ABSTRACTS
Jeremy
W. Crampton, Department of Anthropology & Geography, Georgia State
University, Atlanta, GA 30303 Email: jcrampton@gsu.edu. The Geography of
the Digital Divide: A Critical Appraisal
This paper will introduce the subject matter of the session by suggesting that geography is a critical component of the digital divide. As several papers in the session will document, the digital divide plays out along a number of axes beside access to computers and the Internet. These include race, income and education (up to 25 million Americans are functionally illiterate). However, recent reports have begun to indicate that even controlling for income and education that race is still an important determinant. But all of these factors need to be analyzed very sensitively at different geographic scales: the local, the regional, and the international. For example rural-urban differentials require a very different explanation than the differential between say the UK and Mozambique (half of whose revenues are absorbed by foreign debt payments). In an initial effort to document the geography of the digital divide the experience of Atlanta will be offered. Atlanta is a rapidly growing, high-tech oriented city with large differentials of income and race. I will discuss some of the local community efforts to provide technology resources across the city.
Derek
H. Alderman, Department of Geography, East Carolina
University, Greenville, NC 27858 E-mail: aldermand@mail.ecu.edu.
Naming the Web: Domain Names as a Contested Terrain in the Digital Divide.
The Digital Divide is usually discussed in terms of unequal access to Internet technology, with the virtual world often represented as a utopia for free expression. More broadly, the notion of a divide can be expanded to include the social power relations that face users once they go on-line. An increasing amount of work in geography focuses on the politics of the Internet, how the content and use of the virtual is open to control, conflict, and negotiation by individuals and social groups. Independent of this new literature is an emerging body of work that examines the politics of place naming, which focuses on names as important points of identification used by those in power and those who we may perceive as powerless. Naming is an important and controversial practice in the virtual world of the World Wide Web, particularly when we examine the practice of domain naming. This paper explores several recent domain name disputes in order to shed light on the ways in which the terrain of cyberspace, like its terrestrial counterpart, is constructed along the fault lines and divides of political control and cultural conflict.
Keyword: cyberspace, naming, domain
Gill
Valentine, Dept. of Geography, University of Sheffield,
UK Email: G.Valentine@sheffield.ac.uk,
and Sarah Holloway Dept. of Geography, University of Loughborough,
UK Email: S.l.holloway@lboro.ac.uk.
The Digital Generation?: Children, ICT and the everyday nature of social
exclusion.
It is commonly stated that we are entering an 'Information Age'. In debates about the possibilities and dangers this heralds, particular emphasis has been placed on the need to train all children in technological skills if they are to be able to play a full role in the future of society. As the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, argued when launching the National Grid for Learning: 'Children cannot be effective in tomorrow's world if they are trained in yesterday's skills'. This paper explores the potentially inclusionary or exclusionary implications of ICT for children through an examination of ICT policies and practices within UK schools. It begins by examining the rhetoric about the inclusionary possiblities of ICT and how these discourses are mobilised in classrooms, before going onto consider issues of social exclusion -- specifically how material and social factors can prevent access to hardware/software. We then go on to suggest that physical access to appropriate computing facilities alone does not necessarily promote social access, arguing rather that understanding 'communities of practice' is crucial to understanding children's willingness to use, or to be seen to use ICT. We explore this challenge to the technologially deterministic bent of much of the rhetoric on children's ICT and social inclusion by presenting a vignette of different groups of computer users within a case study classroom to demonstrate the importance of peer group social relations in shaping children's computer use. The conclusion focuses on the implications of these findings, about the everyday nature of social exclusion, for policy.
R.
G. Lentz, Dept. of Radio-TV-Film, UT-Austin, Email:
rglentz@mail.utexas.edu. Telecommunications
Infrastructure Maps as Public or Private Goods?
The availability of advanced telecommunications services is becoming a key factor affecting where one chooses to live or establish a business. Deregulation in 1996 was intended to create competition which would result in more choice in telecommunications services. Yet a digital divide is still quite real for many U.S. households and small businesses, especially in non-lucrative markets such as rural and low-income urban areas. Efforts to bridge, close, and narrow the digital divide require access to targeted data detailing where public support programs to address market failure can be most useful. However, digital divide research to-date has focused mostly on aggregate level description of the spatial unevenness in the deployment of advanced telecommunications services. Publicly available research identifies disparities in broadband access in rural versus urban communities and state level data have been reported in national surveys, as have data for MSAs and some counties, yet the yearly benchmarking studies by the NTIA do not capture data at the block and block group level, nor is digital divide information available for all counties in the U.S. Private sector datasets are available, but these are often quite expensive. Put simply, information about the availability of telecom services choices at the local level is still somewhat difficult to obtain. Telecommunications providers are often reluctant to share what they view as competitive secrets in reporting specifically where broadband access is available and to whom. But who is the public's advocate in these cases? Is industry "cream-skimming" creating a disadvantage for neighborhoods on the wrong side of the digital divide? This paper examines this question through a case study of the politics of disclosure of telecommunications data in Texas focusing on three actors: telecommunications services providers, the Public Utilities Commission, and the Attorney General's Office.
Cheryl
L. Brown, Department of Political Science UNC Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223 Email: cbrown@email.uncc.edu.
