[Air-l] relation digital divide - knowledge gap

[Danny Butt]

Hi Michaël

There are a number of ways of looking at this and it's possible to frame the
question in the way you do. Decisions on terminology reflect long-standing
political and disciplinary issues and I would be surprised if there was
consensus around the correctness of your proposition.

I would agree with 1), that knowledge is a social relationship and very
elusive as an object. Once could say that ICT skills = "knowledge" =
"resource" = "good". But the work of Eszter and others has made it clear
that the acquisition of such knowledge is not at all straightforward, even
if we agreed that it was valuable. (My view is that people like us who write
to academic listservs tend to assume that it's valuable :).

A more sceptical view would be to look at ICTs as part of a much larger set
of social and economic relationships, that informationalise resources with
unevenly distributed benefits. Some knowledge can be converted into material
resources more readily than others, but it's very difficult to measure the
knowledge, and I guess my question would be why introduce the "knowledge
gap" when you can track ICT use against more measurable "divides" like
increasing wage inequality? And even then ICT use itself is such a variable
field - I think the value of work like Kathryn Shaw in the volume I referred
to is that it addresses a specific field and looks at employment change,
something that people can give good information on, rather than a hypothesis
that treats all potential situations as a site of "the gap" rather than
addressing the relationships between one's object of study and what is
external to it. 

Cheers,

Danny

--
http://www.dannybutt.net
adventures in cultural politics  - http://acp.dannybutt.net
digital media - http://digital.dannybutt.net




On 5/12/05 4:21 AM, "Opgenhaffen Michaël"
<michael.opgenhaffen at lessius-ho.be> wrote:

> Thanks Eszter, Redhika, Ulla, Danny, Paula and others for your help.
> I understand that my question was not well formulated, my excuses for that!
>  
> This is quite a complex domain for me and I want to get it right.
> Therefore, an additional question:
>  
> If I got it right, the knowledge gap is the situation that some groups
> (high-class, white, rich, well-educated, ...) are getting smarter en smarter
> (because of there learning-abilities and -motivations and other benefits) and
> the other groups aren't, so that the gap between the info-rich and info-poor
> is widening (cfr Matthew-effect). Since the success of ICT, we can observe
> sort of a same distinction between those who can work with internet and
> computers and those who can't or won't. Those who can work with ict, benefit
> from that use, while the groups for who it could be great to work on (for
> closing the knowledge gap) aren't working with ict so that again, the gap is
> widening. 
>  
> I now i formulated it very briefly, but is this in general correct?
>  
> My question is twofold:
> 1) Can i describe the difference in knowledge-output between users and
> non-users as 'a knowledge gap'? I thought I read it somewhere, but as i read
> your answers, i begin to think that the knowledge gap is more a social
> phenomenon and not the difference in knowledge-output between users and
> non-users. 
> 2) If this difference can not be called 'knowledge gap', which concept do you
> suggest to describe this possible difference in knowledge-output between users
> and non-users? 
>  
> Thankx a lot in advance. I know my English is not as good as my dutch is, but
> i hope clear anough to understand.
>  
> Michaël 
>  
> -------------------------
> Michaël Opgenhaffen
> Translation studies and journalism
> Lessius school Antwerp
> Belgium
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
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