I’ve been following the renewed interest in the digital divide since the publication of the Digital Britain report and also following Martha Lane Fox on twitter since she was appointed the government’s first Champion for Digital Inclusion.
The reason I’m interested in all this is not just because I work in digital media, but also because I researched this whole area from an academic perspective whilst at university. I thought it might be a good idea to publish my dissertation now, although it’s nearly 10 years old I’m sure some of the references and ideas will still be relevant. You can download it here. It’s 28 pages long, and there’s a good bibliography, which I’ve reproduced below for easy access.
I also produced a radio programme about this issue, and I remember interviewing 80 year olds learning how to use computers and going out on the street to get vox pops from a cross section of people living in London’s poorest boroughs. I was struck back then how many people didn’t even know what the internet was. Obviously a lot has changed but we still have 17 million disconnected and obviously this ties in with our less than acceptable literacy levels and the poverty we all see daily.
I hope that people like Martha and her team and Sugata Mitra who I blogged about before do help to make a real difference. As I say in closing line of my essay. The digitisation of life has only just begun, and as Langdon Winner reminds us in “This process amounts to a vast, ongoing experiment whose long term ramifications no one fully
comprehends.”
Here’s a video from the digital inclusion team too:
[This video ‘Think about it’ has been created by the Digital Inclusion Team. It sets out how they can take the opportunity to use technology as a tool for improving lives and life chances or face the risk of increasing economic and social costs. This presentation is available for anyone to place on their website or use when needing to explain the benefits of ICT in tackling social exclusion. Please email movies@digiteam.org.uk.]
DIGITAL DIVIDE – BIBLIOGRAPHY
• New Media and Politics, B. Axford and R. Huggins, Eds, Sage, 2001.
• Demos – Divided By Information: The Digital Divide and the Implications of the New Meritocracy, Perri 6
with Ben Jupp, 2001. www.demos.co.uk
• Theories of the Information Society, Frank Webster, Routledge, 1995.
• War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality, Mark Slouka, New York:
Basic Books,1995.
• Understanding Media Culture, Douglas Kellner, Routledge, 1995.
• Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community, Steven G Jones, Ed. Sage 1995.
• Power Without Responsibility, Curran and Seaton, Routledge, 1997.
• N.Negroponte 1995. Being Digital. Hodder & Stoughton
• D.Rushkoff 1994. Cyberia*. Flamingo
• C.Stoll 1995. Silicon Snake Oil.* Macmillan
• The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens, Stanford University Press, 1990.
• The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, Zone Books, 1994.
• Digital Divide Network –
• Content and the Digital Divide: What Do People Want? By Kade L Twist
• Is closing the Digital Divide more important than providing healthcare? By Mugo Macharia.
• The Arts Online: The Role of the Arts in Bridging the Digital Divide by Victoria Bernal
• Cyber-Tricksters and Cyber-Shamen: The Other Side of The Digital Divide by Kade L Twist.
• www.digitaldividenetwork.org/mugo.adp
• Working together to deliver Information Age Government – Speech by Mo Mowlam MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office at the
LGA/IdeA Information Age Government Conference, 24 November 1999.
• Which? Online Annual Internet Survey 2000 – 11/07/2000 – www.which.net/whatsnew/pr/jul00/general/survey.html
• Broadband Proliferation in Europe: Bring on the Competition, Keith Waller, September 20, 2000 – www.streamingmedia.com
DIGITAL DIVIDE DISSERTATION: MAY 2001 by SARAH PLATT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