Collaborative Corporate Initiatives and the Digital Divide: An Assessment
of the G-8 Summit Policies
The dominance of the private sector in information technology (IT) has led the group of eight industrialized nation (G-8) to seek advice from IT corporate leaders in addressing the digital divide between industrialized and developing nations. At the G-8 Kyushu-Okinawa Summit in July 2000, the industrialized nations acknowledged the advancement of the private sector in IT and committed the organization to the Global Digital Divide Initiative of the World Economic Forum Task Force. The Task Force--consisting of twelve IT corporations, university centers, and intergovernmental organizations-- outlined nine initiatives: G-8-leadership to assist developing nations; collaborative assistance from the private, public, and philanthropic sectors; forward-looking national strategies; education and technology training; new commercial financing; civil society's digital empowerment; pro-competitive telecommunications policies; affordable Internet access; and global electronic commerce. The Task Force also outlined a set of concrete action plans to implement the nine initiatives, which have the potential, if achieved, to exceed the United Nations' announcement of Internet access for everybody by the year 2005. To examine the G-8's first effort to implement collaborative policy initiatives of the private, public, and philanthropic sectors to eliminate a geographical division, this paper will address three specific questions: What are the advantages of collaborative policy initiatives? What geographical variables affect implementation of the policy initiatives and action plans? What is the importance of geography as a variable compared with government structure, poverty level, and other developmental assistance? Answers to these questions will yield testable hypotheses for future research.
Andy
C Pratt, Department of Geography, London School of
Economics Email: a.c.pratt@lse.ac.uk
& Rosalind Gill Gender Institute London School of Economics. Email:
r.c.Gill@lse.ac.uk. Social exclusion
goes digital ? A critical reconceptualisation of the Digital Divide
The concept of the Digital Divide has become popular in the developed world in recent years. Well publicised committees of enquiry and reports have been produced in both the US and the UK linked to social exclusion, and the issue has been noted as of concern in Japan, Australia and the European Community. The cover of the 1999 Human Development Report contained a graphic of internet users by country. The US Digital Divide Summit defined the digital divide as the gap between those who have access to information tools (personal computer and the internet). This paper offers the first critical re-assessment of the concept of the digital divide based upon existing academic and policy sources in the US, Europe and Australia and Japan. It raises associated issues such as: Why has the notion of the digital divide suddenly become so popular ?, Which actors are promulgating and configuring the message ?, and, Whose interests does it serve ? The paper argues that there is not just one digital divide but multiple divides which relate to gender, class, age, race and ethnicity. More fundamentally, it suggests that conceptualisations and policies that characterise the digital divide as primarily being about access to digital technologies need to be rethought. The paper argues that a more helpful approach would be to go beyond access to the 'technical kit' and to consider the social relations around the uses of technologies.
Emma
Mawdsley, Gina Porter and Janet G. Townsend,
Email: emawds@hotmail.com, janet.townsend@durham.ac.uk
Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK DH1 3LE. Development
charities and the digital divide
We have been seeking to trace the way information and knowledge about development in lower income countries moves around the vast and diverse transnational community of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) working in international development. We shall draw on field research with NGOs in Ghana, India, Mexico and Europe to explore the scale, significance and geography of digital divides in this community, together with resistances and transgressions. Northern NGOs and richer, urban based Southern NGOs can access information not available in other forms and participate in global debates. E-mail and the internet facilitate communication with partners, donors and networks and thus enhance opportunities for building alliances, increasing influence and securing funds. Lack of access among smaller, poorer, NGOs in the South which cannot afford the new technology is promoting new exclusions, in which the 'information poor' lose out in the fight to influence international development agendas and secure funding for their work. Information loops come to define success. To date there is limited use of the resources of the World Wide Web: greater use might greatly strengthen loops and divide. We examine an array of possible futures.
Keyword: digital divide, non-government organisations, international development
Michael
W. Longan, Department of Geography, Gustavus Adolphus
College, St. Peter, MN. E-mail: mlongan@gac.edu.
Community networks and the digital divide.
According to Massey, a global sense of place helps to highlight both the more local and the wider networks of power that combine to constitute a place. This paper uses the concept of a global sense of place to analyze the efforts of five place-based community networks to close the "digital divide" in their communities. According to some of its proponents, one major goal of community networking is to improve the fortune of the communities they serve by providing residents of those communities with access to information technologies and the training to be able to use them. Building a community network, they argue, may help in the process of building place-based social networks useful for facilitating community action. Because community networks also provide access to global networks, such community action can potentially extend beyond the local scale, to regional, national, and perhaps global scales. The community networks studied have been successful in providing access to computing technologies. They have also helped to illuminate some of the networks of power that constitute the places they serve. However, this research concludes that despite these successes, neither they, nor their clients are necessarily gaining access to both more local and wider networks of power through electronic networks. Therefore, while community networks may help to overcome some of the digital divides within the places they serve, they do not necessarily play as much of a role in overcoming other social divides that negatively affect their communities. Potential solutions to this difficulty will be addressed.
Anna.E.Bee,
Department of Geography, University of Leicester, UK, LE1 7RH. Email: aeb12@le.ac.uk.
La vida electrónica: The Internet and research in Latin America.
Latin America has shown some of the fastest rates of Internet growth since the mid 1990s and this tremendous expansion of Internet access provides new opportunities for South-South and South-North information transfer. However, while there has been a significant expansion of the Internet, it still only allows entry to a few and to a large extent simply acts as a reflection of 'traditional' Latin American society. For Latin American researchers access to the Internet provides new opportunities and new constraints on their ability to undertake their research and participate in international networks. Using semi-structured interviews, the paper explores the ways in which the expansion of the Internet has impacted on the careers and research experiences of academics in Chile and Bolivia. From the interviews it became clear that the internet is an important research tool for many academics in these countries and that they use it in a variety of ways including searching for on-line information, literature searches, making and keeping contacts, both nationally and internationally and publicising their research to an international audience. However, the transformative nature of the Internet for Latin American academics is limited by dwindling government expenditure, lack of skills training and the speed of technological transformation in the 'North'.
Keyword: Internet, Latin America, academics