Dear all, Interesting discussion . . . I agree very much to what John pointed out: "We have a digit divide but not the one we expected to have." I like to add a different aspect to that discussion. What about not looking at society level but looking at working environments. How can we work in projects teams with a huge "digital divide"? In work settings it's not anymore a question of choice but a question of alignment, so that everybody can participate and collaborate in the project.
From my own experience, I know that different attitude and skills with regards to e-technologies (especially communication tools) make it very difficult to work together and create a common vision. Has anybody similar experiences? What once it was a challenge to work in multidisciplinary teams, in our days the challenge is to work in teams with a huge "digital divide". The biggest issue is that many still see the internet and it's applications as a question of tools - it's IT. They are little aware that by using those "tools" a new way of communication and collaboration is possible, which can/will change the way of working. IT on the other side is puzzled on how come that the tools developed does not get used - or not used properly - or only by a specific group. There is little awareness that those tools need also a ?culture of usage?. And second question is of course when does it make sense to push for new e-technology based application and when not.
Any thoughts or comments? Regards Nicole MA. Nicole Reinhold, Senior Research Consultant nicole.reinhold@philips.com, http://www.design.philips.com air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org wrote on 2006-11-27 09:55:55 PM:
You should check the work of Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/ Particularly interesting here is there studies of "Refusniks" and why some people remain isolated or offline. While clearly there are refuseniks - I think the latest Pew Internet work finds that those groups are becoming increasingly demographically isolated and over time are vanishing. There are for example elder populations which have not gotten online - but as generations move demographically, this is becoming a smaller factor.
You can also find some statistical data aggregated on Cybertelecom. This page has a subcategory re refuseniks http://www.cybertelecom.org/data/broadband.htm
--- John Veitch <jsveitch@ate.co.nz> wrote:
Alexis Turner wrote:
This response is indicative of something I have been thinking about a lot lately, which can basically be summed up by asking "WHY do we expect people to use the web to the extent to which we, web professionals and scholars, do?" and "WHY are we so dumbfounded when they don't?" In particular, I have really begun to question my own horrified, but, ultimately, knee jerk reaction to discovering that someone does not "engage," "participate," or "produce" things on the web. After all, I don't grow my own food, fix my own car, or build my own calculators, so why should I expect others to learn HTML, join a list, or defrag their own harddrive?
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