I think there is a lot of ground in such “dual site” studies.

Love to ear your thoughts

Paul

In respect with digital divide research, I think the issue is the attitude. People look at a problem (by looking at the numbers) and say let’s just throw lots of money at it. It is well-founded that money matters when people are talking about access, speed etc. But, there are other things to consider and culture and local politics play a huge role. When I was growing up, computers and the internet was truly a social suicide. You want to be cool then DON’T use them. It is just for people wanting to see the stock market. Now, I was a geek, but I can’t help but wonder if there were people that stayed clear of technology for a couple of years because they didn’t want to be treated as social outcasts.

Btw, it is funny that we put so much weight on economic factors for the digital divide when prominent theories such as the diffusion of innovations identify human capital as a huge factor for adoption of new technologies.

I’ve been actively involved, for over a decade, in the practicalities of crossing the digital divide between UK and several locations in rural Africa, Policy making usually seems totally unrelated to reality as I know it – and sadly the same is true for most of the academic research that I check. I was therefore delighted to find this post from someone in academia putting forward a viewpoint that I wholeheartedly agree with.

We need far more genuine collaborative research, by academics working with practitioners, so that reality checks start to feed into policy making. Please contact me pamela.mclean@dadamac.net if you are interested in making this a practical reality.

I’ve been actively involved, for over a decade, in the practicalities of crossing the digital divide between UK and several locations in rural Africa, Policy making usually seems totally unrelated to reality as I know it – and sadly the same is true for most of the academic research that I check. I was therefore delighted to find this post from someone in academia putting forward a viewpoint that I wholeheartedly agree with.

We need far more genuine collaborative research, by academics working with practitioners, so that reality checks start to feed into policy making. Please contact me pamela.mclean@dadamac.net if you are interested in making this a practical reality.

The other issue is that we think of the divide as geographical. But, if we perceive that there is also an informational divide then geography may matter little. The divide may exist within social layers of a small town and not locations within it.

It is a topic that I would like to conduct research on and have some ideas currently but the research itself seems challenging. The problem may be so embedded and twisted around other variables that isolating the relationship of interest and eliminating spurious relationships may be methodologically challenging.