The powerful role of information and communication technology (ICT) in social and economic development has led many to ponder the consequences of unequal access to it. In the mid-1990s, journalists, scholars, and political leaders started discussing the significance of what they termed a digital divide between the information haves and have-nots. In this chapter, I review the issue of a digital...

The digital divide refers to inequalities in access to information technology. One of the main reasons why the digital divide is an important issue is that access to information technology has a tremendous impact on people’s ability to acquire knowledge. According to Alvin Goldman (1999), the project of social epistemology is to identify policies and practices that have good epistemic consequen...

policy leaders and social scientists have grown increasingly concerned about a societal split between those with and those without access to computers and the Internet. The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration popularized a term for this situation in the mid-1990s: the “digital divide.” The phrase soon became used in an international context as well, to describe the s...

As its point of departure, this paper takes the view that if the digital divide between rich and poor countries is to be diminished on any significant scale, a wide range of complementary low-cost versions of information technologies will be needed. Since the available knowledge about these technologies is highly fragmented and difficult to access, however, we seek in this paper to provide poli...

s The Government's 2002 Communications Bill (Draft) promises for the first time to 'promote media literacy' among the population of the UK, improving public awareness and understanding of contents and services provided through electronic media. s In order to establish the present level of media literacy among the UK population, and in order to set the benchmark against which future initiatives ...

This paper investigates the association between ethnic heterogeneity and information technology related outcomes such as internet access and internet use. We argue that the global digital divide, as measured by cross-country differences in internet access and use, could be explained by crosscountry differences in ethnic heterogeneity. We use indices of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization as...

This article discusses the danger of a growing digital divide between rural and other areas. It presents broadband as increasingly necessary for the delivery of information, health, education, business, social security, public and leisure services. Access to broadband has become vital for rural communities to participate in a progressively digital economy and to overcome problems of physical an...

This article presents a theoretical examination of the digital divide, tracing its origins in the centre–Left social inclusion policy agenda of the 1980s and 1990s to its current status of political ‘hot topic’. It then moves on to outline four conceptual limitations to conventional dichotomous notions of the digital divide and individuals’ ‘access’ to information and communications technology ...

A number of definitions can be found for the term. The Web site http://whatis.techtarget.com explains that the term “describes the fact that the world can be divided into people who do and people who don't have access to and the capability to use modern information technology, such as the telephone, television, or the Internet...The digital divide also exists between the educated and the uneduc...

introduction: the perceived lean services are definite type of the therapy services that patients’ needs are responded based on information about how to receive services in hospitals and medical centers. the present study aimed to determine the relationship between availability of patients’ therapy information management infrastructures and perceived lean services to find suitable model. method...