This paper studies the country-level digital divide across successive generations of IT, providing detailed insights into the magnitude and changing nature of the divide. We examine a panel of 40 countries from 1985-2001, based on data from three distinct generations of IT: mainframes, personal computers, and the Internet. Using two measures of IT penetration, we conduct an empirical investigat...

With the development of information and communications technology (ICTs), Internet has been one of the major driving forces of the new economy. Nevertheless, access to the new technology remains extremely unequally distributed across and within societies, and there have a good deal of popular discussions about this “digital divide” in academia and business communities of every society. This stu...

Technology had enabled many adult to pursue their education. However, technology changes in terms of type and accessing had caused “digital divide” (DD) to exist among students of all ages. In this paper, issues which should be incorporated in measuring digital divide for adult learners are discussed. The issues which are discussed in this paper are age, gender and income. Why these issues shou...

For the last decade, the concept of a “digital divide” has framed people’s understanding of technology’s relationship to equity and development. This article critiques theoretically the digital divide concept and supports this critique by examining a case study of technology and education in Egypt. The study illustrates the social embeddedness of technology and the intertwining of computer acce...

First and second wave digital divide research underemphasizes the digital labor force divide and overestimates the impact of access to and skill in digital technology. Such emphasis deprives digital divide scholarship of its democratizing potential by muting structural critique and recasting the divide as a problem of diffusion. To the extent that it promotes diffusion over equality, the digita...

D divide initiatives in developing countries are an important avenue for the socioeconomic advancement of those countries. Yet little research has focused on understanding the success of such initiatives. We develop a model of technology use and economic outcomes of digital divide initiatives in developing countries. We use social networks as the guiding theoretical lens because it is well suit...

Although e-health interventions provide new opportunities for health education, there has been cause for concern regarding the purported information technology gap between those who have access to digital applications and those who do not—termed the “digital divide.” The literature suggests, however, that this divide may now be illusory, driven primarily by a myriad of societal divides such as ...

Access to technology and the benefits derived from its use are not available on equal terms to men and women. In this paper, we review research that sheds light on the relationship between the Digital Divide and Gender in the context of Arab countries and suggest that the extent of gender digital divide is influenced by cultural attitudes and consider how this divide may affect information secu...