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"Given algorithmic systems’ impact and sometimes harm on people’s everyday life, information access and agency, awareness of algorithms has the potential to be a critical issue."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1736124

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A New Digital Divide inInternet-of-Things Skills

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A New Digital Divide inInternet-of-Things Skills

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"We argue that comparative advantages of

the IoT to people will vary based on differentiated skills and resources, enabling smaller groups of

people to beneﬁt, and disadvantaging others in new ways"

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Applying Technology to the Global Refugee Crisis

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Applying Technology to the Global Refugee Crisis

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"In the past two decades, the global population of forcibly displaced people has more than doubled, from 34 million in 1997 to 71 million in 2018. Amid this growing crisis, refugees and the organizations that assist them have turned to technology as an important resource, and technology can and should play an important role in solving problems in humanitarian settings."

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Noble, S.U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism . New York University Press. (p. 161)

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Cultural Hegemony of the US, Linguistic Hegemony of the English Language

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Cultural Hegemony of the US, Linguistic Hegemony of the English Language

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A wheel of policy instruments to bridge the digital divide

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A wheel of policy instruments to bridge the digital divide

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Van Dijk, J. (2020). The Digital Divide. Polity Press . (p. 189)

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From Culture Industry to Digital Culture Industry

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From Culture Industry to Digital Culture Industry

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The culture industry is a term by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the theorists of the Frankfurt School. It refers to the commercialized popular culture that functions in a similar way to industry and produces products according to the taste of the dominant class and thereby standardizing,  depoliticizing people, and conditioning them to the capitalist system by making it look like the only valid option.

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The second annual CyFyAfrica 2019 - the Conference on Technology, Innovation, and Society - took place in Tangier, Morocco, in June. It was a vibrant, diverse and dynamic gathering attended by various policymakers, UN delegates, ministers, governments, diplomats, media, tech company representatives, and academics from over 65 nations, mostly African and Asian countries. The conference's central aim, stated unapologetically, was to bring forth the continent's voices in the global discourse. The president of Observer Research Foundation (one of the co-hosts of the conference) in their opening message emphasized that the voices of Africa's youth need to be put front and center as the continent increasingly comes to rely on technology to address its social, educational, health, economic, and financial issues. The conference was intended in part to provide a platform for those young people, and they were afforded that opportunity, along with many Western scholars from various universities and tech developers from industrial and commercial sectors.

The African equivalent of Silicon Valley's tech startups can be found in any corner of the continent - "Sheba Valley" in Addis Ababa, "Yabacon Valley" in Lagos, and "Silicon Savannah" in Nairobi, to name a few - and are pursuing "cutting-edge innovations" in such sectors as banking, finance, heath care, and education. The continent does stand to benefit from these various technological and artificial-intelligence developments: Ethiopian farmers, for example, can use crowdsourced data to forecast and yield better crops. And data can help improve services within education and the health care sector, as this World Heath Organization bulletin details. Data can help bridge the huge inequalities that plague every social, political, and economical sphere. By revealing pervasive gender disparities in key positions, for instance, data can help bring the disparities to the fore and, further, support social and structural reforms.

Having said that, however, this is not what I want to discuss here. There are already countless die-hard technology worshipers both within and outside the continent who are only too happy to blindly adopt anything "AI," "smart," or "data-driven" without a second thought of the possible unintended consequences. Wherever the topic of technological innovation arises, what we typically find is tech advocates offering rationales for attempting to digitize every aspect of life, often at any cost. If the views put forward by many of the participants at CyFyAfrica 2019 are anything to go by, we already have plenty of such tech evangelists in (and outside) Africa, blindly accepting ethically suspect and dangerous practices and applications under the banner of "innovative," "disruptive," and "game changing" with little, if any, criticism or skepticism. Look no further than the speaker lineups and the topics of discussion of some of the biggest AI or machine learning conferences taking place throughout the continent: Ethical considerations, data privacy, or AI's unintended consequences hardly ever feature in these events. The upcoming Deep Learning Indaba conference in Nairobi is a typical example.

Given that we have enough tech worshipers holding the technological future of the continent in their hands, it is important to point out the cautions that need to be taken and the lessons that need to be learned from other parts of the world. Africa need not go through its own disastrous cautionary tales to discover the dark side of digitization and technologization of every aspect of life.

