grant­ing an advan­tage to, many peo­ple. A sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion is wit­nessed with more con­ven­tional elec­tronic net­works — the advent of email in the con­text of global com­merce requires rapid responses to the point that con­sid­er­a­tion of the response does, in some cir­cum­stances, require noti­fi­ca­tion that the mes­sage has been received and the respon­der is indeed con­sid­er­ing the issues raised; cus­tomers have been heard to express dis­sat­is­fac­tion with email response times of greater than a day, com­pared to con­ven­tional (phys­i­cal) mail, with which same-day responses are not the norm in a global con­text, and rare out­side of a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment in which phys­i­cal prox­im­ity ren­ders this realistic.

The indi­vid­ual on the ‘have side’ of the divide (protes­ta­tions regard­ing cat­e­gori­sa­tion stand, how­ever, this ter­mi­nol­ogy is retained with the tra­di­tional seman­tics attached to it held in mind, for the sake of brevity), then, is seen to be bur­dened with a need for imme­di­acy in response to this change beyond that to which peo­ple of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions were sub­jected. This com­mu­ni­ca­tion is, of course, at a peer-to-peer level, as opposed to any mass dis­sem­i­na­tion, although the same tech­nolo­gies could (can) be applied in this way (an exam­ple of this is evi­dent in mass email­ing, solicited or unso­licited), with var­ied effects.
It has been argued that, with the adop­tion of mass mar­ket­ing tech­niques (not lim­ited to those tech­nolo­gies rel­e­vant to the present dis­cus­sion, although cer­tainly includ­ing them), cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment enti­ties have adopted a new form of lan­guage, which, though say­ing much, com­mu­ni­cates very lit­tle and obfus­cates what is com­mu­ni­cated through the use of lan­guage “as con­trived and arti­fi­cial as the lan­guage of the 18th Cen­tury French court“⁴- in other words, to their audi­ences at least, com­pa­nies sound “hol­low, flat, lit­er­ally inhu­man.“⁵

The Clue­train Man­i­festo⁶ was a work pub­lished online in 1999 in the form of 95 The­ses, and, in the fore­word to the pub­lished text, The Clue­train Man­i­festo: The end of busi­ness as usual⁷, the writer of this fore­word, Thomas Pet­zinger, Jr. of The Wall Street Jour­nal claims that book is “one of the first books writ­ten as a sequel to a Web site“⁸ — a claim prob­a­bly not far from the truth. This wouldn’t be of sig­nif­i­cance, but for the con­tent of what was writ­ten in both. Just as the author of this essay may chose to use an elec­tronic form for the exten­sion 2 task that he writes this for but does not, due to the inap­pro­pri­ate­ness of that form for the task at hand, The Clue­train Manifesto’s mes­sage is one which requires an elec­tronic form (in the first instance — the pub­lished book is an exten­sion, not a basis) — for con­tent, for dis­tri­b­u­tion, for authen­tic­ity, and, ulti­mately, for the preser­va­tion of the ideals pre­sented in the work itself.

What ideals, then, are pre­sented? Authen­tic­ity is val­ued, cer­tainly. Human­ity is val­ued. The meta­phys­i­cal con­struct of ‘the cor­po­ra­tion’ is val­ued, but shunned in its present form — it is seen to have drifted away from its constituent’s nature, and into its own ego­cen­tric entity that fails to value the con­sumer. Open col­lab­o­ra­tion and dis­course are val­ued. Inter­est­ing dia­logue is val­ued, with authen­tic­ity, dis­clo­sure, direct­ness, and a gen­uine voice.

The Clue­train Man­i­festo chal­lenges the cor­po­rate mind­set regard­ing mar­ket­ing in a post-industrial soci­ety, in which com­pa­nies aim to ‘cre­ate rela­tion­ships’. This is per­haps best addressed in point 25 of the man­i­festo, which reads “Com­pa­nies need to come down from their Ivory Tow­ers and talk to the peo­ple with whom they hope to cre­ate rela­tion­ships.” The advent of global elec­tronic net­works has simul­ta­ne­ously been a bless­ing and a curse for the indi­vid­u­als con­nected to them. In one sense, it has allowed for the cre­ation of smarter, net­worked mar­kets — in the words of man­i­festo, “Hyper­links sub­vert hier­ar­chy” (point 7). In another, the mis­un­der­stand­ing of the nature of these global net­works has resulted in a curse; the bur­den of the face­less entity upon this new ‘market’ — notably not this new ‘com­mu­nity’ or ‘con­nected people’.

