Part of the problem - and Radhika's question gets to the heart of it - is that the initial question was about a "causal relationship" between the "digital divide" and the "knowledge gap". But both these terms are trying to describe inequalities in a digital/knowledge economy, emerging from studies which treat both "digital use" and "knowledge" as artificially stable formations. Of course, there are a whole lot of traditions of thinking inequality - class being the most long-standing - that have tried to understand the social processes that produce the "digital" and "knowledge" as measurable hierarchies. My own view is that both terms need a heck of a lot of epistemological sorting out (some of which has been usefully done by people on this list like Mark Warschauer in the digital divide case) before any real study can be done on "causal relationships" between them. I usually hate gratuitous self-promotion on lists, but in this case, I have to say that I wrote a thesis on this :7 Class in the Information Society: Socio-economic reproduction in the new media environment http://infoclass.dannybutt.net There is a whole lot of routinely-passed-over work in economics, sociology, education and cultural studies (among other fields) that is relevant here, and I'd have to say I'm only beginning to get a handle on it. Chapter Three has most of the stuff you'll find interesting Michaël, but in case you want to avoid the class stuff and go for the references, I'd particularly recommend: Greenan, N., L'Horty, Y., & Mairesse, J. (2002). Productivity, Inequality, and the Digital Economy: A Transatlantic Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. (particularly the chapters by Shaw; Chennells & van Reenen) You may also want to look at the work of people like Sassen and Portes on informal economies and social capital. good luck! Danny -- http://www.dannybutt.net adventures in cultural politics - http://acp.dannybutt.net digital media - http://digital.dannybutt.net On 5/11/05 8:55 PM, "Radhika Gajjala" <radhika@cyberdiva.org> wrote:
So instead of focussing on class and cultural capital and formations of knowledge-hierarchies we take for granted "smart" and "dumb" and proceed to study knowledge gaps.
interesting.
(of course I knew this - my question still is what "knowledge gap")
thanks for the kind explanation, Ulla:)
r
Radhika and others, the knowledge gap hypothesis is a theoretical approach (not a full-blown theory) that was developed quite a while ago and that basically describes how the smart are getting smarter and the dumb are not, and so the dumb seem dumber in comparison to the smart that are getting smarter. Well, this is oversimplification, but you may get the idea this way. Famous case study: Sesamestreet in Britain, which was originally designed to teach the kids of the lower/blue color classes, but because kids of the middle classes watched it too and the middle class kids had more resources (supportive parents, exposure to learning opportunities, etc.), the middle class kids actually learned more from Sesamestreet than the working class kids did. Ergo: the knowledge gap widened, rather than closed. And yes, this is very applicable to the digital divide and I've long been asking myself why no one seems to have picked up on that and did some theory-based work here. Glad to see Michael's interest in this and hope good sources will pop up on the list. Ulla
-- ***Address Change for Ulla Bunz:
Starting July 1, I will be at Floriday State University. Please note my new email address: ulla.bunz@comm.fsu.edu. The new address is already in place, so you may use either the new address or the current address (bunz@scils.rutgers.edu) until July 1. Thank you!
_______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/