Data and AI seem to provide quick solutions to complex social problems. And this is exactly where problems arise. Around the world, AI technologies are gradually being integrated into decision-making processes in such areas as insurance, mobile banking, health care and education services. And from all around the African continent, various startups are emerging - e.g. Printivo in Nigeria, Mydawa in Kenya - with the aim of developing the next "cutting edge" app, tool, or system. They collect as much data as possible to analyze, infer and deduce the various behaviors and habits of "users."

But in the race to build the latest hiring app or state-of-the-art mobile banking system, startups and companies lose sight of the people behind each data point. "Data" is treated as something that is up for grabs, something that uncontestedly belongs to tech companies and governments, completely erasing individuals. This makes it easy to "manipulate behavior" or "nudge" people, often toward profitable outcomes for the companies and not the individuals. As "nudging" mechanisms become the norm for "correcting" individual's behavior, whether its eating habits or exercising routines, the private-sector engineers developing automated systems are bestowed with the power to decide what "correct" is. In the process, individuals that do not fit stereotypical images of what, for example, a "fit body" or "good eating habits" are end up being punished and pushed further to the margin. The rights of the individual, the long-term social impacts of these systems, and their consequences, intended or unintended, on the most vulnerable are pushed aside - if they ever enter the discussion at all.

AI, like big data, is a buzzword that gets thrown around carelessly; what it refers to is notoriously contested across various disciplines, and the term is impossible to define conclusively. It can refer to anything from highly overhyped deceitful robots to Facebook's machine-learning algorithms that dictate what you see on your News Feed to your "smart" fridge. Both researchers in the field and reporters in the media contribute to overhyping and exaggerating AI's capacities, often attributing it with god-like power. But as leading AI scholars such as Melanie Mitchell have emphasized, we are far from "superintelligence." Similarly, Jeff Bigham notes that in many widely discussed "autonomous" systems - be it robots or speech-recognition algorithms - much of the work is done by humans, often for little pay.

Exaggeration of the capabilities of AI systems diverts attention from the real dangers they pose, which are much more invisible, nuanced, and gradual than anything like "killer robots." AI tools are often presented as objective and value-free. In fact, some automated systems used for hiring and policing are put forward with the explicit claim that these tools eliminate human bias. Automated systems, after all, apply the same rules to everybody. But this is one of the single-most erroneous and harmful misconceptions about automated systems. As the Harvard mathematician Cathy O'Neil explains in Weapons of Math Destruction, "algorithms are opinions embedded in code." Under the guise of "AI" and "data-driven," systems are presented as politically neutral, but because of the inherently political nature of the way data is construed, collected, and used to produce certain outcomes (that align with those controlling and analyzing data), these systems alter the social fabric, reinforce societal stereotypes, and further disadvantage those already at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

AI is a tool that we create, control, and are responsible for, and like any other tool, it embeds and reflects our inconsistencies, limitations, biases, and political and emotional desires. How we see the world and how we choose to represent it is reflected in the algorithmic models of the world that we build. Therefore who builds the systems and selects the sorts and sources of data used will deeply affect the influence they may have. The results that AI systems produce reflect socially and culturally held stereotypes, not objective truths.

The use of technology within the social sphere often, intentionally or accidentally, focuses on punitive practices, whether it is to predict who will commit the next crime or who would fail to pay their mortgage. Constructive and rehabilitative questions such as why people commit crimes in the first place or what can be done to rehabilitate and support those that have come out of prison are almost never asked. Technological developments built and applied with the aim of bringing "security" and "order" often aim to punish and not rehabilitate. Furthermore, such technologies necessarily bring cruel, discriminatory, and inhumane practices to some. The cruel treatment of the Uighurs in China and the unfair disadvantaging of the poor are examples in this regard. Similarly, as cities like Johannesburg and Kampala introduce the use of facial recognition technology, the unfair discrimination and over-policing of minority groups is inevitable.

Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, the central aim of commercial companies developing AI is not to rectify bias generally but to infer the weaknesses and deficiencies of individual "users," as if people existed only as objects to be manipulated. These firms take it for granted that such "data" automatically belongs to them if they are able to grab it. The discourse around "data mining" and a "data-rich continent" - common language within Africa's tech scene - shows the extent to which the individual behind each data point remains inconsequential from their perspective.

This discourse of "mining" people for data is reminiscent of the colonizer attitude that declares humans as raw material free for the taking. As we hand decision-making regarding social issues over to automated systems developed by profit-driven corporations, not only are we allowing our social concerns to be dictated by corporate incentives (profit), but we are also handing over complex moral questions to the corporate world.