This sen­ti­ment is echoed in Meikle’s book, Future Active⁹, which mod­els the Inter­net around two basic con­cepts, known through­out the text as ver­sion 1.0 and 2.0. Some­what iron­i­cally, the older ver­sion (ver­sion 1.0) is per­ceived to be the bet­ter model, with ver­sion 2.0 mis­un­der­stand­ing and cor­rupt­ing the for­mer. Exam­ples are given through­out the work, which cites the suc­cess of Amazon.com as a byprod­uct of its ver­sion 1.0 nature, despite it being a com­mer­cial entity. Sim­ply, ver­sion 1.0 refers to the pre-commercialisation Inter­net of open military-academic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, extend­ing for­wards to the open­ing of the Inter­net to the pub­lic, but essen­tially prior to any over­whelm­ing com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of the Inter­net; ver­sion 1.0 is about open pub­lish­ing and discourse.

Ver­sion 2.0, how­ever, is closed pub­lish­ing. It’s cor­po­rate web­sites, flashy reports, stuff-designed-for-print-but-stuck-online-anyway, and con­tent and web­sites that gen­er­ally fail to recog­nise the col­lab­o­ra­tive poten­tial of the medium, instead view­ing it as a net­work that is a mar­ket, rather than a net­work that is a meet­ing place. Amazon.com is about pre-developed con­tent with com­mer­cial pre­sen­ta­tion, but is suc­cess­ful (accord­ing to Meikle’s text) due to its cre­ation of a com­mu­nity around its prod­ucts, in the form of allow­ing users to com­ment on books/products and leave reviews — for free, in recog­ni­tion of the pulling power of this open pub­lish­ing that peo­ple flock to.
The Inter­net, for com­pa­nies that don’t under­stand the impor­tance of this “ver­sion 1.0″ model, is just an exten­sion of another form of mass media — with­out recog­nis­ing that, here at least, their ‘tar­get mar­ket’ is free to switch to any ‘chan­nel’ they wish — and the Inter­net is rich enough in con­tent that this is of no sub­stan­tial detri­ment to the tar­geted user, unlike its tra­di­tional broad­cast counterparts.

The Inter­net, then, is another avenue for forced ‘broad­cast’ (top down) com­mu­ni­ca­tion, if this is how cor­po­rate enti­ties per­ceive it. This com­mu­ni­ca­tion is often very much in the same style, if in a dif­fer­ent form, from more con­ven­tional broad­cast com­mu­ni­ca­tion — that is, still top down, still non-interactive, still “hol­low, flat, lit­er­ally inhu­man”? but the Inter­net is more than this, and “mar­kets” (cor­rectly peo­ple) under­stand that — “hyper­links sub­vert hier­ar­chy”. With this in mind, use of the Inter­net as though it were sim­ply another form of ‘mass media’ is, in most instances, mis­guided (excep­tions being elec­tronic pres­ences of exist­ing pub­li­ca­tions, specif­i­cally news sources — although these too would do well to per­mit a degree of inter­ac­tion, a good exam­ple of this being the dis­cus­sion fea­tures on CNet news.com and, to a lesser extent, some arti­cles on the SMH.com.au web­site) and backwards-thinking. Meikle’s Future Active pro­poses that activism is “back­ing into the future“¹⁰, apply­ing old tech­niques and mech­a­nisms to a new envi­ron­ment (the web) and then sub­se­quently chang­ing accord­ingly — not the other way around. This is equally true of the major­ity of elec­tronic news out­lets, and, as is begin­ning to be realised, with cor­po­rate web­sites such as englishcut.com¹¹ adopt­ing a dif­fer­ent mind­set in the nature of their elec­tronic pres­ence, as the sig­nif­i­cance of open pub­lish­ing and ‘ver­sion 1.0′ frame­works is realised.

