Hi Michaël There are a number of ways of looking at this and it's possible to frame the question in the way you do. Decisions on terminology reflect long-standing political and disciplinary issues and I would be surprised if there was consensus around the correctness of your proposition. I would agree with 1), that knowledge is a social relationship and very elusive as an object. Once could say that ICT skills = "knowledge" = "resource" = "good". But the work of Eszter and others has made it clear that the acquisition of such knowledge is not at all straightforward, even if we agreed that it was valuable. (My view is that people like us who write to academic listservs tend to assume that it's valuable :). A more sceptical view would be to look at ICTs as part of a much larger set of social and economic relationships, that informationalise resources with unevenly distributed benefits. Some knowledge can be converted into material resources more readily than others, but it's very difficult to measure the knowledge, and I guess my question would be why introduce the "knowledge gap" when you can track ICT use against more measurable "divides" like increasing wage inequality? And even then ICT use itself is such a variable field - I think the value of work like Kathryn Shaw in the volume I referred to is that it addresses a specific field and looks at employment change, something that people can give good information on, rather than a hypothesis that treats all potential situations as a site of "the gap" rather than addressing the relationships between one's object of study and what is external to it. Cheers, Danny -- http://www.dannybutt.net adventures in cultural politics - http://acp.dannybutt.net digital media - http://digital.dannybutt.net On 5/12/05 4:21 AM, "Opgenhaffen Michaël" <michael.opgenhaffen@lessius-ho.be> wrote:
Thanks Eszter, Redhika, Ulla, Danny, Paula and others for your help. I understand that my question was not well formulated, my excuses for that!
This is quite a complex domain for me and I want to get it right. Therefore, an additional question:
If I got it right, the knowledge gap is the situation that some groups (high-class, white, rich, well-educated, ...) are getting smarter en smarter (because of there learning-abilities and -motivations and other benefits) and the other groups aren't, so that the gap between the info-rich and info-poor is widening (cfr Matthew-effect). Since the success of ICT, we can observe sort of a same distinction between those who can work with internet and computers and those who can't or won't. Those who can work with ict, benefit from that use, while the groups for who it could be great to work on (for closing the knowledge gap) aren't working with ict so that again, the gap is widening.
I now i formulated it very briefly, but is this in general correct?
My question is twofold: 1) Can i describe the difference in knowledge-output between users and non-users as 'a knowledge gap'? I thought I read it somewhere, but as i read your answers, i begin to think that the knowledge gap is more a social phenomenon and not the difference in knowledge-output between users and non-users. 2) If this difference can not be called 'knowledge gap', which concept do you suggest to describe this possible difference in knowledge-output between users and non-users?
Thankx a lot in advance. I know my English is not as good as my dutch is, but i hope clear anough to understand.
Michaël
------------------------- Michaël Opgenhaffen Translation studies and journalism Lessius school Antwerp Belgium
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