The term ‘Digital Divide’ refers to the gap between people with access to a computer (preferably with Internet) and the people who are lesson fortunate. The Digital Divide is mainly split up into three different categories, these are:
- socioeconomic (rich/poor)
- racial (white/minority)
- geographical (urban/rural)
However, the term ‘global digital divide’ refers to the difference between countries on what access they have to digital and information technology. This divide takes into account wealth, ethnicity and area of those involved in the divide.
Here is a map of the types of people who use the Internet (%)
The Digital Divide In E-Democracy
In theory the concept of E-democracy is still in early development, despite this, in practice things such as blogs and wiki are helping further the way democracy develops. However, the negative side to E-Democracy if applied to a liberal democracy is the capacity to participate in an "e-government". By this i mean that some more computer generalised countries have more chance of participating whereas the poorer countries would be under-represented and others would be over-represented in a situation where online voting etc is concerned. Thus, this corrupts the idea of the equality principles of democracy.
Civil Digital Divide In The U.K Alone
As you can see from the map above the South of Britian have modern computers with a broadband connection.
Picture and information Refernces:
http://gguillotin.chez-alice.fr
http://www.ellythompson.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide#Digital_divide_in_the_context_of_e-democracy
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