Essay on The Digital Divide

The term “digital divide” was coined to define this growing gap between the people who do not have access to modern technology (more specifically the poor, rural, elderly, and handicapped) and the people who do (wealthy, middle class, and those living in urban/suburban areas). In urban areas especially, a common assumption made is that everyone has access to this modern technology. People see technology all around them and assume it is integrated into everyone’s life. Because of the simplicity technology offers, it has become the engine behind economics, politics, and communication. In rural areas, most people know the potential of modern technology, but don’t have the resources to achieve it. “It has been observed that households earning incomes over $75,000 are 20 times more likely to have home internet access than those at lowest income levels and 10 times more likely to have a

It is no question that technology is changing people and the way we live. Almost every person depends on technology in some way to get through the day. Weather its smartphones, washing machines, toasters, or refrigerators, all of these common technologies were invented to increase our productivity and make life easier. The underlining question in this essay is to highlight the concerns of technology and prove that people are being blurred in their connections to digital reality and physical reality, work life and family, and our dependency on technology.

Since the launch of the Internet as a global communication network and the boom in communication technologies, our world has been overwhelmed by a new phenomenon – digital divide. It has gradually turned into a major, constantly growing world issue, threatening to further increase the gap between advanced and developing countries. Yet, is digital divide really an unprecedented occurrence or a natural and unavoidable trend? “Divide” is certainly a word whose meaning could be traced back to the mere dawn of human history. It goes even deeper – to human nature itself: to sex and racial differentiation, to unequal physical and mental powers, to different

This report will examine how changes in technology are affected by society, in turn, how the society that produced this technology is impacted by this creation. The paper will specifically address the impact of personal computers, cell phones, and the internet on society, and how these technological advancements relate to the three major sociological perspectives; equilibrium model, digital divide, and cultural lag.

One detrimental consequence of the technological society we live in is the development of new power struggles that reveal themselves in the digital divide. In the dawning of the technological age that has brought us into a globalized

To demand a new way of teaching and learning involving technology. (Thomas, 2011, p. 4) These popular claims within the seminal literature on digital natives (for example, that digital natives possess a sophisticated set of ICT [Information and Communication Technologies] knowledge and skills or that they have different learning styles or preferences) are largely unsupported by research evidence (Bennett, Maton, & Kirvan, 2008, p. 777). However, using these claims, enthusiasts’ present digital natives as a part of a utopian vision of technology tied to an exoticized picture of liberated young people (Buckingham, 2011). Despite slight distinctions, the terms digital native, the Net generation, and Millennials are used interchangeably (Jones et al., 2010, p. 723). Digital immigrants are characterized as individuals born before 1980 who knew an analogueonly world and still rely on analogue forms of interaction. For digital immigrants, the communication changes happening via the introduction of digital technologies are supposedly learned and relearned, instead of easily becoming second nature (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008, p. 4). Problems are often identified not with the digital natives but rather with older generations of non-natives who display their “digital immigrant accent” (Prensky, 2001a, p. 3) when using new technologies. In this way, digital immigrants are portrayed as being tied to older media, unable to catch up (Buckingham, 2011), therefore embodying the antithesis

The New York Times published an online article on January 9th 2010, which later appeared in print on January 10th 2010, titled “The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by their 20s” on the impact of technology on the future behavior of children and adolescents. This article focuses on the distinctive behavior of children and adolescents depending on mini-generation gaps with the world of technology. Director of the PRC’s Internet and American Life Project, Lee Rainie, talked about how children and adolescents in the modern world, being only two, three or four years apart, have completely different experiences with technology which has accelerated the generation gap. Thus the results of these increased gaps between generations have caused younger generations to have a more peculiar, but unique way of creating expectations about and of the world. Although many believe this to be false, there has been much research on the long-term effects of modern technology on the intellectual and social development of children but nothing has yet to be proven since the modern technological era is still beginning, thus being able to say that the source doesn’t exactly influence the information.

As one of the 90’s kids, it was quite hard for me to believe that the existing circumstance of our civilization was all developed in less than 3 decades. We are exposed to the Internet in such a young age and grow up with it that we are automatically accustomed to it and deem the Internet as an essential of life. “How do people even live without the Internet?”, most of us wonder. The older generations, such as our parents and instructors, were born in a simpler era, completing their tasks manually and enjoying their lives in a more simplistic way. The civilization was aggrandized greatly in their 20’s and 30’s, the Internet suddenly came into their lives without any caution. The older generations encountered these enormous changes in their

To begin with, one important thing I have learned through this experience is that there is a digital divide that exists within our society. There is a group of people who are the technology ‘haves’, and these people have laptops, iPhone and access to technology. On the other hand,

generation with technology In Marc Prensky article, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Do you think that technology has already introduced to the world? There are many people using the technology, but some people don’t use it because of their age. It was published to the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol.

Since its introduction on a public scale in the 1990s, the internet has been associated with many changes in social experience. Many aspects of social life such as education, work, commerce and even personal relationships have changed through the internet. However, researchers have found that, at least in the early years, access to the internet is shaped according to gender, class, ethnicity and education. During the 1990s the typical information technology user was a white, male, professional with a background in IT. This bias in internet access was named the ‘digital divide’ to point out the implied social inequalities. It was said that the internet was

In the United States and in the world, there is a digital divide related to knowledge and access to electronic resources. The personal pursuit of knowledge, career advancement, and the inequalities that some people encounter as it relates to electronic resources is what has been labeled the digital divide. To better understand the digital divide, a person must first understand the correlation between lifelong learners, adult education, and the digital divide. In the United States the thirst for knowledge is at an all-time high and many people may ask the question why?

Laptops, smartphones, smartwatches and the Internet are all good examples that show how much human life has been relying on digital technologies in the past two decades. Nevertheless, digital divide, the phenomenon that not all people have access to digital technologies, still prevails in Australia. The recent Australia Digital Inclusion Index (ADII) report states that the increase in Internet coverage in the country has been little in the last three years, especially in South Australia and Tasmania, and the lower income group uses the Internet significantly less than the richer (Thomas, 2017). This certainly has much to do with the affordability of hardware and Internet services for people with low socioeconomic status, but such a divergence may also be explained by the absence of infrastructure, such as the broadband network service, in the remote regions (Park et al., 2015, p.3633).

In today’s world it is a requirement to be digitally literate in order to be able to function in a capacity that enables one to be more successful whether it is at home, school, at our jobs or even looking for a job. Over the last few decades our environment has evolved into a digital environment. Being or becoming digitally literate is essential in being successful in this digital environment. Almost everything we do today requires some sort of digital knowledge or literacy. From surfing the internet to searching for a job to being able to perform our jobs, we are required to have some sort of digital

Technology can be used as a great tool for both education and communication. Specifically, the younger generation is being targeted to use technology. They tend to use this technology for work, school, communication, or entertainment. In the film Digital Nation, the producers stressed the influence technology can have on the everyday life of a teenager. In order for one to gain an understanding of the influence of technology, one could use Digital Nation has a reference to identify how teenagers use technology in their everyday life and the distractions it may cause to a teenager’s focus.