The Digital Divide

ola amigos,
A página que você pode acessar clicandono título deste post é uma excelente fonte de informações sobre "digital divide". São vários links para outros documentos sobre o mesmo tema. O autor da página é Martin Ryder da Universidade do Colorado.

A página começa com um link para a pergunta "what is digital divide?" Abaixo eu reproduzo o primeiro parágrafo deste texto.

The digital divide refers to the gap between those who can effectively benefit from information and computing technologies (ICTs) and those who cannot. The term is a social construction that emerged in the latter half of the 1990s after the Internet came into the public domain and the World Wide Web exploded into history's largest repository of human knowledge. For those who can both contribute and retrieve information from the Web, ICTs hold the promise of broad collaborations in science and technology, transparency in government, rationality of markets, and shared understandings between peoples. Sadly, this utopian promise applies only to an elite few. As of 2003, only seven percent of the world's 6.4 billion people have had access to the World Wide Web (NielsenNetRatings, August, 2003). While information poverty is rarely blamed as a direct cause of human suffering, the digital divide raises ethical questions of universal access. Like access to food or clean water, access to essential information has moral and ethical implications that merit consideration in the formation of public policy.