Sophie Davies -
In the fashionable Poblenou district of Barcelona, hipsters and entrepreneurs rub shoulders with homeless people and immigrants, as the city authorities try to reduce digital inequality.
The Media-TIC building is one of several venues around the city where disadvantaged people can sign up for free courses to improve their online literacy skills under a ‘Barcelona, Digital City’ plan launched last year.
The programme, which runs until 2020, is needed because access to technology has become a “new source of social fracture” for cities in an increasingly computerised world, the council of Spain’s second-largest city says on its website.
Initiatives are springing up around the globe to teach online skills in an effort to smooth access to jobs and education, and integrate people better into society.
But questions are being raised about how well such schemes can reach those most in need.
Berlin-based non-profit Kiron Open Higher Education provides free web-based courses for refugees with Internet access anywhere in the world.
In New York, thousands of kiosks offering free Wi-Fi are being rolled out across the city under the LinkNYC scheme to help people of all income levels go online.
Miami-based organisation One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) hands out free laptops to children in developing countries, while Google promised in 2017 to teach online skills to 10 million Africans over the next five years.
The catch with some of these initiatives, however, is that they only work if people are already connected to the Internet, experts say.
“Poor people are the ones most likely to be left outside of the digital sphere,” said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think-tank.
New Yorkers wanting to use LinkNYC’s private Internet connection, for example, need one of Apple’s latest iPhones.
Critics say this excludes low-income users who are most likely to need free Wi-Fi because they cannot afford a home broadband connection.
The so-called “digital divide” has traditionally referred to the gap between those who have access to computers and the Internet, and those with limited or no access.
Globally, around 3.2 billion people are using the Internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency.
Of the 4.3 billion people who are not connected, about half live in India and China, according to the Brookings Institution.
In today’s world, there are many different digital divides, say experts, and various ways of overcoming them.
Prohibitive connection charges are a major cause of digital inequality, especially in emerging economies, said West of the Brookings Institution.
In the United States, most people have a smartphone and a data plan, “and are pretty adept at using that”, said Mark Warschauer, professor of education and informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
The issue is what digital devices people are using — and how.
Lower-income families tend to use smartphones more than laptops, and if they do have a computer at home it may be shared by several family members, he noted.
Children from wealthier backgrounds are using technology to gain knowledge, whereas children from poorer families focus more on chatting and playing, he added.
Digital media “tends to amplify existing discrepancies” in society, he said.
A physical access divide persists, however, between rural and urban areas in the United States, Warschauer noted.
Many remote areas are still not connected to the Internet, an inequality that needs to be dealt with at a policy level, he suggested.
Improving people’s ability to earn by getting them connected is a virtuous circle, as greater wealth increases the likelihood of narrowing the digital divide.
“Anything a country can do to raise people out of poverty is going to bring more people into the digital world,” said West, of the Brookings Institution.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
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