Digesting the Digital Divide

My recent blog about the 2007 election primary in Carbondale dealt with the election candidates (8 out of 11) deliberately not using of the Internet for voter communications. I intentionally listed the candidate’s age along with one web address providing information about either their campaign, background, or other presence on the web.

One reader questioned if publishing the age of the candidate had any significance. The answer is simple. Age has always had an influence of technology adoption, as have other factors, particularly race, income, and geography.

The issue of consumer technology adoption has historically been couched in the context of the so-called “digital divide.” Wikipedia defines it as the gap between those with regular, effective access to digital technologies and those without. The term digital divide refers to those who can benefit from it, and those who don't, as opposed to just talking about who has direct access to technology, and those who don't.”

The Web began its explosive growth in about 1993 – the same year I founded southern Illinois’ only non-profit ISP, the Shawnee Free-Net. Its early mission was to help close the digital divide in this region. We pioneered wireless WAN use to connect schools to the Internet and hosted over a hundred websites for community non-profits. This was done to empower the non-profit community and their constituents because they were among those that could especially benefit from better access to information resources more available to wealthier, better-educated, higher income, younger, and significantly Caucasian citizens.

Fourteen years ago, few schools had Internet access. Very few senior citizens had access. While university students did have access, they certainly did not have the ease of access and range of providers and technologies available today. To place the situation in context, one should recall the history of the predominate PC desktop operating systems (OS). In 1993 it was Windows 3.x – hardly the most robust, secure and user-friendly software!

Age remains a factor in Internet use today. One study shows significant productivity differences in performing online tasks by users of varying ages.” Age is negatively associated with one's level of Internet skill, and experience with the technology is positively related to online skill, and differences in gender do little to explain the variance in the ability of different people to find content online.”

Today the divide in the USA is still significantly racial and is linked to broader issues such as black and Latino community poverty and even a cultural reluctance to use the Internet. Every day I see a lot of that reluctance in the workplace.

The most disheartening aspect about all the effort put into closing the digital divide is that the divide is “widening, not narrowing, and at an ever-increasing rate.”

DigitalDivide.org postulates nine truths about the digital divide that act as a guide for what we still have to accomplish in this depressed region of southern Illinois. I encourage reading the nine truths in the context of of the claim by some that southern Illinois is similar to a small, third-world nation. Illinois has "the highest poverty rate for adults and children of eight Midwestern states, (where) 12.5 percent of Illinois residents - more than 1.5 million in all - live below the federal poverty level and nearly 30 percent of all state residents live at what the report calls "near poverty."” (Source) Southern Illinois continues to have the highest poverty rates in the state.

1. The Divide is widening, not narrowing, and at an ever-increasing rate.
2. Closing the Digital Divide may be the only way to make globalization work for the poor.
3. The consequence of not closing the Divide is terrorism.
4. Closing the Digital Divide is fundamentally about empowerment, that is, it is about using new technologies to empower the poor just as they now empower the rich.
5. Closing the Digital Divide is the only way to sustain the growth of world markets.
6. World leaders from every sector -- business, government, academia, NGOs -- can benefit from closing the Divide. Yet no one sector has the incentives to lead the effort to close the Divide.
7. Closing the Digital Divide requires building an "enterprise ecosystem" that offers "end to end solutions" for the poor.
8. The midlevel countries in relatively advanced emerging markets, not the poorest countries, are the best settings for experimental efforts to close the Digital Divide.
9. Closing the digital divide involves using new technologies to formalize the "informal economy," thereby bringing the poor into established markets.

Is there a relationship between election candidates’ non-use of the Internet, local poverty and the growing digital divide in southern Illinois? I think so. Is there an ultimate answer? Talk about it.