In this article, the authors address the recent trajectory of local e‐government in the United States and compare it with the predictions of early e‐government writings, using empirical data from two nationwide surveys of e‐government among American local governments. The authors find that local e‐government has not produced the results that those writings predicted. Instead, its development has largely been incremental, and local e‐government is mainly about delivering information and services online, followed by a few transactions and limited interactivity. Local e‐government is also mainly one way, from government to citizens, and there is little or no evidence that it is transformative in any way. This disparity between early predictions and actual results is partly attributable to the incremental nature of American public administration. Other reasons include a lack of attention by early writers to the history of information technology in government and the influence of technological determinism on those writings.
Broadband access in the home is a necessity, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Increasingly, connectivity is of vital importance for school, work, family, and friends. Existing international research on the implementation of broadband has studied its adoption patterns with a focus on the rural/urban digital divide. This paper explores the digital divide in a case study of the seventh largest city, by population, in the United States; San Antonio is a majority-minority city where over half of the people are Hispanic. This paper focuses on the five key affordability factors that drive broadband adoption. Researchers test social exclusion theory, the structural facets of poverty and social marginality to ascertain its potential impact on broadband access. The authors conducted a survey in both English and Spanish to learn more about the affordability factors that influence the broadband digital divide. Through our analysis, we found evidence that four of the factors (geographical disparities, profit-based discrimination, technology deployment cost, and socio-economic factors) played a role in the digital divide in this case study. The results of this study demonstrate that the digital divide is not exclusively a rural/urban digital divide, but can also occur in an intra-city context. This is especially evident in low-income areas within the city because they have substantially lower broadband adoption rates. The results of this study demonstrate the importance of looking closely at issues of social exclusion of marginalized groups and the affordability of broadband access intra-city.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.