Friday, March 26, 2010

Project to bridge the digital divide in rural areas


I want to share this video because I thought it was very interesting to see the economic and educational impact of technology in a small rural town in Honduras. The people of the town have experience a lot of benefits from having electricity, phone lines and computers in their community.



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Friday, March 5, 2010

History of Digital Divide

The Digital Divide is simply defined as the gap between the rich people who benefit from the access to technology and the poor who do not benefit as much from access to technology (if they have any). One very important fact to not is that this gap is expanded because technology companies way to make profit. They believe that making solutions for the rich is profitable, while making solutions for the poor is not as profitable, because the poor cant pay for the technology.

Another important thing to note is that in certain parts of the world, technology brings more problems than solutions. For example, in a rural community in the middle east, a kid might stop going to school because the local cyber cafe has video-games in their computers. In this case, the access of technology is not benefiting this kid, or the community he lives on. This fact created a bigger gap in technology in the late 90's.

The term was used first before the 80's rarely. It was until the early 90's when the technology boom began with the access to personal computers. President Clinton and Vice President Gore first used the term in a speech in 1996, when the then technology adviser of the Clinton administration took notice on the problems of inequalities surrounding the digital divide. During the passage of the US Telecommunications act in 1996, Digital Divide became a term of friction between the public sector and the private sector. This happened Mainly because the private sector wanted the government to subsidize technology in order to drop prices of technology and make it more accessible. The public sector argued that technology companies should pay for the cost of bringing the poor into the information society.

Sources:

http://www.digitaldivide.org/history.html

http://www.dbfboston.org/index.html



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