Digital divide

Digital divide:

Definition of digital divide:

Digital divide (fossé numérique in French) refers mainly to the gap between those with regular, effective access to digital and information technology and those without access to it. The term Digital divide shows that the world is split into two major parts: people who have and people who don’t have access to digital/ modern information technology such as television, internet …

The origin of the term:
The use of the term digital divide was started to be used in a regular basis in the mid 1990s. At the time, the united state president Bill Clinton and vice president Al Gore used the term “digital divide” in a speech in Knoxville. Since this time, “digital divide” had appeared in several news article prior to 1996.
The term initially referred to gaps of possessing computers technology between different groups. The area mainly focused on school computer access. Rich people had the much possibility to access to computers, and more specifically to the internet.
Recently, discussions of a digital divide in school access have broadened to include technology related skills and training in addition to basic access to computers and internet access.

Current Usage
Due to the range of criteria which can be used to assess technology access, and the lack of detailed data on some aspects of technology usage, the exact nature of the digital divide is both contextual and debatable. Criteria that are often used to distinguish between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' of the digital divide tend to focus on access to hardware, access to the internet, and details relating to these categories. In the context of schools, which have consistently been involved in the discussion of the divide, current formulations of the divide focus more on how (and whether) computers are used by students, and less on whether there are computers or internet connections.