BeyondwebctFall08

It took digital-divide researchers a whole decade to figure out that the real issue is not so much about access to digital technology but about the benefits derived from access.

80/20 factor” (in which eighty percent of profit is made by serving the most affluent 20%) causes technology designers to work hard at creating "solutions" specifically for the affluent. The poor are ignored because market forces assume that designing solutions for them will not be profitable*. The result is that even where the poor are provided access to digital technology, it is low-quality and merely “localized” versions of products and services intended for the rich.

1) Closing the Digital Divide is a precondition for reducing poverty.

Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid

I mean academia’s policy that enforces an unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual divide. What intellectual divide? It is that gaping chasm between two opposing models of disseminating knowledge: toll access and open access.

lack of access to technology (dubbed the "digital divide") seriously handicaps half the world's population. That is a giant problem but one being gradually ameliorated by mobile telephony and economic forces.

Universities are inherently conservative organizations. Perhaps Clark Kerr said it best when, after witnessing 20 years of social upheaval, he described universities’ deeply-rooted tendency toward stasis. In The Uses of the University, written in 1982 when he was chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, he wrote: “About 85 institutions in the Western world established by 1500 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and 70 universities. Kings that rule, feudal lords with vassals, and guilds with monopolies are all gone. These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways.”

A decade after the birth of the commercial Internet, a specter began to haunt the hallowed ivory halls of the university campus (and much else around the globe). The DNA of the Internet respects no boundaries, has little use for hierarchy, and flaunts the communication paradigm in which every message needs to have a messenger.

In the gold rush that followed the birth of modern computing, universities were among the few institutions to serve as checks on software companies’ attempts at control. Colleges around the globe invested in standards-based technologies and open-source solutions to prevent domination by any one entity.