It's not the Digital Divide - It's the Socio-Techno Divide!

This paper aims at contributing to the debate about the digital divide. We first focus on what to us constitutes the root problem: the typical approaches to the development of people through and by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). In contrast to governmental, political and technological attempts that focus almost exclusively on providing access to digital communication technologies, and expect "development" naturally to flow from that, we argue for a focus on "development" which is based on our notion of sustainable socio-economic development. We refer to "technocentric approaches" when the approaches propose and pursue technological interventions and show little regard for the actual needs of the people involved. At the other end of the scale, where the focus is on people and their developmental needs, we will speak of "sociocentric approaches". This presents us with a different divide, which we will refer to as the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ECIS
• Authors: J. Dewald Roode, Hilary Speight, Michael Pollock, Russell Webber
• Keywords: Communication Technologies, Digital Divide, ECIS 2004, Information Technology, Socio-techno Divide