overview

concepts

N America

L America

W Europe

E Europe

Australia

New Zealand

Asia

Middle East

Africa

Oceania

missions

initiatives

claims







related
Guides:

Metrics &
Statistics

Networks &
the GII  

     overview

This profile considers digital divides in Australia and other parts of the globe.

It covers -

• this overview, offering some indicators
• concepts - highlighting questions about the nature of "the digital divide" and points of entry to the literature
• North America - divides in the US and Canada and Latin America
• Latin America - divides in Central America and South America
• Western Europe - divides in Western Europe
• Eastern Europe - divides in the former Soviet Union
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Asia
• Middle East and North Africa
• Sub-saharan Africa
• Oceania - the 'invisible divides' in Polynesia, Melanesia and other parts of Oceania
• missions - the politics of digital divides and the scale of funding
• initiatives - some responses to divides in the Third World
• claims - cautions regarding digital divide hyperbole

It supplements the discussion in the 'Divides & Broadband Rankings' page of the Metrics & Statistics guide and the Community page in the Digital Environment guide.

We have highlighted overarching initiatives and information sources on this page. The following pages explore divides in the advanced, developing and emerging economies.

     different divides

Some critics have questioned the notion of the internet as "the global information network", arguing that the G8 nations (US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and UK) account for under 20% of the world's population, but 'own' 80% of internet hosts and most traffic. Depending on whose count you believe, the US 'owns' 83% of the G8 hosts.

Much of the discussion about 'the Digital Divide' is predicated on a belief that there is one divide: essentially that relating to the size of the pipe (or its absence) connecting people to national/global information infrastructures.

Other discussion has been even more simplistic, characterising the digital divide as one where there is a simple solution (personal computers) for a complex problem (poverty).

In fact there are different divides that cannot be effectively addressed through a simplistic 'one size fits all' model. In essence, those divides involve differential access to computers, the net, telecommunications and information. That differential access involves variables such as income/poverty, education, race, gender, age, ethnicity, disability and geography. It includes unequal access to knowledge, training, resources, job opportunities and the practices of the information economy.

Charles Kenny of the World Bank naughtily commented that

Communications matter to the poor. A system of well-regulated, competitive communications services will reduce costs and extend access. In many cases, it may well be worth extending access to telephony with limited, targeted, carefully designed subsidy programs. But pursuing universal access to the Internet would be a misallocation of considerable resources. To draw an analogy, another technology boasts a 70-fold difference in access rates between the United States and India, and economists link that technology to increased productivity as well. But no one is setting up a UN task force to overcome the Air Conditioner Divide.

Poor countries face many serious divides, including those in education, healthcare, and transportation. The relevant question for the poorest is, does the lack of access to a particular good provide a significant barrier to becoming more wealthy? The answer is yes for the tools of communication in general but no for the Internet in particular.

In 2005 the World Bank followed up with a report commenting that

the digital divide is rapidly closing ... People in the developing world are getting more access at an incredible rate - far faster than they got access to new technologies in the past.

and claimed that half the world's population now enjoys access to a fixed-line telephone (with 77% to a mobile network).

     gateways

The South Africa-base Bridges.org is an international, nonprofit organization concerned with appropriate use of information and communications technology in developing and emerging countries.

The World Bank's Development Gateway offers a range of pointers to development resources. It has been critiqued in a report by the Bretton Woods Project as overly biased towards top-down, large-scale and culturally inappropriate solutions. The US Population Reference Bureau (PRB) World Population Data Sheet (PDF) provides statistics about population sizes, life expectancy, fertility rates, infant mortality, energy use and income levels.

The Markle Foundation, the US nonprofit representative on the DOT Force, has a useful global divides page.

     journals

In the world where it seems that every subject, however obscure, has been colonised by a professional society and commoditised through a journal there is a surprising absence of scholarly journals devoted to the digital divide/s. Most literature has appeared in journals with a wider focus. A valuable source about developments within Asia is the Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC).

     indicators

For global statistical reports refer to the Divides page of the Metrics & Statistics guide on this site. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has published a number of 'internet access' papers and case studies.

Its December 2002 telecommunications snapshot (PDF) about ICT is sobering - of 141 million internet hosts across the globe some 106.2 million are in the US and a mere 0.274 million in Africa (0.238 million in South Africa). The estimated number of personal computers in Australia is 10 million, in New Zealand is 1.5 million, in the US is 178 million and in all of Africa 7.55 million.

Very indicative figures for uptake of the net, as of early 2002, are -

By 2006 that was

Some benchmarks for other technologies are highlighted here.

As of early 2001 around 67% of Australian households were not connected to the net (the apparent discrepancy in NOIE and other figures reflects access via work). Users were predominantly young, male, earning in excess of $75,000, employed, and living in metropolitan areas. The online population has grown and normalised since that time.

Those on low incomes, without tertiary education, living in rural/remote areas, of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, with disabilities, with a language background other than English, and aged over 55 are however still less likely to be online.

By mid 2008 over 52% of Australian households were estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as having broadband. 75% had a personal computer.

Figures in the 1998 MOSAIC Group report on The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project: An Initial Inductive Study are dated but the analysis remains of value, particularly for understanding uptake of the net in countries around the Persian Gulf.

Menzie Chinn & Robert Fairlie's 2004 The Determinants of The Global Digital Divide: A Cross-Country Analysis of Computer & Internet Penetration (PDF) is of value.

Some of UNESCO's 1996 figures, although problematical, are suggestive of underlying differences:

At a global level the October 2000 conference in Seattle (of course) of the Digital Dividend Organisation (DDO) claimed that there were more telephones in New York City than in all of rural Asia, more internet accounts in London than all of Africa. Speakers reported that as much as 80% of the world's population had never made a phone call and although the net "connects 100 million computers" that "represents less than 2% of the world's population".

The World Economic Forum's Global Digital Divide Initiative (GDDI) page similarly announced that "Finland alone has more internet users than the whole of Latin America".

80% of Haiti's roughly eight million citizens live on less than a dollar a day; 85% may be illiterate. The 2002 Energy & Poverty (PDF) study by the International Energy Agency suggested that across the globe around 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity and that 2.4 billion rely on primitive biomass (eg straw and dried cow dung) for cooking and heating.

For gender issues see the 266 page International Development Research Centre report edited by Eva Rathgeber & Edith Ofwona Adera on Gender and the Information Revolution in Africa (2000).



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