Social System User Managers and IT Professionals

Digital Divide

The Social System: User, Managers, and IT Professionals

The term Digital Divide refers to the broad disparities between income groups in terms of availability of information technologies including the Internet and related services. Studies of the Digital Divide show that the greater the accessibility of the Internet, specifically in schools and libraries, the higher the probability of students graduating and pursuing advanced education (Stevenson, 2009). Advocate organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates Center for technology Access (GCTA) argue that it is critically important for the Digital Divide to be eradicated to ensure below poverty line children and families have an opportunity to pursue educational opportunities and therefore increase their earning potential (Stevenson, 2009). The hard reality of the Digital Divide is that it exists in the United States just as prevalently as in 3rd world nations (Agarwal, Animesh, Prasad, 2009). The CTA has discovered that "poverty pockets" exist in the lowest income areas of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and New Mexico for example as telecommunication companies refuse to run broadband or even telephone lines into the poorest countries in the country for lack of potential revenue (Stevenson, 2009).

The Digital Divide in the U.S. -- Real and Growing

The fact is that if a family is below the poverty line in the Untied States there is a very good chance they will eventually find themselves on the side of the Digital Divide where Internet access is not affordable if available at all. The studies completed by GTCA as underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation underscore this point as correlational analysis has shown that these lowest income American families are often in a vicious cycle of not being able to better their lives through education, taking the lowest paying jobs, and then not being able to afford to better themselves through training for higher paying jobs. The mission of the GCTA is to wire every library and school in these "poverty pockets" to give the lowest income students and their families an opportunity to learn more online, increase not only their knowledge but also the potential to earn more through online training. It is common to find GCTA teams in the field using corporate American Express cards to charge up to $5,000 to get telecommunications companies to wire a town library or school for examp0le, or pay to have a single telephone line dropped into a desolate and poverty-stricken county in New Mexico. The U.S. has in fact an embarrassing technology secret as the most advanced nation on the planet: if anyone is below the poverty line in the country there is a good chance they will either lose Internet access or never have the chance to better themselves with the learning and training available on it in the first place.

Digital Divide Globally

Even more pronounced globally, the Digital Divide is prevalent in many nations of the world due to the wide disparity of income distribution and willingness of nations to invest in the necessary infrastructure to make Internet access affordable for the masses (Sharma, Samuel, Ng, 2009). The World Bank has stated from their research that only 14% of the world's population makes over $10,000 per year (per capita), leaving 86% of the world in lower income and poverty levels (Batson, Oster, 2006). The correlations that the GCTA found in the U.S. also are true globally and even more severe in 3rd world nations where there is a lack of scalability on the part of telecommunications providers to wire the most poverty-stricken areas of their nations even if they chose to. The Digital Divide then acts as one of the greatest impediments to poverty-level children and families being able to better themselves and increase their earning potential through education.

Solutions to the Digital Divide