Behavior-based "personalization" - in other words, the extraction, simplification, and instrumentalization of human experience for capitalist ends, which Shoshana Zuboff details in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - may seem banal compared with the science fiction threats sometimes associated with AI. However, it is the basis by which people are stripped of their autonomy and are treated as mere raw data for processing. The inferences that algorithmic models of behavior make do not reflect a neutral state of the world or offer any in-depth causal explanations but instead reinscribe strongly held social and historical injustices.

Technology in general is never either neutral or objective; it is a mirror that reflects societal bias, unfairness, and injustice. For example, during the conference, a UN delegate addressed work that is being developed to combat online counterterrorism but disappointingly focused explicitly on Islamic groups, portraying an unrealistic and harmful image of online terrorism: over the past nine years, there have been 350 white extremist terrorism attacks in Europe, Australia, and North America; one third of all such attacks in this time period in the U.S. are due to white extremism. This illustrates the worrying point that stereotypically held views drive what is perceived as a problem and the types of technology we develop in response. We then hold what we find through the looking glass of technology as evidence of our biased intuitions and further reinforce stereotypes.

Some key global players in technology - for example, Microsoft and Google's DeepMind from the industry sector; and Harvard and MIT from the academic sphere - have begun to develop ethics boards and ethics curricula in acknowledgment of the possible catastrophic consequences of AI on society. Various approaches and directions have been advanced by various stakeholders to pursue fair and ethical AI, and this multiplicity of perspectives is not a weakness but a strength: It is necessary for yielding a range of remedies to address the various ethical, social, and economical issues AI generates in different contexts and cultures. But too often, attempts to draft the latest "ethics framework" or the "best guideline to ethical AI" center the status quo as the standard and imply that the solution put forward is the only necessary one. Insisting on a single one-size-fits-all ethical framework for AI, as one of the conference's academic speakers advised, is not only unattainable but would also worsen the problems it is meant to address in those contexts it wasn't equipped to anticipate.

Society's most vulnerable are disproportionally affected by the digitization of various services. Yet many of the ethical principles applied to AI are firmly utilitarian. What they care about is "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people," which by definition means that solutions that center minorities are never sought. Even when unfairness and discrimination in algorithmic decision-making processes are brought to the fore - for instance, upon discovering that women have been systematically excluded from entering the tech industry, minorities forced into inhumane treatment, and systematic biases have been embedded in predictive policing systems, to mention a few - the "solutions" sought hardly center those on the margin that are disproportionally affected: Mitigating proposals devised by corporate and academic ethics boards are often developed without the consultation and involvement of the people that are affected. But their voice needs to be prioritized at every step of the way, including in the designing, developing, and implementing of any technology, as well as in policymaking. This requires actually consulting and involving vulnerable groups of society, which might (at least as far as the West's Silicon Valley is concerned) seem beneath the "all-knowing" engineers who seek to unilaterally provide a "technical fix" for any complex social problem.

As Africa grapples with catching up with the latest technological developments, it must also protect the continent's most vulnerable people from the consequential harm that technology can cause. Protecting and respecting the rights, freedoms and privacy of the very youth that the leaders of the CyFyAfrica conference want to put at the front and center should be prioritized. This can only happen with guidelines and safeguards for individual rights and freedom in place in a manner that accounts for local values, contexts and ways of life, as well as through the inclusion of critical voices as an important part of the tech narrative. In fairness, CyFyAfrica did allow for some critical voices in some of the panels. However, the minor critical voices were buried under the overwhelming tech enthusiasts.

Following the conference, speakers were given the opportunity to share their views and research for publication in a semi-academic journal run by the Observer Research Foundation. Like other speakers at the conference, I was encouraged to submit my observations and reflections. However, when I submitted a version of this essay, it was deemed too critical by the editorial board and therefore unsuitable for publication. Ironically, the platform that claims to give voice to the youth of Africa only does so when that voice aligns with the narratives and motives of the powerful tech companies, policy makers, and governments.

The question of technologization and digitalization of the continent is a question of what kind of society we want to live in. African youth solving their own problems means deciding what we want to amplify and show the rest of the world. It also means not importing the latest state-of-the-art machine learning systems or any other AI tools without questioning what the underlying purpose is, who benefits, and who might be disadvantaged by the implementation of such tools.

Moreover, African youth leading the AI space means creating programs and databases that serve various local communities and not blindly importing Western AI systems founded upon individualistic and capitalist drives. It also means scrutinizing the systems we ourselves develop and setting ethical standards that serve specific purposes instead of accepting Western perspectives as the standard. In a continent where much of the narrative is hindered by negative images such as migration, drought, and poverty, using AI to solve our problems ourselves means using AI in a way we want, to understand who we are and how we want to be understood and perceived: a continent where community values triumph and nobody is left behind.

