Effective Use: A Community Informatics Strategy Beyond the Digital Divide

Abstract

"A huge industry has been created responding to the perceived social malady, the 'Digital Divide'. This paper examines the concepts and strategies underlying the notion of the Digital Divide and concludes that it is little more than a marketing campaign for Internet service providers. The paper goes on to present an alternative approach — that of 'effective use' — drawn from community informatics theory which recognizes that the Internet is not simply a source of information, but also a fundamental tool in the new digital economy."

From the Introduction

"In December of 2003 the United Nations will be staging the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This event, in many respects, can be seen as a Summit on the Global Future as framed by our increasingly information and communications technology (ICT) mediated environment. This will be the first global attempt to come to grips with a potentially malleable and technologically determinable future. It is thus important that the discussions around the event and which provide its context should not be left to the exclusive hands of the usual suspects — the governments and the bureaucrats playing out their familiar routines of control and centralization; or the corporations seeking their ever shorter horizons of profit maximization; or the traditional NGOs, many of whom seem so unable to see that ICTs are at least as much an opportunity as a problem.

What seems to be missing so far from any of the 'official' involvements in the WSIS is the sense of building a common future with a remarkable and incredibly powerful new set of tools; of going beyond the 'market building' and 'market failure' rhetoric of much of the 'Digital Divide' (DD) discussion; and, of moving toward opportunities for effective and active use of ICTs to enable communities, active citizens, and democratic participation. What has been lost is the vision of achieving the widest possible distribution to communities and individuals (as producers of goods and services and as citizens) of the remarkable opportunities for gains in productivity, efficiency, and process and product innovation; for active participation and devolved control; for an amplification of creativity and an intensification of 'voice' which ICTs are making available.

Also, in the public discussions around the WSIS there is little sense of the Internet as a network, a network of networks, a technology with the capacity to engage and enable interaction across geographies and boundaries, both physical and cultural, and to support initiatives from the 'bottom up' as well as the 'top down'. Nor, and finally, is there the sense of the creative ebullience that the Internet has let loose, initially, through the DotCom's but which continues through the development of alternative patterns of governance and consultation, new forms of services and production opportunities and new styles of knowledge creation and effective use.

Remarkably and sadly (and this too is overlooked amidst the tired and tiresome clichés of the WSIS), it seems that it has been primarily the corporate sector and even only certain elements within the corporate sector who have truly taken advantage of the revolutionary potential presented by ICTs. Others — small or more conservative enterprises, those with lower capitalizations or access to investment funds, enterprises in developing countries, and perhaps most important, whole strata of those who are not direct financial beneficiaries of the corporate sector — not for profits, the local public sector, those outside the market and beyond the enabling technology networks — are clearly falling ever further behind.

In addition, there has been little opportunity for those actually building the new 'Knowledge Societies' as practitioners, researchers, suppliers; as communities — to have a voice in the WSIS. It appears as with the various global initiatives, such as the Digital Opportunities (DotForce) Task Force growing out of the G8 Okinawa summit, the U.N.'s ICT for Development Task Force, and the World Bank's Global Development Gateway initiatives, that this is something that will be done to 'us' from the top, rather than by 'us' from the bottom. The form that this 'talking about' or 'doing to/for' has primarily taken is to focus on the 'Digital Divide' as the central 'social' or 'developmental' issue to be addressed in the context of the WSIS as it looks to respond to the changing technological environment.

Meanwhile, many have serious reservations about the DD terminology and overall discussions in this area. They find the DD approach patronizing and 'welfare-ist' and a major diversion from what are the truly important questions which might be addressed addressed at a global gathering such as the WSIS. Specifically it is being observed that these issues are not about 'access' (as the DD rhetoric and analysis presents it) but rather about how and by whom and under what circumstances, and for what purposes ICTs can and should be used to benefit individuals, communities, and societies as whole."

Dr. Michael Gurstein is Visiting Professor in the School of Management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, N.J. While at the University College of Cape Breton he implemented one of the first locally oriented ICT applications research and development centers. He is active in the Global Community Networking Partnership and is the Chair of the Community Informatics Research Network.

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