With the recog­ni­tion of the impor­tance of this dif­fer­ent mode of pub­lish­ing, the present (over­whelm­ing redun­dant) man­ner that many busi­nesses cur­rently utilise for all elec­tronic com­mu­niqués will be seen to sub­side, to be replaced by more open, hon­est dis­course between busi­ness, employee and cus­tomer, in a way that views “the Inter­net” as its own medium, not sim­ply “TV with a buy but­ton“¹².

What does this mean in terms of the dig­i­tal divide, then? Before the par­a­digm shift in the way cor­po­ra­tions approached and thought about this new medium, in terms of business-to-consumer or business-to-employee com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the “have not” group weren’t, in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, miss­ing out on any­thing sig­nif­i­cant. In fact, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion was so facile, so trite, and so back­wards look­ing that the “have not” group would find a bet­ter expe­ri­ence in tele­vi­sion, print media, or sim­ply real­ity itself. The Clue­train Man­i­festo book car­ries through­out a “mar­ket” metaphor for the Inter­net — it brings peo­ple together, not as a tar­get mar­ket, or any business-based under­stand­ing of the term, but rather as with mar­kets in the most basic sense — a gath­er­ing of peo­ple to share, to con­verse, to exist in a com­mon envi­ron­ment where not only goods are traded, but also sto­ries and experience.

This, it is argued, is what an open Inter­net looks like.

Cana­dian com­edy group Three Dead Trolls¹³ have satir­i­cally described ‘mul­ti­me­dia’ as being “just like nor­mal media, but not as good!“¹⁴. Mul­ti­me­dia is like “own­ing a TV that’s three inches wide“¹⁵. In a way, that’s how many aspects of the Inter­net are cur­rently pre­sented. Many con­tent authors don’t appre­ci­ate or under­stand how “mul­ti­me­dia” can be appro­pri­ately applied, and the over­all effect is a far cry from cohe­sive, con­sis­tent, or usable. And yet peo­ple use it any­way, immerse them­selves in it, despite its shortcomings.

What of this divide then? If, despite the imper­fec­tions of the medium and (more sig­nif­i­cantly) its appli­ca­tions, peo­ple who can access this resource by their voli­tion elect to — then these imper­fec­tions are out­weighed by the per­ceived advan­tages the medium offers. Apparently.

Is the value mis­placed? Is the imple­men­ta­tion of this seem­ingly empow­er­ing tech­nol­ogy such that the ‘empow­er­ing’ is lost and the ‘tech­nol­ogy’ is a rul­ing influ­ence? The time­less ques­tion resounds — is tech­nol­ogy serv­ing us, or is the reverse true?

Given suf­fi­cient access to tech­nol­ogy, the answers to all these ques­tions is no. The Inter­net can be used for empow­er­ment, for col­lab­o­ra­tion, as a global ‘mar­ket­place’ (in both a com­mer­cial and a social sense) and to serve human­ity socially — it is not purely a mil­i­tary tool, or a com­mer­cial tool, but a tool for com­mu­ni­ca­tion in an altru­is­tic sense sans any ulte­rior motive — sim­ply, com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the sake of dis­course, exis­tence in a social net­work, con­nec­tiv­ity within this ‘web’.

Hav­ing said that, how­ever, the effects of the dig­i­tal divide on the indi­vid­ual are wide-ranging, depend­ing on the social con­text and the degree to which access exists. Mark Warschauer’s book, Tech­nol­ogy and Social Inclu­sion: Rethink­ing the Dig­i­tal Divide¹⁶, iden­ti­fies a sce­nario where par­tial ‘access’ to tech­nol­ogy results in a wors­ened sit­u­a­tion than that which existed prior to the pro­vi­sion of tech­nol­ogy in the first instance. By ‘access’, it is impor­tant to remem­ber that this term must not be solely applied to phys­i­cal access to tech­nol­ogy — train­ing, knowl­edge, abil­ity (espe­cially motor skills and phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties), usabil­ity and inter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion all con­sti­tute ‘access’, in this context.

