Digital Divide 'is just marketing'

Michael Gurstein has contributed a paper to First Monday on the Digital Divide and concludes that it is 'little more than a marketing campaign for Internet service providers'. The paper goes on to present an alternative approach — that of "effective use" — drawn from community informatics theory 'which recognizes that the Internet is not simply a source of information, but also a fundamental tool in the new digital economy'.
There also an analysis from New Zealand of why people didn't use a community internet facility 'What the don't-want-tos won't compute'. Most of the non-users said they were just not interested. See also an earlier posting here by Tom Steinberg - 'It's about the value, stupid'

Comments

[Taran]

It's all about the underlying Social and Economic issues - and masking the associated problems.