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The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa - Real Life

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Startups are importing and imposing AI systems founded on individualistic and capitalist drives

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Introduction to Ch.7. "Exploitation at Foxconn" in Digital Labor and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs (2014).

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Digital colonialism is threatening the Global South

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Digital colonialism is threatening the Global South

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Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School

File: A billboard advertising Facebook's Free Basics initiative, which was banned in India for violating net neutrality laws, is seen in a photo dated Dec 30, 2015 [File: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters]

Silicon Valley corporations are taking over the digital economy in the Global South, and nobody is paying attention.

In South Africa, Google and Facebook dominate the online advertising industry, and are considered an to local media. Uber has captured so much of the traditional taxi industry that drivers have been in the "South African taxi wars". Similar battles have broken out in

Meanwhile, Netflix is not only pulling subscribers away from local television services, they are in Africa. The streaming giant is now the source of Internet traffic across the world.

In India, Facebook was its "Free Basics" programme that gave the social media giant control over the Internet experience on mobile phones. Indians protested that the service deepened Facebook's monopoly power and subjected them censorship and surveillance. Nevertheless, Facebook is expanding in most countries, including India, and Free Basics is active in over sixty countries. Through the project, Facebook has retained its influence in countries like

What is going on?

What is digital colonialism?

Under classic colonialism, Europeans dispossessed native peoples of their land, exploited their labour, exercised extraterritorial governance, and perpetuated dependency and plunder through strategic underdevelopment. Corporations like the East India Company played a pivotal role in this process. In their pursuit of profit and power, Europeans took ownership and control of critical infrastructure, including ports, waterways, and railroads.

Similar to the technical architecture of classic colonialism, digital colonialism is rooted in the design of the tech ecosystem for the purposes of profit and plunder. If the railways and maritime trade routes were the "open veins" of the Global South back then, today, digital infrastructure takes on the same role: Big Tech corporations use proprietary software, corporate clouds, and centralised Internet services to spy on users, process their data, and spit back manufactured services to subjects of their data fiefdoms.

For example, Google siphons user data from a variety of sources - Google Search, Maps, Ads, Android location services, Gmail - to provide them with one of the richest collections of information on the planet. Through the and proprietary control of their " ", they ensure the world's data flows into their corporate cloud. They then process the data for consumer and business services.

Thus, tech corporations have expanded their products across the globe, extracting data and profit from users all around the world while concentrating power and resources in one country, the US (with China a growing competitor).

Poorer countries are overwhelmed by readily available services and technology, and cannot develop their own industries and products that compete with Western corporations. They are also left unable to protect their people from exploitation.

Can Big Tech be held accountable?

The public cannot hold Big Tech corporations accountable if they cannot take direct action to change how their software works.

It is for this reason that American software programmer Richard Stallman started advocating for Free and Open Source Software in the early 1980s. "A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power," Stallman reasoned.

People should be given the freedom to control their computers, which requires them having access to software source code - the set of instructions that tells your computer what to do.

Free Software licenses are written to invert the authoritarian power of proprietary software: They secure the user's freedom to use, study, modify, and share the software. They keep software free and open for everyone and enable accountability.

However, Free Software alone is not enough to protect the public interest because in recent years, surveillance capitalism has given rise to centralised Internet services outside of user control. Platforms like Facebook function as "information intermediaries" which stand between end users. Want to send a picture to a friend? You send it to Facebook first, and then your friend downloads it from Facebook.

Cloud services provide petabytes of information to corporations, who use the data to train their artificial intelligence systems. AI uses Big Data to "learn" - it requires millions of pictures to "understand" how to recognise, say, the letter "A" in its different fonts and forms. In this sense, "data is the new oil".

When applied to humans, the sensitive details of people's personal lives become an incredibly valuable resource that tech giants are incessantly trying to extract.

The concentration of data is concentration of power

"Feedback effects" of Big Data make the situation worse: Those who have more and better data can create the best artificial intelligence services, which attracts more users, which gives them even more data to make the service better, and so on.

, economies of scale, and vast resources for infrastructure, training, and product development further concentrate corporate power. Silicon Valley can hire the best computer engineers, purchase startups and competitors, and lobby governments for favours.

