Intent and Inequity: How the Digital Divide Resists Closure     Dated June 7, 2011

My research into the current state of the digital divide was headed in seemingly multiple, unrelated directions, until a video presentation by Toyama Kentaro helped me pull everything together.  Since the digital divide became a well-known issue in the early 1990’s, researchers and representatives of numerous academic disciplines, along with columnists, journalists, and bloggers, have had something to say about the digital divide.  When Kentaro, a researcher studying technologies for emerging markets, put up a slide in his video that said: “Technology only magnifies human intent and capacity.  It can’t substitute for them” (Kentaro), all the dialog came into focus.  The digital divide is a manifestation of the magnification of human intent and capacity via technology, and as such, it is not likely to go away any time soon.  In this essay, we will first examine factors contributing to the current state of the digital divide.  Then, we will look at what it takes to become a digital citizen, followed by an example of capitalizing on the digital divide.  Presented next are some issues concerning ICT (information and communication technology) and original peoples – Alaskan Indians and Native Hawaiians.  Lastly, we look at the effects of the digital divide on the workforce and high school education.  Although this may seem like a truly diverse collection of subject areas, they all have this in common: the intent of those defining and managing ICT, Internet content, and technology education is what shapes their positive or negative outcomes.  This has a direct effect on the capacity of those expected to use these implementations to learn, earn, socialize, create, and generally participate in life online.

Contributing Factors

In his TEDx Tokyo video, Kentaro dispels some myths concerning what technology can and can’t do; in particular, he informs us that it will not fix all our problems.  He speaks from experience, having spent time working with technologies in developing countries.  One example that he gives is when people with information skills use Internet resources such as social media to find work.  From this, we may generalize that the Internet is a good place to look for work, and so we direct other job seekers with skills such as construction or assembly line work to look for jobs on the Internet.  If these job seekers are not proficient in Web searching, email, and social media, they are unlikely to have any success.  Those who are fluent in using the Internet have an invisible advantage: the know-how to find jobs, government services, transportation, and other employment-related information that is becoming more available on the Internet and less available elsewhere.

To gain understanding of the aspects of the digital divide that may be difficult to see – these invisible advantages – we need to make them more visible.  One easily visible way of looking at the digital divide is as a technological problem, where there are ICT haves and have-nots.  The haves possess or have access to some sort of digital device, such as a computer or smart phone that is connected to the Internet.  The have-nots do not possess any such device or access.  From this point of view, the divide is closing and may soon be entirely closed in the U.S. (excluding native peoples, a subject we will examine shortly) and the rest of the developed nations.  The Internet is becoming ubiquitous, as “smart” phones replace “dumb” phones and ICT devices can be found in libraries and other public places.

However, this way of looking at the digital divide is flawed.  Possessing or having convenient Internet access does nothing to resolve the political, social, educational, and cultural issues that are exacerbated by life in the digital world.  In his work on the digital divide, Jan van Dijk states: “People framing the digital divide as a technological problem suggest that access to the technology concerned is able to fix existing social problems, among them problems of social inequality, democracy, freedom, social relationships, and community building…Giving someone a computer and an Internet connection does not solve any of these problems” (van Dijk 5).  On the contrary, when one’s intent is to maintain the status quo, subvert democracy and freedom, or promote discrimination against a people group, the Internet can be a powerful tool for accomplishing these goals if one has the ability to manipulate the content of this new medium.

The traditional media, newspapers and television, have been and continue to be useful methods for staying abreast of current affairs, politics, and news.  They are priced so that most people can afford them if they so wish.  Since the Internet was initially viewed as another media outlet among many, it is generally considered a convenience for those who can afford it.  However, the Internet has evolved into something much more than another media outlet, and access combined with skill in usage is becoming increasingly essential to 21^st century life.  Kenneth Hacker and Shana Mason put this forward: “We know that ICT and Internet usage offer nontrivial cognitive, cultural, and political spaces for creative, learning, and building activities.  Therefore, they should not be considered luxuries but instead critical tools for living a new age of communication and information technologies” (Hacker 111).  As something essential to participate in society, Internet access and advanced online skills are a necessary element in the education that all young people should be receiving.  These are the entry points to digital citizenship.

The Digital Citizen

The research team of Mossberger, Tolbert, and McNeal introduces the concept of the digital citizen, someone capable of working intelligently with digital information and fluent in content creation and information retrieval.  They state that: “For low-income and less-educated Americans of all backgrounds, in both metropolitan and rural communities, poverty and unequal education diminish the potential for digital citizenship…Unequal access to education and growing income inequality reveal the cracks in the liberal tradition promising an equal chance for all to succeed and prosper” (Mossberger 122).  The liberal tradition they reference is that American culture has, as one of its foundations, that everyone in the U.S. has the opportunity to succeed financially, politically, educationally, and in any other lawful way.  This tradition is in danger of becoming beyond the reach of those with the inability to skillfully use the Internet, because this limits their access to the tools necessary for success in the digital society.