Warschauer presents the cir­cum­stance of a vil­lage in an Asian nation (prob­a­bly India, this exam­ple is recalled from mem­ory) where an Inter­net access point had been installed by some bene­fac­tor, who freely pro­vided the nec­es­sary phys­i­cal resources for this to occur. Ongo­ing access fees may or may not have been pro­vided for, but that is not wholly rel­e­vant — the dona­tion was futile because of the over­whelm­ing tech­nol­ogy illit­er­acy in the area, and the fail­ure of this dona­tion to encom­pass any degree of train­ing. Once installed, the pri­mary use of this newly installed tech­nol­ogy was not com­mu­ni­ca­tion and open dis­course, but instead found local chil­dren using this resource for play­ing games online.

Sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions exist closer to home — many local libraries in New South Wales now pro­vide free Inter­net access to their mem­bers, often with­out for­mal train­ing pro­vided as well. The author has wit­nessed e-learning ini­tia­tives in such envi­ron­ments fall to sim­i­lar fates as the Indian sce­nario above, with chil­dren find­ing online games more engag­ing than often stale ‘inter­ac­tive learn­ing material’ — as a result of the pre­sen­ta­tion, not the con­tent itself.

Nei­ther of these sce­nar­ios results in the break­ing down of bound­aries, or the open­ing of new and excit­ing dis­course — instead, the tech­nol­ogy places a bur­den upon the com­mu­nity in terms of main­te­nance, ongo­ing costs, and ini­tial invest­ment for lit­tle or no tan­gi­ble — or intangible! — return, and the slave/master rela­tion­ship between human­ity and its tech­nol­ogy turns, in this case, against humanity.

What ICT isn’t

ICT isn’t a magic pill for the prob­lems of indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion. Indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion still has to occur; because ICT is depen­dant upon the infra­struc­ture that indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion devel­ops to exist (not just the tech­nol­ogy itself in a his­tor­i­cal frame­work, but the elec­tric­ity to oper­ate the tech­nol­ogy, and the phys­i­cal net­works used to con­nect it!), and can­not come before the other.

ICT isn’t a magic pill for the prob­lems of poverty. It cre­ates indus­try, and arguably higher stan­dards of liv­ing — but the real prob­lems of pop­u­la­tion con­cen­tra­tion ver­sus arable land and other phys­i­cal con­straints will mean this eman­ci­pa­tion from cer­tain influ­ences is not absolute in its unbur­den­ing? although, ICT in the means it pro­vides the for expres­sion of indi­vid­ual thought, feel­ing, and voice is such that poverty as a result of polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tions may, poten­tially, be over­come or at least chal­lenged in a way pre­vi­ously unprece­dented — an exam­ple of this is the recent 2004 elec­tion in the United States, cov­ered by ‘blogs’ (web logs, or per­sonal jour­nals) so exten­sively that, fol­low­ing the elec­tion, bills have been pro­posed¹⁷ to amend laws con­cern­ing jour­nal­ism and the press to include web logs, grant­ing sim­i­lar rights — and, more impor­tantly, cen­sor­ship — as that which con­ven­tional media is sub­ject to.

ICT isn’t a magic pill for the prob­lems of dis­tance. If any­thing, it is seen to exac­er­bate them, as phys­i­cal locale directly influ­ences avail­abil­ity and sub­se­quent adop­tion of tech­nol­ogy, ulti­mately result­ing in inequal­ity and the broad­en­ing of the social divide between peo­ple. ICT alters the form and style of com­mu­ni­ca­tion used, and the early/late adop­tion rift results in the devel­op­ment of skills to man­age this being frag­mented between groups, influ­enc­ing the way in which groups can relate to each other both in the medium used, and in the lan­guage used within the con­fines of that medium — that is to say, styl­is­ti­cally, the feel of com­mu­ni­ca­tions and the way in which these are writ­ten, spo­ken or oth­er­wise pre­sented alter, based on the author’s expe­ri­ence with dif­fer­ent modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The writ­ing con­ven­tions of per­sonal e-mail, for exam­ple, are sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent from those used in the writ­ing of most let­ters, in its inher­ently con­ver­sa­tional tone merged with the writ­ten word and, in some instances, the alter­ation of lan­guage itself in terms of spelling, use of jar­gon (‘emoti­cons’ are included in this), and abbre­vi­a­tions not com­monly used out­side the con­text of this form of elec­tronic com­mu­niqué — reflected, con­versely, in other writ­ing by users of said tech­nol­ogy, in which adop­tion of the dif­fer­ent lan­guage fea­tures com­mon to elec­tronic forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion are seen to tran­scend this, and per­me­ate other writ­ings — the use of emoti­cons and/or abbre­vi­a­tions such as ‘LOL’ (a com­monly used abbre­vi­a­tion for ‘laugh out loud’, gen­er­ally not used in a lit­eral sense, but sim­ply to denote some degree of humour) in let­ters, for exam­ple, or even in speech (albeit to a lesser extent, and only with some terms).