Add to this the fact that the Internet is universal and platforms are not easy to restrict without draconian censorship tools like the "Great Firewall" of China, and we have a situation where Silicon Valley is concentrating power at the global level.

American Big Tech companies are just as dominant as they are inside of it. And with US markets relatively saturated, they are seeking to colonise emerging markets .

Microsoft and Google, for example, are investing in efforts to place their software in through programmes like Microsoft Partners in Learning and Google Classroom. This hooks young people into their products from an early age, and biases Global South software developers towards their software ecosystems.

Big Tech corporations are also building their own server farms in foreign countries to capture emerging markets and shift them towards the Silicon Valley model of a centralized cloud economy.

At the same time, countries in the Global South are less able to protect their people from exploitation. Countries with power - the United States, the EU states, Australia - are the ones calling the shots on Big Tech companies.

This poses a problem: Users around the globe are being subjected to the norms set by US-based companies. "Code is law" in the sense that computer code constitutes privatised regulation binding all users. If YouTube wants to block, say, the sharing of content protected by fair use, there's not much that foreign jurisdictions can do.

The same goes for speech regulation, content moderation, and freedom of association: The major social networks use algorithms and employee rulebooks to censor content, shape what people see in news feeds, and determine which activist and other social groups people are allowed to form on their platforms.

This means that users outside of the US are under the de facto extraterritorial governance of Silicon Valley.

What can the Global South do?

If a system is designed for exploitation and control, then it needs to be changed. Railroads are great, but bypassing local villages for imperial power is not. If you want to stop exploitation and surveillance, you have to redesign these systems.

A movement to combine Free and Open Source Software with tools to re-decentralise the Internet is attempting to do just that. In 2010, Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen the : Free Software that turns computer devices into personal servers that provide the technology needed to run cloud services without a middle-man in control.

can host decentralised social networks like or as well as email and messenger services. It builds in the option for Tor onion routing to protect your privacy and allows you to store your data on your home device - and access it on the go.

The FreedomBox project incorporates major contributions from core developers Sunil Adapa and Joseph Nuthalapati. Over the past few months, they worked with NGO Swecha to successfully implement FreedomBoxes in twelve Indian villages .

The project uses old devices to offer WiFi connectivity to villagers while providing them decentralised services and blocking surveillance. The FreedomBox project is expanding to other villages, and it is open-sourced and built for replication across the world.

Tech that is Free and Open Source, interoperable, and decentralised can be built so that no institution anywhere in the world could own or control it. This would alleviate many problems of territorial jurisdiction. Adding in new legal tools to complement an overhaul of the digital ecosystem would further strengthen digital rights.

As the Vice Chancellor of Wits University in South Africa , "Considerations of [technological innovations] have not even entered the public discourse and we are at a collective risk of once again merely being victims of economic forces and processes beyond our control." , few are contemplating how this actually works.

It's time to talk about Silicon Valley as an imperial force, and take seriously the fundamental changes needed to stop digital colonialism.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

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Digital colonialism is threatening the Global South

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Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School Silicon Valley corporations are taking over the digital economy in the Global South, and nobody is paying attention. In South Africa, Google and Facebook dominate the online advertising industry, and are considered an to local media.

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Capitalism replicates the methods of 19th-century imperialism, which is based on accumulation by colonial dispossession, seizing resources in non-western countries. The New Imperialism is based on accumulation by dispossession. Drawing from Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, David Harvey coined the term accumulation by dispossession to refer to neoliberal global capitalism’s commodification of culture, knowledge, social welfare, practices of privatization, and the creation and manipulation of crises (Fuchs, 2014, p. 356). Digitality opens new milieus of accumulation and exploitation.
Fuchs, C. (2014). Digital Labor and Karl Marx. Routledge

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Social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., accumulate capital by commodifying the online activities of users. The term Internet prosumer commodification is used by Christian Fuchs. Corporate social media platforms monitor and commodify data, which then facilitates targeted advertising according to users’ interests and activities.

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Technology  and Uneven development; Rural-Urban Bias

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Technology  and Uneven development; Rural-Urban Bias

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Low access rates attributed to affordability, stemming from an urban bias, and leading to sparse and limited digital infrastructure in underdeveloped and rural areas; thus creating income gaps between developed and underdeveloped communities

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Alienation and Digital Labor through the Marxist lens

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Alienation and Digital Labor through the Marxist lens

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Alienation is threefold. Alienation from the self ( labor-power is controlled by capital), alienation from the object (the objects of labor and the instruments of labor are not owned by the worker ), and the subject-object (the products of labor are not used by the worker). Fuchs elaborates alienation on corporate social media: “a) in relation to subjectivity, they are coerced by isolation and social disadvantage if they leave monopoly capital platforms (such as Facebook); b) in relation to the objects of labor, their human experiences come under the control of capital; c) in relation to the instruments of labor, it is not the users who own the platforms, but private companies that also commodify user data; and d) in the relation to the product of labor, the platform individually controls profit (229).
Fuchs, C. (2015). Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media, Routledge.

