The Internet has brought about huge changes in the way we do things and on many aspects of our society.
Digital divide between the technologically literate, elite people and the wide fraction, which cannot access such information, is one of the most significant problems faced.
Those without money, literacy, electrical power, proper training, and phone/broadband infrastructure have been excluded from the resources of the internet.
One thing that comes to mind in reference to digital divide was seeking employment at the age of seventeen. After carefully looking for jobs that interest me, I narrowed my search to five jobs in the neighborhood where I was living. When I went to apply for the jobs, I was discouraged. I assumed that all I needed to do was to meet with the person in charge, address my desire to be employed, and feel out a paper application; but I was immediately directed to apply online. At the time, I didn’t feel totally comfortable about using the computer, nor did I want to take the time to enter the necessary information.
Technological literacy and digital divide has become the salt and pepper of our society. Technological literacy, involves individuals the potential to shape their lives and the world around them. However, this “potential” comes with various competencies in action. These are: obtaining knowledge, personal engagement, and social engagement in the world.
Patterns all over the world tend to represents global diffusion of the internet. Presently, internet is the fastest diffusing information and communication technology to date. During 1999, internet users increase by one million every month; compared to fifty-two years taken by electricity, seventy-one years by telephone, thirty-eight years by radio, and thirteen years by television.
Serious inequalities not only between social layers, but also age and gender groups, and between regions, emphasize what the notion of digital separation refers to and its dimensions. These inequalities exist between those living in rural areas and those living in urban areas, between the educated and uneducated, between economic classes, and on a global scale between more or less industrial developed nations.
Digital divide on the other hand is like being “lost in the sauce;” meaning the resources of technology exist, but circumstances prevents one from obtaining those resources. Such as, financial, government control of information, non-interest, and culture.
Since the 1970s, the number of countries connected to the Internet has increased steeply from 60 in 1993 to 214 in 2000 despite this growth; the Internet has a highly asymmetric global distribution (Kshetri 2001). There were 40 million people worldwide using the Internet regularly in 1995 (Media Metrix 2000). This jumped to 131 million by the end of 1999 (Pastore 2000) and to 606 million by September 2002 . Internet is the fastest diffusing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) innovation to date. For instance, it took just 10 years for the Web-based Internet to reach 50% of American homes, compared to 52 years taken by electricity and 71 years by telephone (Thierer 2000). It took only three years for the Internet to reach 50 million users. By contrast, it took 38 years for radio and 13 years for television to have 50 million users (Bell and Tang 1998). During 1999, the number of Internet users increased by one million every month.
The Internet passed through various stages to arrive at the present situation. The first wide area network (WAN) was developed in 1965. It took another four years for the first two hosts in the ARPANET to be connected. The graphical format of Internet as we know it now emerged in the 1990s. President Eisenhower’s request for funds to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the U.S. Department of Defense in 1958 laid the foundation for the Internet. The packet switching theory first published by Leonard Kleinrock of MIT in