A2 - Hauck Orin Pitts

The Digital Divide:

At a time when technology seems to be changing the face of human interaction, it is easy to overlook those for whom technology is changing very little. The digital divide crosses gender, racial, ethnic, age, and income gaps as technology forges new roads. The digital divide refers to how in certain groups worldwide technology, internet access, devices, and computer access are flourishing, while other locales, races, and income levels are seeing little or no improvement to daily life as a result of technological advancement. This article, http://www.edutopia.org/digital-divide-where-we-are-today, it states that "almost half of Americans do not have Internet access at home and only 25 percent of America's poorest households are online compared with approximately 80 percent of homes earning over $75,000. Only around 30 percent of youth in the lowest household income category use computers at home compared to over 90 percent of youth in the highest income category." This socioeconomic gap is a serious one in a world where almost all employment opportunities can be advanced by computer knowledge.

The digital divide is perhaps even more apparent across continental lines to third world countries. The physical distance between people and computers is much greater and far more obvious. Looking at medical industries, information sharing and schools in these countries make the digital divide quite obvious.

In essence, the digital divide refers to how technology helps some and leaves others behind. It refers to the division of people when one very large group of people can and do communicate in one way, in this case digitally, via cell phones, email, facebook, community oriented websites, etc, and another very large group of people communicates in what quickly becomes another language. The first group may still be able to read a letter or an encyclopedia but the other group has a bridge to cross that is much wider, much higher and much more difficult to build.

Usability Divide:

The usability divide is an important aspect to the digital divide because it creates a larger rift between the opposite ends of the spectrum as the technology continues to advance. Things become more complicated and sophisticated in software as well as hardware and it adds more things for the user to learn. This is fine when you are already a computer whiz, but for folks like senior citizens, who weren't just born into this age of computers, or those who aren't literate, it presents a greater challenge to keep up with all the new versions or editions and releases of software and hardware. Advertising, documentation, and more straightforward or image-based user interfaces would allow for problems to be overcome, since the idea of usability issues can never truly be avoided. Some advances in usability are currently being engineered and offered, such as touch-screen interfaces, vocal instructions for software, and integrated technology to ease the gap between the opposite sides of the usability divide.

CLever Project:

The project outlined in the movie relates to the digital divide in two ways. The first digital divide that would exist for such a system is due to socio-economic factors affecting availability and accessibility to such a system. A system such as this could be implemented relatively easily in the United States and western European nations, but in a third world country the cost of the #bubblec('GPS', 'actually, the GPS infrastructure is, for the most part, already there. But youre right, the processing and the transfer of GPS data would require high investments.') and computer infrastructure necessary could be prohibitive. The second digital divide that would affect such a system is that between the disabled persons that the system is designed to help, and people such as therapists or parents working to help these people. The creation of the scripts could be made very easy for non-computer experts in general, but the user interface and scripting process might have to be designed very differently to provide accessibility to disabled persons.

Resources:

http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/clever/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=D0CSHNEfRlAC&dq=digital+divide&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=QvogH5A9Fa&sig=RtZVoUShxU4MCRSFKXvkdlKkYZc&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPA3,M1

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/digital-divide.html

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/warschauer/