On the Global Digital Divide

• Author: Ashfaq Ishaq
• Position: Founder and Executive Director of the International Child Art Foundation

Why is the global digital divide an important issue, and what benefits would result from bridging it?

The digital and information revolution presents a historic opportunity for developing countries to take a quantum leap forward, develop their own productive and creative capacities, and become integrated into the global virtual economy. However, Internet density (users as a percentage of population) is still much higher in industrial countries, as well as in affluent and educated communities in every country, than elsewhere. The Internet threatens to magnify the existing socioeconomic disparities, between those with access and those without, to levels unseen and untenable. Therefore, urgent actions are needed at the local, national, and international levels to bridge the global digital divide. This article outlines both the digital opportunity and the digital divide and argues that bridging the divide is a precondition for a worldwide creativity revolution to blossom.

The big divide

In the final pages of Jacques Barzun's opus on the past five hundred years of Western cultural life (Barzun, 2000), he conjures up the following vision of the year 2300:

The population was divided into two groups; they did not like the word classes. The first, less numerous, was made up of the men and women who possessed the virtually inborn ability to handle the products of techne and master the methods of physical science, especially mathematics-it was to them what Latin had been to medieval clergy. This modern elite had the geometric mind that singled them out for the life of research and engineering. . . . Dials, toggles, buzzers, gauges, icons on screens, light-emitting diodes, symbols and formulas to save time and thought-these were for this group of people the source of emotional satisfaction, the means to rule over others, the substance of shoptalk, the very joy and justification of life. . . . It is from this class-no, group-that the governors and heads of institutions are recruited. The parallel with the Middle Ages is plain-clerics in one case, cybernists in the other. The latter took pride in the fact that in ancient Greek cybernetes means helmsman, governor. It validated their position as rulers over the masses, which by then could neither read nor count. But these less capable citizens were by no means barbarians, yet any schooling would have been wasted on them; that had been proved in the late [twentieth century]. Some now argue that the schooling was at fault, not the pupils; but when the teachers themselves declared children unteachable, the Deschooling Society movement rapidly converted everyone to its view.

This is Barzun's description of the digital divide, written as if it were being viewed from after the year 2300 but actually reflecting New York's reality in 1995-just before the Internet created the greatest equity wealth boom in the history of mankind. At present, the digital divide mirrors the technology gap separating the rich countries from the poor ones-a gap that opened up during the industrial revolution and has yet to be fully bridged. The pessimistic view of the digital divide-that it is widening as information and communications technologies (ICTs) advance to broadband-is likely to prevail if the public, private, and civil sectors fail to bridge it before it becomes too expansive and intractable.

The uncontested fact is that the Internet is still growing at a phenomenal pace. Estimating the current number of Internet users is difficult, however, because one person may have...