Kris McAbee: kmcabee@umail [dot] ucsb [dot] edu

The "digital divide" and differential access to computers and the Internet by class, gender, ethnicity/race, age, and region

• Digital Divide Network
  
  
• MIT Media Lab's One Laptop Per Child initiative
  
  
• United Villages's First Mile Solutions initiative
  
  
  

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• Historical comparison: the rise of literacy

The digital divide and the global struggle of "identity":

• Networked societies vs. fundamentalism:
  
  

  Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (vol. 1 of his 3-vol. trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 1996-97): "In such a world of uncontrolled, confusing change, people tend to regroup around primary identities: religious, ethnic, territorial, national. Religious fundamentalism, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, and even Buddhist . . . , is probably the most formidable force of personal security and collective mobilization in these troubled years. In a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning. . . . Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self" (p. 3)

  
  

  Los Angeles Times article, "Syria Lead Looks Set to Stay the Course," 7 June 2005: A5 :      "It was unclear whether [Syrian President Bashar] Assad was heralding an impending online crackdown, but he described the Internet as nothing less than an existential threat.      'The ultimate objective of all this is the destruction of Arab identity, for the enemies of the Arab nation are opposed to our possessing any identity or upholding any creed that could protect our existence and cohesion,' Assaid said. 'They simply aim at transforming us into a negative reactive mass which absorbs everything that is thrown at it.' "

  
  
  
• Information-rich vs. "developing" nations (e.g., differences in attitude toward intellectual property or censorship):
  
  

  Roberto Verzola, "Towards a Political Economy of Information" (1998) [writing from the Philippines]: "Piracy: good or bad? It is to the interest of developing countries, both the agricultural and the newly-industrializing economies, to dip freely into the world's storehouse of knowledge and adopt technologies where they might be useful for the country's development. When it was still a developing country, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the U.S. was one of the worst pirates of British books and publications. When it was trying to catch up with the U.S. and Europe, Japan also freely copied Western technologies. Taiwan did the same. So did Korea.          Yet, the U.S. and Europe would lead us to believe that piracy is morally wrong. They do not want us to pirate their books, their software and their designs.          They say we pirate their intellectual property rights. Yet, they continue pirating our intellectuals. Advanced countries think nothing of pirating our best scientists, engineers, technicians, and other professionals. They patent or copyright the works of these intellectuals and then sell them back to us at high prices. They also pirate our genetic resources. Their scientists roam the world pirating biodiversity resources like microorganisms, plants, animals and even human DNA. They then claim monopoly ownership over the genetic information they extract, patent them, and sell them back to us at high prices.          When the U.S. sent spy satellites in space, countries complained that the U.S. was taking away strategic information and violating their sovereign control over their own territories. The U.S. insisted that it was free [to] get this information whenever it wanted, even to sell them back to those countries, if they were willing to pay for them. U.S. commercial satellites then started beaming video programming into other countries. When those whose culture considered the video content objectionable, the U.S. invoked the concept of "free flow of information" to insist that it had the right to beam these programs. Yet, when local people developed a taste for U.S. programs, captured these satellite broadcasts, and distributed them locally, the U.S. started complaining [that] people were receiving and copying their broadcasts without paying for them. According to their twisted logic, this was a violation of their intellectual property rights. . . .          In short, information acquisition has been defined so that when it is bad for the interests of the U.S. and other advanced countries but good for us, it is called "piracy" and "freeloading," but when information acquisition is good for their interests and bad for us, it falls under labels like 'free flow of information" and "common heritage of mankind.'"

Explanation of game

Sample logs of games: Female game | Male game

(cf., Chatterbots: Eliza | Cybelle | MyCyberTwin)