A Profile of the Digital Divide

A Profile: You’re white, male, between 16-24 years old, have a high income, live in London, use the Internet to shop, and spend about nine hours a week online . . . you are on the “right” side of the digital divide.

A Profile: You’re female, don’t have a college education, are over the age of 50, live in rural China, and do not have access to the Internet — you are on the “wrong” side of the digital divide.

The concept of the digital divide has been widely discussed since its emergence about seven years ago. While it’s difficult to quantify the multi-dimensional inequalities that the digital divide represents, as the profiles above indicate, the term refers to the gap between people who access and use information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, effectively. . . and those who don’t.

The Extent of the Digital Divide
While researchers generally don’t agree on the scope of the digital divide (or its rate of growth or decline), they do acknowledge that a gap exists.

The AMD Global Consumer Advisory Board’s (GCAB) Socio-Economic Committee conducted a thorough review of available research, drawing data from national representative surveys conducted by government agencies, academic institutions and international policy organizations. The goal was to provide an integrative framework for examining the digital divide. The Committee’s resulting report — developed with the help of GCAB member, Barry Wellman, and his graduate assistant, Wenhong Chen, with the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto — is the first, from our findings, to systematically compare and synthesize global research on the digital divide during the past ten years. Perhaps indicative of the complexity of the problem, one of their first discoveries was that there is no single, global standard for measuring Internet usage and growth.

What We Found
The GCAB’s “Charting and Bridging Digital Divides” report specifically examines the digital divide in eight countries: China, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Republic of Korea, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States. In each country, data about the digital divide is described in terms of socio-economic status, gender, age, ethnicity, geographic location and Internet access and use. Specifically, we found that there are dramatic differences in physical and social access to the Internet in developed as well as developing countries. A sampling of the study’s results:

Diffusion (or the distribution of Internet users) is extremely uneven around the world. Although the Internet’s reach has grown exponentially in about the last ten years, increasing from just under a million users in 1993 to more than 600 million in 2002, only about 10 percent of the world’s population is online. And, almost 90 percent of the world’s Internet users are from what we consider to be developed countries, with nearly a third of those users from the United States.

While the digital divide is narrowing in some developed countries, paradoxically it is widening in some developing countries. That’s because in these developing countries, as underserved populations such as the poor or women go online, they’re still going online more slowly than those traditionally better-connected, such as the more affluent or men.

There is no single digital divide — there are multiple digital divides. The digital divide has diverse manifestations along the fault lines of socio-economic status, gender, life stage, and geographic location. For example, in some developed countries, such as the U.S., the U.K. and Japan, the gender digital divide is narrowing as high percentages of women have come to the Internet. However, women are still underrepresented in Germany, Italy, Korea, China and Mexico.

The digital divide is shaped by social factors as much as technological factors. And access to the Internet doesn’t mean informed use of the Internet. The research shows the various dimensions of the digital divide tend to be mutually reinforcing. So, better-educated, young urban men living in developed countries are the most likely to reap digital dividends, while less educated, older rural women living in less developed countries are most likely to be on the wrong side of the digital divide. Technological fixes won’t close the divide unless they take into account the social reasons why people aren’t online.

Despite some overall similarities, different countries have different ways of dealing with the Internet. For instance, Japan is a leading user of the mobile Internet, Korea is the world leader of broadband connections, while the U.K. has a high rate of digital TV access to the Internet.

The research highlights a number of social factors behind the creation of the digital divide such as:

• Infrastructure — Not enough reliable phone lines, electricity or network capacity.
• Socio-economics — Not being able to afford computers and connection charges.
• Technological literacy — older and poorer people are not acquiring skills to use computers and the Internet.
• Technological complexity — Computers and the Internet are hard to install, use and maintain (as we found in the recently published AMD GCAB Technology Terminology and Complexity study).
• Social issues — Dissuasion of women from acquiring computer skills and accessing the Internet.
• Social networks — Lack of a critical mass of neighbors and friends to provide advice about using the Internet.
• Public access — Lack of policy supporting reliable, low-cost public access to the Internet in both developing countries and poorer areas of developed countries.

As the report indicates, the global digital divide will take generations to close. The bottom line: “The uneven diffusion and use of the Internet are shaped by—and are shaping—social inequalities. On the one hand, the digital divide occurs at the intersection of international and intra-national social, technological, and linguistic differences. On the other hand, the digital divide has profound impacts on the reproduction of social inequality.”

Divides & Dividends: The Policy Implications
As Internet diffusion continues unevenly around the world, understanding the causes and impacts has important policy implications. Bridging the digital divide requires more than simply offering computers and Internet access.

Developing countries need infrastructure, along with social and human capital — such as phone lines, electricity, computers, repair shops, Internet networks, and knowledgeable use and assistance from friends and neighbors. In more developed countries, government policies and enhanced institutional arrangements are essential for a complete transition to a “knowledge society.”

Such policies and arrangements can be designed to promote the development of the Internet and other communications technologies by lowering access costs for individuals and connecting people to the Internet in public places such as schools and libraries.

Bridging the digital divide requires cooperation between governments, private sectors and non-governmental organizations to provide disadvantaged individuals and groups with the necessary resources to leapfrog into a digital future.

Again, if you would like to see a full copy of the report, please visit www.amdgcab.org at the “What’s New” section.