Thanks to all of those who have commented and started discussion. I have again thought about some of the points of discussion and tried to find my own answers to the questions at hand that I'd like to share. WHY CAN THE PRACTICE OF GIVING $100 LAPTOPS TO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES HAVE STRATIFYING EFFECTS AND CREATE INEQUALITY OR DEEPEN OLD INEQUALITIES? The $100 laptop is technologically old-fashioned, e.g. its clock frequency is only 500 MHz. The global digital divide is about an unequal access to material infrastructure, skills, usage capacities, and benefits concerning ICTs on a global level. This problem today starts with the fact that most people in developing countries don't have access to telephones, computers, the internet, etc. Assume that $100 laptops will be spread throughout developing countries. What could be possible effects? As these laptops are technologically inferior to Western technology, a new divide between owners of advanced and ever-progressive technology and owners of old-fashioned technology will emerge. The emerging divide then is not about have and have-nots, but about those who have advanced technology and those who have inferior technology. Not technology creates inequality, but "technology transfer" is embedded into unequal social structures that need to be changed at the same time that ICTs are adopted in developing countries. Who will be able to buy such a laptop of the social structures causing the global wealth divide are not changed at the same time that technologies for developing countries are advanced? It's not a technological, but a social issue. WHAT IS INEQUALITY AND STRATIFICATION IN THIS CONTEXT? WHAT IS THE UNDERLYING LOGIC? I like to think of these terms in the categories of Bourdieu: Modern society is based on the asymmetric accumulation of economic, political, and cultural capital and hence creates different classes and class fractions which control certain amounts of the different capital types. Modern society is not functionally differentiated (Luhmann), but stratified (i.e. different strata/classes are created that have different degrees of power) because it is based on different classes controlling different amounts of different capital types. That this means inequality is a moral judgement, it means unequal opportunities for participating in society. The underlying logic is the logic of accumulation characteristic for modern society. ICTs are today embedded into stratified structures, they are an economic resource that can't be accessed by all; and cultural capital needed for operating them and the institutional capital needed for using them in empowering ways are also not accessible to all. Technologies for the Third World need in my view be connected to a global redistribution of the different types of capital, this is not a technical issue, Negroponte and his initiative seem to believe that the digital divide can be solved technologically. The $100 laptop also doesn't take political and cultural capital that is connected to ICTs and needed for their meaningful operation into consideration. I think that stratification and inequality are appropriate terms in this case, because these are terms describing the dominant logic of modern society. I like that Jan van Dijk in context of the digital divide speaks of underlying "structural inequalities". DO PEOPLE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES NEED ICTs? People in developing countries have the same human rights as people in the West. They have a right for food, social security, etc., and also for means of communication and the accompanying skills. To provide developing countries with inferior technology conveys the image that they are considered as second-class citizens who are only in need of second-class technology. I think that technologies for developing countries should not create dependency on Western standards that must be purchased because this would reproduce the old mechanisms of colonial and post-colonial dependency and value-transfer. Therefore I think that technologies for developing countries should be adapted to local needs, autonomos from dominant Western standards and economic interests, based on open source technology, and be distributed at absolutely no cost. I think the last point is crucial because today there are 3 billion people living on less than $2 per day. How should they be able to purchase a $100 laptop? Selling these laptops in the end will mainly create profits. What is needed is global redistribution and an advanced $0 laptop as expression of an emerging open source gift economy that quetions the dominant mechanisms of exclusion, dependency, and value transfer that has characterized the colonial and post-colonial global economy. Best, Christian