Contemporary Digital Divides in the United States

Abstract

While cyberspace has become increasingly ubiquitous in American society, enormous class, ethnic, and spatial inequalities characterise access to the US internet. This paper summarises the country's digital divides in the early twenty first century. First it notes major market and policy forces that have led to the growth in internet access. Second, it addresses the changing social and spatial patterns of internet access between 1995 and 2010. Although penetration rates grew among all socio-demographic categories, significant differences by age, income, ethnicity and educational level persist but not gender. Third, it points to the roles of public schools and libraries as mechanisms to alleviate the divide. Fourth, it examines differentials in broadband access as the most recent manifestation of internet inequality. Fifth, it comments on the mobile internet and urban 'hotspots'. The conclusion points to public policy measures that could diminish discrepancies in access.

Collaborative learning in environments with restricted access to the internet: Policies to bridge the digital divide and exclusion in prisons through the development of the skills of inmates

“…Employment status (Strine et al, 2010), income (Venkatesh, Sykes, & Venkatraman, 2014;Warf, 2013) The researches which relate ICT and inmates are majority focused on distance education (Farley, Murphy, & Bedford, 2012;Pike, 2009). There is a lack of research on policies that could bridge the gap of digital divide.…”

“Bad Neighborhood” and Internet Adoption in Poor Countries: What is behind the Persistent Digital Gap?

“…In fact, however, there is often substantial geographic variation of Internet use within nations. This has been shown for highly developed countries like the U.S. (Warf ) as well as for developing economies like China, Mexico, or Indonesia (Li and Shiu ; Freedom House ; Sujarwoto and Tampubolon ). Hence, it cannot be excluded that a country may be bordering on a neighboring nation's sub‐region that is much higher in Internet use or much lower in Internet use than that neighbor's average Internet use…”

Spatial Planning and High-Speed Broadband: Australia's National Broadband Network and Metropolitan Planning

“…Results suggest a steady growth of broadband penetration in the USA (Grubesic 2004;Grubesic and Murray 2004), despite the fact that characteristics of broadband accessibility remain spatially uneven and unequal across ages, incomes, ethnicities and educational levels. These studies indicate that broadband availability is no longer simply a question of geography (Glass, Chang, and Petukhova 2003;Rowe 2003), but rather it is a complex and dynamic interplay between geography, socioeconomic status, market forces, federal policy and local government initiatives (Grubesic 2004;Warf 2013). The US experience shows that while most areas have some type of broadband available, only select locations benefit from competition that motivates better pricing and better quality of service.…”

“…The problem is that in the absence of a proactive broadband policy at the national or regional level, local governments' attempts are not systematic nor comprehensive. Recent US-based studies have concluded that only when the most disadvantaged populations have reliable access to the telecommunication infrastructure will this digital divide disappear (Warf 2013).…”