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A defining characteristic of digital transformation success is a diverse digital culture. This cultural approach maximizes human capital. Tightly coupling the adoption of digital transformation with the elimination of cultural bias across the organization; increases the odds for the success.

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If cultural disparities are not considered, aspirations of universal access will remain obscured.

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Knowledge and Information in the Digital Age

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Knowledge and Information in the Digital Age

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Digitality changed the way knowledge is created, kept, and disseminated.

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Digital Transformation and Sustainability 

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Digital Transformation and Sustainability 

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Digital technologies are not only transforming markets and creating new paradigms of doing business, the technologies are also providing solutions to organizations for addressing Sustainability challenges.

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Even before the advent of a global pandemic, executive teams faced a challenging and dynamic environment as they sought to protect their institutions from cyberattack, without degrading their ability to innovate and extract value from technology investments.

Over the past year, we’ve sought to publish cybersecurity articles in various areas that will help senior executives consider their options and make pragmatic decisions about how to move forward in making the right tradeoffs in managing technology risks.

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CRITICAL THEORY  aims to understand society to reveal society’s oppressive practices in order to work towards a change. Often understood as the works of the Frankfurt School with its starting point as the work of Karl Marx on capitalist economic relations,  critical theory engages in questions such as power, domination, exploitation, and the status quo. Its difference from traditional theory is that, while traditional theory seeks to understand society to explain it and to reach “objective” knowledge, critical theory rejects the notion of knowledge-impartiality, expressing that objects of knowledge are situated in social and historical contexts

References:

Crossman (2020), Corradetti (n.d.)

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Monitoring and collection of data on the users of online technologies has become a central dimension of the digital information economy.

Lupton, D. (2014). Theorising digital society. In Digital Sociology. Routledge.

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Developing countries in subordinate positions

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Developing countries in subordinate positions

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The digital divide is thus not simply a question of access to digital technologies but about the capacity to make meaningful use of its access.

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"Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Information Needs."

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"Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Information Needs."

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Keilty, P. (2010). Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition, M. J. Bates & M. N. Maack (eds), pp. 3275-3280.

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"Older Adults’ Information Needs and Behavior."

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"Older Adults’ Information Needs and Behavior."

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Williamson, K. & Asla, T. (2010). Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition. M.J. Bates & M. N. Maack (eds), pp. 3938-3943.

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"Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism", Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018

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"Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism", Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018

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" MDPI has the mission to foster open scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines."

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Introducing Smart Cities: A Transdisciplinary Journal on the Science and Technology of Smart Cities

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The concept of a smart city includes a high degree of information technology integration, but goes beyond the use of ICT for better resource use and less emissions. [...]

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"To be a sustainable and inclusive smart city, thoughtful consideration of diverse social groups of age, education level, and region are needed in smart cities’ urban policies."

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"When social and economic inequality persists and digital technologies are implicated, it is crucial to enable a dialogue that may reveal alternative pathways which challenge the presumed natural direction of digital innovation"

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"The mobile platform is regarded as a novel and effective tool to reduce the digital divide"

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Digital Technology during the COVID-19: connecting people to services  including health, education, culture, manufacturing and transport.  

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Digital Technology during the COVID-19: connecting people to services  including health, education, culture, manufacturing and transport.  

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If knowledge is reduced to the result of an algorithm, those who have easy access to technological means of knowledge can easily obtain and even manipulate knowledge. David Berry (2014) argues “the result of this new circuit of power and knowledge is that knowledge is now connected directly to wealth” (177).
Berry, D.M. (2014). Critical Theory and the Digital. Bloomsbury.

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Public/ private
Users

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"Term that describes the uneven distribution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in society. The digital divide encompasses differences in both access (first-level digital divide) and usage (second-level digital divide) of computers and the Internet between (1) industrialized and developing countries (global divide), (2) various socioeconomic groups within single nation-states (social divide), and (3) different kinds of users with regard to their political engagement on the Internet (democratic divide)."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/digital-divide
Some authors add a third-level: familiarity.