As an aid for identifying Internet skill levels, Lisa Nakamura, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, developed a method for defining digital citizenship participation levels.  She says, “It may be helpful to envision various categories of online citizens rather than thinking in terms of gaps and divides” (Nakamura 80).  She uses the analogy of a commercial airline flight, where some passengers are flying Economy Class, some are in Business Class, and a few are First Class passengers.  In this analogy, the Economy Class passengers use ICT for basic information retrieval, such as getting a map to a destination, downloading music from a music store, and streaming video from a content provider.  The Business Class passengers may engage in online financial transactions such as banking and shopping, use social media to stay in touch with family members, and do some minor content creation such as uploading photographs to a site that facilitates organizing and sharing pictures.  The First Class passengers use ICT in most areas of their lives, posting to their own blogs, constructing web sites for their interests and occupations, and in general creating content such as text, images, audio, and video.  As Internet technologies become more and more ubiquitous, those who are able to make the transition from Economy Class to First Class become the leaders of the digital age.

Capitalizing on the Digital Divide

We can’t blame the Internet for creating our social problems, but we can look askance on those who capitalize on the digital divide.  “On its own, the digital divide does not create racism, class-ism, colonialism, or sexism; these phenomena predate computing.  Rather, these logics treat historically under-served groups primarily as opportunities for or impediments to the dissemination of ICT” (Kvasny 203).  Putting a laptop in every living room has become the accepted method to move us toward digital citizenship.  Meanwhile, the real work of increasing Internet literacy and skills doesn’t get done, because the profit margins are slim to non-existent.  Along with the push to sell hardware and transmission services, there are more subtle ways to profit from the inequities brought to light by new technologies.

One example of capitalizing on the issues around the digital divide is a study performed by the California Governor’s Health Information Technology Financing and Advisory Commission, titled “California’s Digital Divide: Clinical Information Systems For The Haves And Have-Nots.” This study made a convincing case for increasing spending on CIS (Clinical Information Systems) for healthcare facilities that provide services for disadvantaged and under-served patients.  They proposed that implementation of CIS would increase positive patient outcomes, and in the long run produce financial benefits.  The study also concluded that these facilities usually run at a deficit and therefore have no money for CIS, and because of their financial condition, are not likely to be able to raise money through vehicles such as bond issues.  Therefore, any CIS implementations will need to be funded by the government agencies sponsoring the facilities – for the purposes of this study, the State of California.

As noble as these recommendations may be, the study only documents one side of the digital divide referenced in its title.  The facts and figures presented in the study concern community health centers, public hospitals, unaffiliated rural hospitals, and MediCal-oriented solo and small practices; in other words, those facilities providing services to disadvantaged and under-served patients.  There is no documentation in the study concerning the other side of the digital divide, if it exists.  This leads one to suspect that, rather than documenting a divide-related problem, this study is using the issues around the digital divide as justification for funding, as they are more glamorous than the healthcare issues.

Broadband and Original Peoples

In a video-recorded hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, Sen. Daniel Inouye presiding, representatives of the Alaskan Indians and Native Hawaiians discussed the state of Internet access for indigenous peoples living in tribal areas of Alaska and Hawaii.  The state of life for the original peoples of the U.S. – Alaskan Indians, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians, who originally inhabited the land we call the United States – is the result of many years of often conflicting decisions and interests, and each tribal organization, of which there are hundreds, functions as a distinct people.  This video provides insight into the state of original peoples and ICT, and what the federal government may or may not do to bring about improvements in their access to ICT.

Myron Naneng is the President of the Association of Village Council Presidents of the Yukon-Koskwim delta, an area of Alaska the size of the state of Oregon, with no paved roads.  Travel between villages is generally done in small aircraft.  Broadband Internet is a great service for them; once the young people have the necessary technological skills, they can work via the Internet, the tribes can communicate with healthcare professionals unavailable locally, they can communicate with friends and relatives over the great expanses that they live in, and college classes are available online so they do not have to leave their homes to get an advanced education.  Mr. Nahale-a, Chairman of the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, also testified to the improvements that broadband access has brought to Native Hawaiians, who can now establish homesteads, the largest of which covers 20,000 acres on the island of Maui.  These homesteads are in rural areas, often with no roads or other infrastructure.  Broadband Internet brings the same benefits to the Native Hawaiian communities that it does to the Alaskan Indians.

