Gender and the Media

Warshauer, Mark. 2002. Reconceptualizing the digital divide. First Monday 7(7).

Accessed: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/967/88

This article chronicles some ultimately ineffective ways to bridge the so-called 'digital divide,' or the divide between more affluent communities who have access to technology and those who do not. Unsupervised technological education often does not reinforce educational values, as manifested in the example of a self-teaching kiosk in India; even giving free computers to residents of rural Ireland did little to help the population understand the value of information technology; computers sat in boxes at an Egyptian university when no trainers existed to teach students how to use them.

But the 'digital divide' is not a chasm but a continuum and is inexorably related to race and class status. Barriers are manifested not simply in the cost of hardware, but also software and broadband access. These gradients of IT awareness are similar to those of literacy as a whole, or the difference between being able to decipher words vs. higher-level understanding of technology.

The author states that technological literacy is a social practice. This is reflected in how certain types of social media are preferred by specific ethnic groups or ages over others -- for example, Twitter is often used by African-Americans or persons less likely to have access to home computers, since it can be easily used with a mobile phone, unlike Facebook. However, the fact that mobile applications have gained new legitimacy for serious business promotion as well as 'fun' may mean that the distinctions between different levels of technological literacy may be breaking down. The more portable and cheaper it becomes to access information, the less important the distinctions discussed in the article may be.

However, this does not mean an end to the digital divide continuum. Not knowing how to use business applications on a computer will hinder one's job prospects; even having friends more or less interested in computers (which often is manifested as a gender divide) can affect self-perceptions of technological efficacy.

Gilbert, Eric, Karrie Karahalios & Christian Sandvig. 2008. The network in the garden:

An empirical analysis of social media in rural life. CHI.

Accessed: http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/papers/pdfs/chi08-rural-gilbert.pdf [October 22, 2011]

As well as being divided by race and class, online access is also divided by location. This article confirms through an empirical study that rural residents use the online environment differently than users in urban areas. Although rural residents have fewer friends online than residents of other areas, many reported that technology provided relief from their isolation. However, there was a greater distrust of meeting new people and a notable gender discrepancy in the ways that rural women dominated the online environment. Rural residents more frequently used online technology to access known friends, and rural women in particular were apt to use more stringent privacy settings. While urban residents were used to large circles of friends with weak social ties, rural residents were accustomed to smaller groups of friends with a strong sense of social bonding, and this was expressed in their online relationships.