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It can be a matter of access or skills. Barriers the elderly face to using ICTs, include anxiety about technology, lack of interest, health or disability issues, lack of opportunity, training and cost (Russel et al., 2008). Technology is changing at a very fast rate and even people who had a certain familiarity with computers cannot keep pace with those changes when they retire because they no longer update their skills. As the population of the more economically developed countries is aging, this situation is getting worse.
Russel, C., Campbell, A., & Hughes, I. (2008).
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6612.2008.00284.x
Willis, S. L. (2006). https://www.jstor.org/stable/26555448

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The digital divide – characterized by a gap between information-haves and information-have-nots – is an imbalance based on more than just issues of access. Often, the digital divide is evidenced by a cultural divide – which is a split in socio-economic structures and psychologies between communities. It is within these splits that the digital divide stands more prominently, as a community’s views and values surrounding technology, which are affected by socio-economic circumstances, would stand as the first barrier to entry for most.

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Digital transformation and Smart Buildings

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Digital transformation and Smart Buildings

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Raktim Singh - Thought Leader in Digital Transformation | TEDx Speaker | Fintech Leader

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Smart Buildings Technology – Digital Transformation and Innovation in Smart Buildings - Raktim Singh

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Smart Buildings Technology - Digital Transformation and Innovation in Smart Buildings As part of this article, we will cover, smart homes, smart cities, smart apartments & smart commercial buildings. An average household has many things that need to be done and taken care of. Chores such as food prep, laundry, cleaning, and errands are generally

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COVID-19 accelerated the Digital transformation

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COVID-19 accelerated the Digital transformation

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Digitization, bridging the distance between people and organizations

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A social and technological divide between
people who have access to and feel welcomed by digital cultural heritage and those who don’t.
An inter-organisational divide between organisations that are digitised and connected and those who are not.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever. 

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever. This is how

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Research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information, and take less time, meaning the changes coronavirus have caused might be here to stay.

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Children that are left outside educational system in the time of COVID-19 due to Digital Divide

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Digital health has been a revolution for healthcare, it comprises hardware and software solutions, from software, mobile medical apps and connectivity infrastructure to AI and machine learning, not only to support decisions doctors make every day but also to provide health care to people for whom access to traditional health care is difficult. Digital health also includes technologies used in wearables, diagnostics, or as an adjunct to other medical products.
Lupton, D. (2014) .

https://doi-org.proxy.lnu.se/10.1111/soc4.12226

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A way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought.

Catherine D’Ignazione & Lauren Klein (2002)

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Webster, F. (1995), "Theories of the Information Society", Routlegde.

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Post-industrial society / Information society

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Post-industrial society / Information society

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Bell, D. 1979, "The social framework of the information society" in The Computer Age: A  20 Year View, eds. M.L. Dertoozos & J. Moses, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Bell, D. 1973, "The coming of post-industrial society", Basic Books, New York.

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Castells, Manuel (2000). "Toward a Sociology of the Network Society" in Contemporary Sociology.

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Governments decisions on digitization an internet access

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Governments decisions on digitization an internet access

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Creators of programs and apps that influence the digital society

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Creators of programs and apps that influence the digital society

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As information and knowledge are means of social power, inequalities in knowledge lead to exclusion from social resources and inequalities in social power (Bonfadelli, 2002). Usage gap is explained by van Dijk (2020) as "a systematic use of the Internet for particular goals by people of higher social class (education, income, and property) and status (social position and cultural resources) as compared to those of lower social class and status" (124). He argues that the usage gap is more critical for society than the knowledge gap because knowledge gap concerns “mental categories – learning – in using mass media” but usage gap “also refers to behavior and activities in using the Internet and other digital media. The latter are multifunctional and are drawn on for all activities in society and daily life. The behavioral and systemic effects of the usage gap are much more important than the learning effects of the knowledge gap (124).
van Dijk, J. (2020). The Digital Divide, Polity Press.

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beyond the matter of access... when the use of digital media is incorporated into daily life.  categorical inequalities->unequal distribution of resources->unequal access->unequal participation- categorical inequalities and unequal distributions of resources.
source

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Digital engagement in later life is not always desirable or possible and the provision of alternative information channels should always be good practice in health and care. However, of the 4.8 million people over 55 who are currently not online, many could experience preventative gains related to social interaction, better information, increased access to other services and enhanced self-management resources for long-term conditions and disabilities. Digital inclusion is a natural meeting point for health and social care; getting it right promises to improve the quality of older people’s lives as well as health system outcomes.

