Information Societies or “ICT Equipment Societies?” Measuring the Digital Information-Processing Capacity of a Society in Bits and Bytes

Abstract

The digital divide is conventionally measured in terms of information and communication technology (ICT) equipment diffusion, which comes down to counting the number of computers or phones, among other devices. This article fine-tunes these approximations by estimating the amount of digital information that is stored, communicated, and computed by these devices. The installed stock of ICT equipment in the consumer segment is multiplied with its corresponding technological performance, resulting in the "installed technological capacity" for storage (in bits), bandwidth (in bits per second), and computational power (in computations per second). This leads to new insights. Despite the rapidly decreasing digital equipment divide, there is an increasing gap in terms of information-processing capacity. It is shown that in 1996 the average inhabitant of the industrialized countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had a capacity of 49 kibps more than its counterpart from Latin America and the Caribbean. Ten years later, this gap widened to 577 kibps per inhabitant. This innovative approach toward the quantification of the digital divide leads to numerous new challenges for the research agenda.The far-reaching and profound impact of the digitization of information and communication processes has long been noted (e.g., Wiener 1948; Machlup 1962;Bell 1973). It is widely recognized that the advancement of digital information and communication technologies (ICT) has led to a new mode of development (e.g., Perez 1983; Freeman and Louça 2001). With the arrival of digital systems, the storage, communication, and computation of information became the omnipresent core of social and political activity, and of economic and cultural production (e.g., Webster 1995;Castells 1996). This has put the question of how to track and measure the diffusion and eventual impacts of these new technologies on the center stage.This article is a contribution to this discussion. We propose to improve the measure of traditional ICT access indicators by adjusting existing ICT equipment statistics with the corresponding quality of their performance. The stock of available technologies is multiplied with their corresponding performance measures. The result is three new aggregate indicators that represent the "installed information-processing capacity": (1) how much information can be stored (in bits), (2) communicated (in bits per second), and (3) computed (in computations per second). This improvement not only contributes to the 157

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