Lecture: Digital Divide

Today we had our lecture on the Digital Divide with Tanya Notley who's working on the Youth Internet Radio Network project at QUT. The project itself is quite interesting: providing access for 'young people' to a space where they can express themselves culturally on the web.

The Digital Divide is quite a complex topic starting from who has physical access and who doesn't through to the kinds of access and the ability to actually utilise the access effectively and even whether people have the desire for access.

In this post I've commentated a bit on the meaning of the divide in terms of the poorer parts of the world. The lecture actually brought up some more interesting issues in terms of the use of the access that people have. The point I found most interesting was the idea of access relating not just to the technological access but also to access to participation in democracy and culture building. The project itself is an example of building culture through giving people the tools to participate.

This ties in again to the issues of access to common knowledge discussed in last weeks lecture. The project makes a point of allowing the users to decide how much permission they will give to other internet users to make use of their cultural production. This is based on the idea of the Creative Commons license where people choose to allow their material to be allowed into the public domain (or at least under what circumstances use is allowed).

There's a whole pile of ethical considerations involved in this debate about access to the intellectual commons and the site linked to should give you a further outline. For my part, I think access to the tools to become creative producers or to interact and participate in building culture is an important right that we should be able to rely on. I don't agree with the copyright laws that are tightening our access in a counter-productive manner. I think that Chris's explanation about the stagnation that could occur if the enclosure of the digital commons becomes too tight is quite valid and that the argument that privatising creativity so that people can make a living is just not played out in real life. Either mega!moguls get all the profit, or people choose to be creative for personal reasons, including self expression, that never gets paid for.

The Digital Divide is also interesting because for most users (read: American teenagers), particularly in the forums where its an expression and reaffirmation of Western culture, these issues never come up. Most of the Fandom forums never discuss the access issues and in fact people can be quite surprised when you mention that not everyone has seen all episodes of a television series that has finished showing in the USA.