However, both peoples are experiencing difficulties with access: roughly ten percent of Alaskan Indians living on tribal lands have broadband access, and twenty percent of Native Hawaiians living on tribal lands have broadband access.  This compares to sixty five percent of U.S. residents not on tribal lands with access to broadband.  Why should we care about improving the lives of native peoples?  For one thing, they were here first, and as hard as the European conquerors tried to eliminate, marginalize, and assimilate them, they just wouldn’t abandon their cultures and disappear, and they bear testimony to the violent and discriminatory aspects of the development of our nation.  Also, they carry the cultural heritage of this land.  Broadband is a technology that provides the means for these original peoples to maintain their cultures in place, rather than relocating to urban areas for jobs and education.

Effects on the Workforce

There is a well-known cartoon of a dog typing on a computer and saying to a nearby canine, “No one knows that you’re a dog on the Internet.”  The humor is in a play on being physically unattractive – a “dog.”  However, when dogs disconnect from the Internet, they are still dogs with dog issues.  And so it is for us: when we leave the Internet, all our human issues still remain.  To marginalize these issues, a corporation or government agency can convert their contacts with the public from customer service representatives to interactions via the Internet.  This not only marginalizes their customers, it is cost-effective, because one web developer can replace hundreds of service representatives.  Lynette Kvasny, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University writes:  “ICT provides a low-cost solution to inherently social problems.  It makes problem people less human in the sense that ICT mediates our interactions with the government, health, education, and other important institutional spheres that determine our life chances” (Kvasny 209).  The way to counteract this depersonalization of interactions is to publish reviews in blogs, forums, Facebook pages, and other outlets on the Internet.  But, this requires Internet literacy.

One could suppose that, because children are growing up in the digital age, they will all be computer-literate and Internet-savvy.  There is significant research that reveals this to be untrue; a new divide is growing between children who are learning the skills necessary to function well in digital society, and those who are receiving training in vocational computer use only.   In their essay titled Creating Educational Access, Wiburg and Butler delve into ICT in relation to education: “Access, as it relates to the digital divide, is often discussed as if it were a simple problem of just hooking everyone up” (Wiburg 12).  While most of the focus on the digital divide has been on acquisition of computers and Internet connections,  Wiburg and Butler documented more aspects that need attention: “44 million Americans do not have a high enough literacy level to use the Internet…While schools were quick to hop on the hardware-acquisition bandwagon, they dedicated very small percentages of budgets to training in how to use these resources…Participation is made possible only when there are opportunities to learn how to use technological resources in ways in which all people can participate in creating new digital knowledge” (Wiburg 12-13).  The crisis in literacy is finding its way into the digital divide; young people who have the intelligence to be contributors in the digital world are not gaining the literacy skills that they will need.  Teachers are not being trained in how to educate students in the uses of ICT and methods for integrating ICT in their teaching methods.  This leaves only a small percentage of students as participants in content and knowledge creation in the digital world.  These few will determine what the rest will have available to them as content and applications on the Internet.  They will be the information elite.

Also disenfranchised are those with lower English skills.  Without the skills to create content, one is limited to retrieving information from the Internet.  “Schools face a serious shortage of educators who know how to use technology effectively and also have skills and training in ESL (English as a Second Language].  These factors lead to less use of technology, and more importantly, when technology is used, it is more likely to be used in mundane ways” (Schrum 132).  As technology continues to replace lower skilled workers with automation, higher skill levels will become essential for employment.  One of the noticeable aspects of the recovery from the recession of 2009 is a considerable employment gap between those with advanced education and those without.  Rather than merely being a path to a better paying job, having advanced online knowledge and social skills will very likely be essential to employment in information-dependent sectors of the work world.

High School Education and the Divide

A team of researchers studying digital technology education at several high schools in Los Angeles made some truly distressing discoveries.  The schools they studied had equivalent faculty and ICT, but they found significant disparities in the coursework being offered to students.  In the schools serving mostly white students with affluent families, courses were offered in advanced computer science topics.  In the schools serving mostly black students with poor families, the computer-oriented classes were entirely vocational.  Their research at one of the high schools attended by less affluent students revealed that,  “At East River [High School], we witnessed computer skills being taught in isolation from an understanding of the deeper concepts that underlie them…For students interested in pursuing computer science, there was no way to truly engage and no clear path to follow” (Margolis 48).  So, even with adequate equipment and instructors, students could not get on track to gaining advanced knowledge and information skills.  The predominant attitude at the school, which pervaded the administration, faculty, and student body, was that these students weren’t “UCLA material” – capable of doing the work to attend the University of California Los Angeles.  Therefore, their information studies were limited to vocational skills.  The researchers found that the exact opposite attitude predominated at the high schools serving affluent students, who with equivalent instructors and equipment, were being prepared for entrance into universities such as UCLA.

