the digital divide

Last year, I did a project where I interviewed a number of people in my age group who were at varying levels of comfort with technology. During one of my interviews, a woman noted that she felt cheated, not only because her little brother got better access to the computer, but also that her time in the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe really screwed her in terms of catching up with technology. So when Pippa Norris describes the social and the global divide, I think I know what she's talking about.

It's always hard to evaluate or comment on an argument when it's heavily edited, as Norris's intro on the Digital Divide is in the Information Society Reader, but it does make me wonder just how we're doing now. She laments that non-industrialized countries are failing to "catch up" to industrialized ones in terms of use of technology. She wrote the book in 2000, but is this still the case now, in 2006? Certainly tourism and outsourcing are thriving, partly based on internet connectivity in industrious countries like India.

I do see the "digital divide" as a problem, and I'm particularly interested in the gender divide, which Norris only mentions briefly here (but again, with the editing, it's possible she addresses it in depth in the full work). But I also wonder, is this "lagging behind" paradigm the most useful one in order to view the situation? The language seems to reify positions. What if, instead, we looked at the types of uses of networking in various societies? So perhaps Malaysia's not going to come up with the next amazon.com, but perhaps there's a use of the internet that would be far more pertinent to its political, social and religious issues. We live in a capitalist society, and it's easy to view everything through that lens, but I'm not sure that it gets us very far.