Case 3 Bridging the Digital Divide

Based on what was discussed during the lecture and what you read in the textbook regarding the post-PC era, what do you think will be the impact of the rise in mobile devices in developing countries for the OLPC project?

The rise in mobile devices in developing countries is likely to have both negative and positive impacts. A likely positive impact is growth in business opportunities resulting from increased access to social media at the household level. With mobile devices more accessible, employees can work conveniently away from the office by taking advantage of social media marketing to increase their reach. They could also use apps available on the internet to do research, understand trends, and drive innovation. Further, the proliferation of mobile devices would ensure that businesses make decisions faster as employees can attend to meetings online outside office hours – effectively meaning that urgent decisions/tasks do not have to wait until the next day. However, this IT consumerization also raises serious information security concerns in developing countries.

As more and more employees access organizations’ corporate networks using their mobile devices, organizations face a heightened risk of malware attacks that could lead to potential information losses, business losses and reputational risks if sensitive information falls in the hands of unscrupulous people (Russu, 2022). With the consumerization of IT, developing countries are likely to report increased incidents of cybercrime that could lead to major disruptions of organizational and government activities. Cybercrime-related attacks will be more common in these countries due to their weak defensive and surveillance capacities resulting from limitations in ICT skills, weak institutional capacities, and limited inter-agency coordination (Russu, 2022).

At the same time, increased availability of mobile devices in developing countries may, in fact, worsen the digital divide - especially in the poorest countries. Some of the world’s poorest economies are characterized by limited internet connectivity, with some households in the rural areas lacking access to electricity (Houngbonon et al., 2021). In such cases, children from urban areas may benefit from the said mobile devices, while their counterparts in disadvantaged backgrounds may not due to infrastructural challenges. This would exacerbate the digital divide, rather than address it. In such countries, it would be prudent to increase access to infrastructure for rural and disadvantaged urban populations before the OLPC project can enhance digital inclusion (Houngbonon et al., 2021).