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The report finds that hurdles to access, affordability, lack of education as well as inherent biases and sociocultural norms curtail women and girls’ ability to benefit from the opportunities offered by the digital transformation. In addition, girls’ relatively lower educational enrolment in disciplines that would allow them to perform well in a digital world – such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as well as information and communication technologies – coupled with women’s and girls’ more limited use of digital tools could lead to widening gaps and greater inequality.

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Digital skills of citizens 16-64 years old in Europe

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Digital skills of citizens 16-64 years old in Europe

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The growth in teleworking seen during the Covid-19 crisis has been strongly skewed towards highly paid occupations and white-collar employment, raising concerns about the emergence of a new divide between those who can work remotely and those who cannot. Nonetheless, enforced closures of economic activities due to confinement measures resulted in many new teleworkers amongst low and mid-level clerical and administrative workers who previously had limited access to this working arrangement.

Milasi et al. (2008).

The potential for teleworking in Europe and the risk of a new digital divide

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COVID-19: a global crisis for teaching and learning

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COVID-19: a global crisis for teaching and learning

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UNESCO : Building Peace through Education, Science and Culture, communication and information

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Learn more about UNESCO's role, vision and results. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Our aim is to promote peace and security through international cooperation

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“Today, we live in a digital society in the sense that we are in an era where our lives, our relationships, our culture, and our sociality are digitised, digitalised, and affected throughout by digital processes.” (Lindgren, 2017:7)

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The geographical factor in digital divide

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The geographical factor in digital divide

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Geography is one of the major factors contributing in the digital divide. In less economically developing countries infrastructures and certain services like optical fiber or broadband may not be widely available. Beyond economic reasons, the location can also be very important; People living in more remote areas of a country, or of a particular geographic terrain, have lower access to technologies such as an adequate internet connection, in comparison to others residing in more densely populated areas because of the difficulty and cost of constructing the infrastructures.

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"Digital Democracy works in solidarity with marginalized communities to use technology to defend their rights"

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At Digital Democracy we build tools in solidarity with frontline communities. Our frontline partners represent marginalized communities worldwide, including Indigenous Peoples and ethnic minorities, whose human rights are most severely impacted by environmental abuse.

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"Rethinking digital skills in the era of compulsory computing: methods, measurement, policy and theory."

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"Rethinking digital skills in the era of compulsory computing: methods, measurement, policy and theory."

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Allmann, K. & Blank, G. (2021). Information, Communication & Society.

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Digital Infrastructures are the services that facilitate ICTs. There are two categories. Hard Infrastructure refers to physical assets that provide Connectivity & Transportation, Processing & Storage. Soft Infrastructure refers to non-physical assets such as Services & Applications, Terminals & Devices.
source

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The pandemic exposed the digital divide like never before.  Facing a global hardship, humanity needed technology and global cooperation, which emerged as an issue of vital importance from every aspect: Education, Teleworking, E-Commerce, and as source of information about heath and protection.  However, another aspect, closely associated with human nature, where digital technology proved very important in times of isolation, was communication; Due to visiting restrictions, COVID-19 patients in intensive care, many of them dying, alone without support from friends or family, experienced exceptional social isolation, anxiety and depression. Videoconferencing tools were their link with their loved ones, where the hardware and connectivity existed.

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Gender digital divide may be indirect, resulting from existing gender-based inequality factors, like education, financial independence, computer literacy, and language skills, nevertheless transposes to the digital sphere and aggravates the gender inequality.
Joiner, R. et all (2015).
https://doi-org.proxy.lnu.se/10.1002/9781118771952.ch4
Huyer, S. & Sikoska, T. (2003).
www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SHS/pdf/Overcoming-Gender-Digital-Divide.pdf

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Some have argued that we are evolving into a world of the information-rich and informationpoor, with computer access and skills forming the great divide (Castells 1997; Lyon 1988). Even though computers seem omnipresent in society, they are present in only a minority (about 40 percent) of U.S. households and only half of those households have e-mail or Web access (National Telecommunications Information Administration [NTIA] 1998). To the extent that computers with Web connections shift from an optional way of accessing important information and purchasing good and services to a mandatory means of obtaining competitive prices, a case can be made that
class differences will expand .

DILLMAN, D. A. (2001). Information Society. In Encyclopedia of Sociology (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1344–1348). Macmillan Reference USA; Gale eBooks. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3404400177/GVRL?sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=ba3f8508