查看文章

The digital divide is a new frontier where social inequalities are shaping, and being shaped by, the latest development of technology. Social inequality has been increasing both in developed and developing countries since the 1990s. At the same time, the Internet has grown exponentially. Yet, the diffusion of the Internet is extremely uneven. As science fiction writer William Gibson put it:“[T] he future is already here; it just isn’t evenly distributed”(1999, radio program). On the one hand, there is marked evidence that the digital divide occurs at the intersection of international and intranational socioeconomic, technological, and linguistic differences. At the global level, there is a huge digital divide between developed and developing nations. For instance, while 10 percent of the world population was online in 2002, 88 percent of them were residents in industrialized countries (World Economic Forum 2002). Within …