What the divide means

Such is this change in com­mu­ni­ca­tion as a result of the com­mon adop­tion of this new media form in groups of peo­ple on the ‘have’ side of the divide, that the way in which they com­mu­ni­cate is sub­stan­tially altered to the point of obfus­ca­tion of mean­ing and gen­eral incom­pre­hen­si­bil­ity. As with gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in lan­guage, the dig­i­tal divide has intro­duced (and con­tin­ues to per­pe­trate) a fur­ther gap lin­guis­ti­cally, as well as in terms of the mode and form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion used, assum­ing resources even exist to receive infor­ma­tion pub­lished electronically.

At an indi­vid­ual level, this pre­vents expo­sure to a diverse range of writ­ing and con­tent cre­ated and dis­sem­i­nated elec­tron­i­cally — and, at the stage when this expo­sure and the ‘bridg­ing of the divide’ becomes fea­si­ble at some (as yet unde­ter­mined) point in the future, there still remains a cul­tural and com­mu­nica­tive gap — some would cite Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock¹⁸ to high­light the pos­si­ble effects of this gap, once ‘bridged’. Notably, this ‘bridg­ing’ is an un-real con­cept — whilst the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the divide may be mit­i­gated, the effects of the divide are longer last­ing, at least for a gen­er­a­tion, and poten­tially longer; for exam­ple, unem­ploy­ment prop­a­gates through gen­er­a­tions in a cyclic man­ner, as soci­ol­o­gists have observed is the case in cer­tain areas — a con­tem­po­rary exam­ple being parts of Mac­quarie Fields. The dig­i­tal divide is per­haps not nec­es­sar­ily as extreme in con­se­quence as the cyclic unem­ploy­ment in Mac­quarie Fields, although, arguably, the divide may lead to unem­ploy­ment as a result of the new skills it requires (per­haps revers­ing the trend insti­gated by the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion towards ‘deskilling’), and this unem­ploy­ment may con­tinue across gen­er­a­tions if appro­pri­ate train­ing is not avail­able and/or offered to those still lack­ing in skills.

Of course, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and train­ing bar­ri­ers may not nec­es­sar­ily be an issue — the divide holds a lesser rel­e­vance to those employed in pri­mary indus­tries, for exam­ple. Hav­ing said this, changes in tech­nol­ogy (not communications-related) have also resulted in changes in req­ui­site skills for employ­ment in pri­mary indus­try areas — per­haps requir­ing an under­stand­ing of tech­nol­ogy to func­tion in a com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment, for exam­ple, the use of soft­ware to deter­mine appro­pri­ate use of chem­i­cals, etc.

Not only this, but ICT itself is rel­e­vant to these pri­mary indus­tries for the pur­poses of receiv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the require­ments of cus­tomers, as well as com­mu­ni­ca­tion of changes in tech­nol­ogy for the basic means of pro­duc­tion — sim­ply, ‘keep­ing on top of’ the lat­est indus­try devel­op­ments. This is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to the agri­cul­tural aspect of pri­mary indus­try, with min­ing and log­ging often already con­nected to a larger par­ent com­pany that is likely to already have ICT sys­tems in place for the pur­poses of such communications.

