2012 in Review: The Digital Divide | Britannica Blog

Since 1938 Britannica?s annual Book of the Year has offered in-depth coverage of the events of the previous year. While the book won?t appear in print for several months, some of its outstanding content is already available online. Here, we feature this article by Britannica contributor Steve Alexander, which explores disparities in Internet access in the United States.

The Digital Divide

By 2012 the expression digital divide had come to be applied to the information gap between those who did and those who did not have easy Internet access and to the potential social and economic repercussions of that divergence. The term was most often used to describe the uneven availability of broadband Internet connections, which the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered vital for economic opportunity in the online age. Beyond the availability of broadband, however, there was also a digital divide based on age, education, and household income. In addition, there appeared to be a ?lost opportunity? digital divide for career advancement and health care.

An elementary school student and teacher look at a laptop computer in classroom. Credit: iStockphoto/Thinkstock

The FCC concluded that while the broadband digital divide had been narrowed as expanding commercial online networks?wireless and landline fibre?served more people, there were still many Americans without broadband or with connections that were considered inadequate. In its eighth annual Broadband Progress Report, adopted in August 2012, the FCC said that about 19 million U.S. citizens (the vast majority living in rural areas), or about 6% of the population, had no access to sufficiently fast broadband service (defined as 4 million bits per second [bps] downloads and 1 million bps uploads). The FCC previously had sought to promote broadband by shifting its Universal Service Fund, created to help pay for universal telephone service, to support broadband expansion.

Beyond the availability of high-speed Internet service, there were other signs of a digital divide that separated citizens in the computer age. About 20% of U.S. citizens did not use the Internet at all, according to a report in 2012 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. They included senior citizens, those less skilled in the English language, people who had not graduated from high school, and households with incomes below $30,000 a year. About half of those who did not use the Internet said that it was not important to them. People with disabilities also were sometimes victims of the digital divide, the Pew report said. About 27% of them were far less likely to use the Internet than were people without a disability.

At least among senior citizens, there were signs that the digital gap might be lessening. A 2012 Pew survey reported that a little more than half of Americans over age 65 were using e-mail or the Internet. This was the first time a study had shown that number breaking the 50% mark. (In the population as a whole, 82% of American adults used e-mail or the Internet.) The study also showed that 69% of those over 65 had a cell phone, up from 57% two years earlier. A 2011 Pew report showed that of those over 65 who used the Internet, about a third used social-networking Web sites, a growth of 150% from two years earlier.

Another factor mitigating the digital divide was the rising use of mobile phones and computer-like smartphones. Some people who formerly did not use the Internet found cellular wireless connections a more affordable means of access. The 2012 Pew report showed that young adults, minorities, those who did not attend college, and people from lower-income households were more likely than others to say that the cell phone was their chief way to access the Internet. About 88% of U.S. citizens had a cell phone, whereas only 57% had a laptop computer.

Viewing the Internet through a cell phone imposed limitations, however. Writing a r?sum?, getting a college degree online, and starting a business were all more difficult on a cell phone Internet connection. In addition, because most cellular providers charged for Internet service on the basis of the amount of data downloaded, those limited to a cell phone faced additional costs if they used the Internet excessively.

In addition, the proliferation of Internet-enabled cell phones created another sort of digital divide: studies showed that some young people from poorer families became so entranced by ubiquitous Internet access that they wasted time with social-networking sites, games, and videos and thus fell behind academically. This turned out to be especially true for children of poorly educated parents. Experts asserted that the problem was that most of that time was spent on entertainment rather than education, which served only to widen what some called ?the time-wasting gap.? The FCC considered the creation of a $200 million digital literacy corps to teach students, their parents, and job applicants about more productive ways to use their Internet-access time, including how to use online technology for job-training and other educational pursuits.

Some looked at the digital divide from a broader economic perspective, arguing that more equitable access to high-speed Internet service would improve worldwide economic equality, social mobility, and economic growth. Developed countries clearly had the best Internet connections. A 2012 report by Internet-content-delivery firm Akamai Technologies showed that the entities with the highest percentage of Internet connections above 10 million bps were, in order, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Latvia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, and the U.S.

A report from the United Nations telecoms agency indicated that falling costs for Internet service were helping less-developed countries (LDCs) to reduce the magnitude of the digital divide between themselves and developed countries, although not completely erasing it. For example, the UN said that LDCs were the biggest growth market for cell phone Internet connections and that economic development had followed the expansion of broadband access. The report also said that the price of Internet access remained relatively high in some low-income countries and that the only solution involved an expansion of cellular networks and price reductions.

In a report published in the Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Debabrata Talukdar from the University at Buffalo School of Management and Dinesh K. Gauri of the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse (N.Y.) University affirmed that a decade of digital divide studies showed some ominous widening of the socioeconomic gap when it came to income and urban-versus-rural location. Compared with a decade earlier, those with higher incomes were considerably more likely to have Internet access at home than did those with medium incomes, and people in urban areas were more likely to have Internet service than were people in rural areas.

As more individuals worked from home or interviewed for a job via videoconferencing software, the lack of access to high-speed Internet service could be a limiting factor in a career. Meanwhile, online health care?long cited as an area that could provide doctors with an opportunity to ?visit? remote patients over the Internet?was likely to be available only to those with fast Internet connections. Political involvement and video entertainment also were increasingly active online, and those with high-speed Internet connections were more likely to be able to participate. The growth of small business was said by the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) to be limited by a lack of broadband Internet connections. ?The smaller the business, the bigger the impact that broadband can have,? Lawrence Strickling, an assistant secretary at the DOC, asserted in July 2012 in testimony before Congress. ?Broadband is responsible for approximately 20% of new jobs across all businesses, but it is responsible for 30% of new jobs in businesses of fewer than 20 employees.?

Susan P. Crawford, a law professor at Yeshiva University, New York City, said [in an opinion piece published in the New York Times] that U.S. demographic trends suggested that African Americans and Latinos, who faced the greatest risk of being left behind by the digital divide, would in 30 years make up more than half of the workforce in the U.S. As a result, the digital divide could be expected to have long-lasting effects on the country?s labour pool.

Source: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2013/01/2012-in-review-the-digital-divide/

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