Document Actions

No section

Re-conceptualizing the Global Digital Divide

  1. Dr. Mira Burri

Abstract

The article seeks a re-conceptualization of the global digital divide debate. It critically explores the predominant notion, its evolution and measurement, as well as the policies that have been advanced to bridge the digital divide. Acknowledging the complexity of this inequality, the article aims at analyzing the disparities beyond the connectivity and skills barriers. Without understating the first two digital divides, it is argued that as the Internet becomes more sophisticated and more integrated into economic, social, and cultural processes, a “third” generation of divides becomes critical. These divides are drawn not at the entry to the net but within the net itself, and limit access to content. The increasing barriers to content, though of a diverse nature, all relate to some governance characteristics inherent in cyberspace, such as global spillover of local decisions, regulation through code, and proliferation of self- and co-regulatory models. It is maintained that as the practice of intervention intensifies in cyberspace, multiple and far-reaching points of control outside formal legal institutions are created, threatening the availabil- ity of public goods and making the pursuit of public objectives difficult. This is an aspect that is rarely ad- dressed in the global digital divide discussions, even in comprehensive analyses and political initiatives such as the World Summit on the Information Society. Yet, the conceptualization of the digital divide as impeded access to content may be key in terms of ensuring real participation and catering for the longterm implications of digital technologies.

Keywords

This is only a dummy page, because no html content was created

Feel free to modify this page and look in the folder contents for other content objects

Fulltext

License

Any party may pass on this Work by electronic means and make it available for download under the terms and conditions of the Digital Peer Publishing License. The text of the license may be accessed and retrieved at http://www.dipp.nrw.de/lizenzen/dppl/dppl/DPPL_v2_en_06-2004.html.

JIPITEC – Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law
Article search
Extended article search
Newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter
Follow Us
twitter