The Digital Divide

What is the digital divide?

The digital divide is slowly shrinking, as digital devices become more widespread. Mobile phones let people access the internet almost anywhere in a city. Broadband internet allows for high speed internet access at homes. Organizations, companies, and schools all have infrastructures that allow for the exchange of digital information. However, most people do not think of literacy when it comes to the digital divide. People have access to digital devices, and can use them. But they don’t use it to create content, only share information. These digital devices are simply an auxiliary for most people. Because of this, most people can only express themselves using basic tools in digital devices. Most other content are instead created by a small population of the internet. This is called the second-level digital divide.

Second-level digital divide is becoming more and more important as the first digital divide, as more and more people gain access to digital devices. Yes a lot of people know how to use these devices, but the people who create the content that populate digital systems continue to be the ones who are in power. This means that big corporations continues to have the biggest influence on content and information is spread. There are a few outliers, of course, but these are major exceptions. Because of the dominance corporations have on content creation, they also influence what products and culture is deemed important. This leads to most content on the internet being based on how a corporation can use it to make money and share their agendas.

That’s not to say that content creation on the smaller level doesn’t influence people. But they are mostly driven by emulating the bigger corporations in order to appeal to people. If they don’t emulate corporations, they use sponsors to fund themselves, effectively becoming an advertisement for these same corporations. The digital divide is only increasing with how many people are ok with being consumers of content and not creators. And it’s because of how corporations want it that way.

The effects on the average person:

The danger that this digital divide has on normal people is bigger than you’d think. As an example, I used to be just a consumer of content. My parents didn’t want me to be near computers and gadgets when I was young, so I contented myself with books and CDs. When I was a teenager, I was able to grasp how to use computers fairly easily, having been taught by my parents. I eventually became interested in both photo and video editing, though it was simply a phase for me. I learned how to make simple websites, and I learned how to create simple codes. But I eventually lost interest in learning more than the basics, and stopped analyzing a lot of the stuff I consumed.. I wouldn’t call myself digitally literate because of this. But I didn’t really care, at least at the time. I was okay with watching a video or analysis on a subject and forget about it hours later. I was okay with being a mindless consumer. Now I know better; corporations run the show, and they want you to stay a mindless consumer.

The course of action:

So what do we do to lessen the second level of the digital divide? We must make sure that people who have access to digital devices have the opportunity to learn how to create content on their devices. It’s cool that an average person knows how to search the internet, but they should also know how to blog and create a website. How do we encourage this? By offering faster internet with wider coverage. People will be more curious on the workings of the internet if they didn’t spend half of the time waiting for content to load or searching for an access point.

For poorer countries, we need to make sure to integrate digital devices to education. If the curriculum of a school integrates technology, it encourages the students to use this technology to their advantage and learn more of how it works. I’m an example of that, having gone through APEC Schools curriculum of online education. By using technology, I was able to think of ways to accomplish and even surpass my teachers expectations.

The first level of digital divide is something the world is scrambling to close. But by giving access to people who have no idea how to use digital devices, we’re leading them open to exploitation from corporations and people who want to earn money or spread their own agendas. People need to learn how to create their own content in the digital world in order to be able to better understand the current content being offered to them. It’s like reading. If you didn’t know how to write, and only read the books available to you, you’d only know the things that people tell you. But if you know how to write, you can understand the various parts of the book, analyze the content, and By understanding how to create digital content, people will be able to more than just consume the content they watch, listen and read; they’ll be able to learn and surpass from them.

References:

Bernard, S. (2011, August 8). Crossing the Digital Divide: Bridges and Barriers to Digital Inclusion. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/digital-divide-technology-access-inclusion.

Di Basta, A., Dutta, S., Geiger, T., & Lanvin, B. (2015). The Networked Readiness Index 2015: Taking the Pulse of the ICT Revolution. The Global Information Technology Report 2015: ICTs for Inclusive Growth, 15–20.

Digital divide. (2019, September 18). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide#Second-level_digital_divide.

Garrity, J., & Pepper, R. (2015). ICTs, Income Inequality, and Ensuring Inclusive Growth. The Global Information Technology Report 2015: ICTs for Inclusive Growth, 34–36. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2588115