Simply installing ICT did nothing for the students in the poorer areas of Los Angeles.  What could be determined, by examining the training that accompanied the installation of ICT, were attitudes that had become entrenched in the school system:  “Our research reveals that irrespective of the kinds of technology available on campus, a key equity issue has been ignored: technology has not become the great equalizer, because schools are providing different learning opportunities, and these opportunities vary according to the racial and socioeconomic demographics of the students” (Margolis 134).  Rather than narrowing the digital divide, the implementation of ICT in the school system has made matters worse.  The best that students receiving vocational training could expect would be lower paying jobs in information and knowledge industries.

Further, within those students receiving advanced training in information science, the elite students were edging out those who wanted to participate but had not developed skills on their own or through coaching from friends and family members.  This further reinforced beliefs that only certain people with “aptitude” for information science could succeed in the field.  “We saw how belief systems that link different racial groups to different capacities and propensities are often so deeply entrenched that sometimes we no longer even see them.  And we saw how these belief systems interact with structural inequities to make a powerful mechanism that ends up preselecting only a narrow band of students to receive the necessary preparation for our twenty-first-century economic world” (Margolis 139).  And those preselected, the elite, the students “destined” for advanced training, are predominantly male, white, and affluent.

Wrapping Up

We have looked at a wide sampling of research concerning the digital divide, and making sense of it is difficult without a perspective: a lens with which to bring the issues into focus.  The principles of intent and capacity work well; one can see that when the intent is to provide benefit – for students, for those who are disenfranchised, for original peoples – the positive outcomes are magnified by ICT.  The learning and earning capacities of those marginalized by society’s actions are also magnified when the intent is to help, and that help is provided in the spirit of altruism, rather than the spirit of condescension.  This runs counter to the spirit of capitalism and competition; if the ultimate purpose of the Internet is the buying and selling of goods and services, then little benefit will come to the marginalized and disenfranchised.  However, if the intent of those producing content and applications for the Internet is to provide a vehicle for education, professional communication, social conversation, entertainment, and culture in general, then those marginalized by political forces, societal forces, and hegemony stand to benefit.  It’s a matter of intent and capacity.

Works Cited

Adelson, Joel W. et al. “California’s Digital Divide: Clinical Information Systems For The Haves And Have-Nots.” Health Affairs 28.2 (2009): 505-516. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 16 Apr. 2011.

Hacker, Kenneth L. and Shana M. Mason. “Ethical Gaps in Studies of the Digital Divide.” Ethics and Information Technology Vol. 5 99-115. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Web. 4 May, 2011.

Kentaro, Toyama. “TEDxTokyo.” TEDx Talks. YouTube, 15 May 2010. Web. 2 May 2010.

Kvasny, Lynette. “The Existential Significance of the Digital Divide for America’s Historically Underserved Populations.” Information Technology Ethics: Cultural Perspectives. Hongladarom, Soraj, and Charles Ess, ed. London: Idea Group Reference, 2007. Print.

Margolis, Jane, Rachel Estrella, Joanna Goode, Jenifer Jellison Holme, and Kimberly Nao.  Stuck In the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Mossberger, Karen, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Ramona S. McNeal. Digital Citizenship: the Internet, Society, and Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Nakamura, Lisa. “Interrogating the Digital Divide: The Political Economy of Race and Commerce in New Media.” Society Online: The Internet in Context. Thousand Oaks, CA: Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones, ed. SAGE Publications, 2004. Print.

Schrum, Lynne and Bonnie Bracey. “Refocusing Curricula.” Toward Digital Equity: Bridging the Divide In Education. Gwen Solomon, Nancy J .Allen, and Paul Resta, ed. Boston: A and B, 2003. Print.

U.S. Dept. of Commerce. “Hearing on Closing the Digital Divide: Connecting Native Nations and Communities to the 21^st Century.” U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation. commerce.senate.gov, 5 April 2011. Web. 4 May 2011.

van Dijk, Jan A.G.M. The Deepening Divide. Sage, 2005. Print.

Wiburg, Karin M. and Julia F. Butler. “Creating Educational Access.” Toward Digital Equity: Bridging the Divide In Education. Gwen Solomon, Nancy J .Allen, and Paul Resta, ed. Boston: A and B, 2003. Print.