At an indi­vid­ual level, the divide has the poten­tial to result in com­mu­ni­ca­tion dif­fer­ences greater than the gen­er­a­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion gap, as lan­guage and the appli­ca­tion of lan­guage changes, and new forms and modes of expres­sion are adopted on a large scale. The ‘bridg­ing’ of the divide allows this nuance to be realised, as the indi­vid­ual strug­gles to com­pre­hend and adapt to this dif­fer­ent means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion — Toffler’s con­cept of “future shock”; an exam­ple of which has been observed at the Uni­ver­sity of Sydney’s Facil­i­ties Man­age­ment depart­ment¹⁹, which has, at some point in the last sev­eral years, seen the intro­duc­tion of ICT in order to audit and man­age activ­i­ties inter­nally. The pri­mary users of this ICT infra­struc­ture are trades­peo­ple, many of who do not use com­put­ers at home, or had not pre­vi­ously used them in the work­place — the work­place train­ing co-ordinator²⁰ at Facil­i­ties Man­age­ment com­mented on the wide­spread frus­tra­tion and dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion expe­ri­enced; and this, in an envi­ron­ment in which appro­pri­ate train­ing is pro­vided. “Future shock” is a real­ity, which, espe­cially in light of the ICT rev­o­lu­tion, is increas­ingly rel­e­vant in today’s soci­ety, both locally and on a global scale.

Enti­ties and soci­ety as a whole faces this rev­o­lu­tion as its con­stituents expe­ri­ence and capac­ity to deal with change man­dates — that is to say, sim­i­lar chal­lenges are pre­sented to soci­ety as with the indi­vid­ual, with cumu­la­tive effect play­ing a role in shap­ing the soci­ety into the future. Require­ments for train­ing, such that last­ing change can occur, must be met for the divide to be bridged, and, to avoid the lin­guis­tic aspects of this gap broad­en­ing fur­ther, this should occur in a timely man­ner, before this sec­ondary divide of con­se­quence is per­mit­ted to take hold and insti­gate cyclic dis­ad­van­tage. The dig­i­tal divide is but a descrip­tor for the first effect of a cir­cum­stance with con­se­quences far beyond this orig­i­nal manifestation.

Ref­er­ences

1. Warschauer, M. Tech­nol­ogy and Social Inclu­sion. Cam­bridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Octo­ber 2004.
2. http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/nw2002/extras/digitaldivide.pdf – ref­er­ences to Ngaany­at­jara Lands
3. “Icon” tech­nol­ogy sec­tion, SMH, April 9, 2005
4. The Clue­train Man­i­festo, http://www.cluetrain.com/ point 15.
5. Ibid. point 14
6. http://www.cluetrain.com/, see also ref. 7, p.xi
7. Locke, C., Levine, R. et al. The Clue­train Man­i­festo: The end of busi­ness as usual. Cam­bridge, Mass.: Perseus. 2000.
8. Ibid. p. iv
9. Meikle, G. (Edited by Wark, M.) Future Active: Media Activism and the Inter­net.
10. Ibid. p. 14
11. Macleod, H., Mahon, T. Eng­lish Cut: Bespoke Sav­ile Row tai­lors. 2005. < http://www.englishcut.com/ >
12. Locke, C., Levine, R. et al. The Clue­train Man­i­festo: The end of busi­ness as usual. p.15
13. http://www.deadtroll.com/
14. Ibid. “How to Buy a Com­puter” record­ing. Also http://www.ampcast.com/music/22488/artist.php
15. Ibid.
16. Warschauer, M. Tech­nol­ogy and Social Inclu­sion.
17. McCul­lagh, D. Blog­gers nar­rowly dodge fed­eral crack­down. 24 Mar. 2005. CNET News.com. 14 Apr. 2005 < http://news.com.com/Bloggers+narrowly+dodge+federal+crackdown/2100-1028_3-5635724.html >
18. Tof­fler, A. Future Shock: A study of mass bewil­der­ment in the face of accel­er­at­ing change. Lon­don: The Bod­ley Head Ltd. 1970.
19. The author of this essay worked at the Facil­i­ties Man­age­ment Office at the Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney in an IT capac­ity on a work place­ment, for a period of time in 2004, dur­ing which employ­ees whose pro­fes­sion was in their trade, rather than in man­age­ment or an ICT role, expressed frus­tra­tion at the tech­nol­ogy which they were required to use for the man­age­ment aspects of their job.
20. Bar­bara Achilles, also the work place­ment co-ordinator.

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