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!

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!

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Yeah I'm always dubious about this stuff. This has been an educational hot potato since time began. There are endless studies demonstrating that middle-class people are far more likely to use educational facilities in a middle-class way - surprise! And the middle-class way is, of course, the *only* way . . . As if we're not having enough fun dealing with the likes of Eric Raymond telling us that studies have proven that African people and the diaspora have much lower IQs than Europeans. One of these studies, to take a random example, used a sample of rural African migrants coming into Israel looking for manual work. Strangely, these individuals' lives have not prepared them to construct a pyramid out of only 3 matchsticks without breaking any, manipulate abstract shapes with spots on them or contemplate how long a frog would take to circumnavigate the moon at a known constant speed. However, clearly ;-) they can be seen as an splendidly representative sample of a global diaspora comprising everyone from illiterate farm labourers who've never used a telephone to internationally revered academics. I vaguely recall E P Thompson mentioning that handwritten copies of Rousseau's and Voltaire's radical essays were circulating amongst working-class Chartist activists in the 19th Century -- these activists would mostly have nothing more than a Methodist Sunday-School education. My grandmother (from a long line of Welsh Methodist labour activist with nothing but Sunday-school literacy) used to copy out entire library books for me by hand when I was a child so I have personal experience of that tradition. 'Course, that'd be "piracy" now ;-) and they'd cart nanny off for criminally attempting to participate in the information society as an unrepentant poor person. Nan didn't hold with apeing middle-class ways -- she had an ingrained sense of class loyalty, brought up to believe you work for the class as a whole and don't just try to haul yourself out of the hole and pull up the ladder after you. God forbit you could remain loyal to the agendas and traditions of your community of origin and still be able to make a decent livingl. Dumb old woman eh? On a more contemporary level, Asian kids around me in Shadwell (on some of the most deprived housing estates in the UK) are setting up bittorrents to distribute the digital music they create by hybridising diasporic forms from all over the globe on cracked software on whatever crappy old PCs they can get hold of. They can also sort out a satellite dish to pick up global TV beyond the Murdoch menu and flip you between Al Jazeera's Arabic service, Star News and BBC News 24 and deliver an impassioned, illustrated, critique of Western news values flipping effortlessly between the three languages they are fluent in. Still, if you asked them to tell you which of three black and white shapes will fit in a hole if skewed at 34 degrees they'd look at you like you're pathetically nuts and suck their teeth in irritable dismissal of such a pointless f***ing activity. Of course, they still manage to fail IT courses at school because they're not terribly interested in constructing spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel which they don't have a use for. Of course, they'd be happy to run you up an nice little critical Islamist blog . . . but, strangely, corporate employers aren't particularly crying out for that skill . . . Or to put it another way, why would you bother learning alien skills to go after jobs -- or fit yourself up with a student loan it'll take the rest of your life to pay off -- when you know perfectly well that the primary hiring criterion for middle-class jobs in the UK is being a white bloke with the "right" accent? At best, you might end up joining the the other third-generation immigrants in IT helpdesk hell for too little money to leave home on. Why bother when once a week you can haul arse up to the dole office and get too little money to leave home on -- so you have more time to make groundbreaking music and hone your expertise in ad hoc electronics and deconstructing news media . . . 8-) P Radhika Gajjala 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

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