Remapping the Digital Divide

A phrase with great urgency a few years ago, “the digital divide” now is on the sidelines. As the federal government renewed its commitment to marketplace solutions in telecommunications and information technology issues under the Bush administration, the idea of a digital divide faced criticism from FCC Chairman Powell for being an ill-advised version of the “Mercedes divide” in the United States: Some people can afford expensive luxury cars, others cannot, but that is the American way. The notion of a severe divide also was challenged by an array of studies documenting the rising pace of computer and Internet use and connectivity: The statistics seem to be moving in the right direction, so why worry? Numerous programs founded in the late 1990s by the federal government (NTIA’s Technology Opportunity Program, the Department of Education’s Community Technology Centers programs, Housing and Urban Development’s Neighborhood Networks Program) have been slashed. They were intended to aid technology deployment to disadvantaged populations or remote regions and to spread the reach of the Internet to more publicly available locations in order to serve people who do not have home equipment of their own, or who could not afford an Internet connection. The phrase “digital opportunity” replaced the divide, putting a blandly positive spin on all things computer related. As the very idea of inequity is eliminated from the social policy vocabulary in favor of marketplace reasoning, the concept of a divide being played out on the latest technology front may slip away from public scrutiny. This issue of The Information Society is an effort to reassert some of the new definitions of the digital divide, and to explore its shape and operations in more nuanced ways. The brief history of the digital divide illustrates symbolic, practical, and opportunistic responses to the confusing prospect presented by mass use of computers and the Internet. The confusion relies on the ready acceptance that the computer is the gateway to membership in the Information Society and the workforce of the future, and that it also renders society more democratic, even in the face of no substantial change to our existing social structure attributable to computerization. One broadband proponent of this vision, for example, writes “I and others believe our goal is to create a knowledge-based democracy. In the Knowledge Democracy, every person and every organization will have the skills, the information tools, and the network access to have a prosperous life and to contribute to the health and wealth of their communities” (Cohill, 2002, p. 1). The centrality of the computer and the Internet to countless national and international economic pronouncements underscores these technologies’ implicit promises and begins to explain why so many individuals, organizations, policymakers, and businesses adopted the mantra equating computer use with economic development and improved social conditions. However, technologies never exist in isolation. Social, political, and economic environments condition the scope of imagination that assigns technology certain roles in our lives, as well as its use, acceptance, integration, and utility. With computers in well over half the homes of the United States and some form of household Internet connectivity achieving similar status, these technologies have become mass media, penetrated with common expectations that at once acknowledge a utopian and egalitarian vision of free, open communication among all users and the lifechanging capabilities of going online, but at the same time acknowledge the dominance of businesses in providing Internet content and controlling basic network infrastructure, especially in the United States. However, the focus on technologies as discrete systems and their users as isolated individuals masks some of the contradictory ideas that routinely accompany information technology policy and programs. How can an egalitarian system of communication flourish in privately controlled “space”? How can technology alone make such monumental changes in one’s life? Such premises have caused little discomfort precisely because of the coalescence of the symbolic, practical, and opportunistic positions regarding the digital divide. The digital divide has been a symbolic banner for politicians and corporate largesse insofar as it substituted for more direct action against inequalities of income, education, and race. Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Dell Computer’s Michael Dell both instituted programs that granted