Andy Carvin: How Wide's the Digital Divide? 2006

See http://www.andycarvin.com/?p=1118 . As the original link to the podcast's mp3 does not work anymore, this Amara page was created using a 2007 copy available from the Internet Archive.

(Applause)

(Andy Carvin) Good morning.

(inaudible) ... moments that I really had no idea what Joey was talking about (laughter)

So, he'd ask me a few minutes ago to critique his introductory remarks

and, you know, all I did was this (laughter)

For those of you who are listening to the podcast of that,

I was doing a "We're not worthy" kind of .... (laughter)

Yes, I am recording this.

For those of you who are contemplating taking notes [inaudible - not]

you really don't have to because the presentation, this powerpoint,

is already on my blog, andycarvin.com .

It's been released on what's called a Creative Commons license

and I'll talk about that later,

but that basically mean you can use it almost any way you want.

And with that little digital recorder I have here I'm going to be taping my presentation

and making it available as a podcast on my blog as well.

So, if you really insist about taking notes, you know, (inaudible - it)

but if you're on the fence about it like I am about these kinds of things,

don't worry about it, hang back and instead it would be better for you

to be thinking about some really good questions to throw me by the end of this presentation.

So, first of all what exactly is the Digital Divide?

The term has been around for at least 10 years, now,

probably since 1992, 1993.

And it often gets used in very different ways.

In fact, one of the very first uses of the Digital Divide I ever heard

was on a Greatful Dead's discussion list in the early 90's,

where Dead Head (check) was describing the challenges he had

recording Greateful Dead's concerts,

and he was about to make the leap from analog recording to digital recording

and so, he was asking for assistance in bridging this digital divide.

He could easily have been the one to claim the coinage

but thankfully, the term has evolved since then to mean a variety of things.

But when I talk about the digital divide, I try to summarize it in three very basic ways.

In the most basic sense, it's the gap that exists between populations

in terms of who has access to ICTs, or Information and Communication Technologies,

and who doesn't.

So, that includes the internet, computers and the like.

For a long time, when people talked about the digital divide, the definition stopped there.

They would just look at who had internet access at home,

who had access at school,

and that was only marginally useful, in my perspective.

It -- I think it became much more important to (inaudible) also as equal factors

access to literacy skills and the ability to use ICTs effectively,

because if every person on the globe had internet access tomorrow,

if they weren't functionally literate, if they weren't IT-literate,

then their internet access would be rather meaningless to them.

Some way or another, you'll need to have access to high-quality, robust and diverse content,

and the ability and the skills to create content yourselves.

And we'll talk a bit more about that later.

Sometimes these three ideas have been described as the ABC's of the digital divide:

Access, Basic skills and Content.

Now where does this term come from? (laughter)

It's a tough question and people have been tossing around the question

for a very long time.

Sometimes people are giving credit to Al Gore.

He may not have invented the Information Superhighway,

he did invent the term, though, interestingly:

he's been using the term Information Superhighway since the late 70's

and some have said that he tried claiming to have invented the internet.

Well, we'll leave that for historians to judge, but I think we all know better.

Summarily (check), occasionally people attribute Bill Gates as coining the term.

He didn't.

Perhaps it was some anonymous (inaudible) bureaucrat in Washington.

The fact of the matter is, we simply don't know.

The term has been around since, at least, the early 90's.

I think the first time I've heard it was around 1993, from a -- early1994 --

from a K-12 educator named Bonnie Bracey

who was working on an advisory commission that President Clinton had organized

about the information infrastructure, as this internet and everything else was called back then.

But the term had been around even prior to that.

When you ask people who are often credited with coining the term,

they always pass the buck and say:

"No, it wasn't me, I got it from someone else, but frankly I don't remember whom."

And so, in fact I think it is quite likely that the term may have been indeed created

by some anonymous Bellevue (check) bureaucrat, or an anonymous educator,

or someone else who started using it in their professional networks,

online networks, and social networks.

And by the mid-1990's, it had become a term of art to describe this gap between the have's and the have-not's.

And I should also add that the have's and the have-not's, that term,

has actually been around much, much longer than the term digital divide.

In fact, it was coined by Cervantes.

If you go and read Don Quijote, you'll see that Sancho Panza describes his grandmother

as coming from a family who represented the have's rather than the haven't's.

And so, that term has been used to describe equity issues and poverty ever since.

So, the digital divide has been a policy issue at one level or another for over 10 years, now.

Much of it began in '93,

when President Clinton created this Advisory Council I mentioned a few minutes ago,

this National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council.

Basically, they were given the task to take a look at this Information Superhighway,

figure out where it was going, whether it was going to leave the country,

and what it was going to mean if some people had access to it and some people didn't.

By 1994, the Commerce Department was releasing a report, which eventually became a series of reports,

known as Falling through the Net,

and this became essentially a national benchmark on the digital divide.

And initially, they were just looking at who had telephone access and who had computer access

and who didn't.

But in the years since then it has moved to a much deeper look

at the state of the digital divide in Amarica. (6:22)