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Abstract: The digital divide has been historically been understood too simplistically, as gaps in physical access to computers and the Internet among various identity groups. As a result, approaches for ending digital inequities, such as adding more computers to all schools and classrooms, have failed to take into account the historical and current social, cultural, political, and economic systems of power and privilege of which the digital divide is a symptom. This article examines this problem in the context of a greater picture of race, gender, class, language, and ability privilege, moving toward a more progressive approach for dismantling the digital divide.
Keywords: technology, equity, access, digital divide, Internet.
By August 2000, women had surpassed men to become a majority of the U.S. online population (National Telecommunications and Information Administration [NTIA], 2000) leading many instructional technology scholars to hail the end of the gender digital divide -- gaps in computer and Internet access rates between women and men. If more women than men were using the Internet, the logic went, equality had been achieved. (The slightly larger overall number of girls and women, as compared with boys and men, using the Internet was consistent with the slightly larger overall number of girls and women, as compared with boys and men, in the U.S. population.) But girls and women continued to trail boys and men in educational and career pursuits related to computers and technology, due largely to a lack of encouragement, or blatant discouragement, from educators, peers, the media, and the wider society. And women remained virtually locked out of the increasingly techno-driven global economy. Meanwhile, men were much more likely to recognize computers and the Internet as tools for economic and professional gain at much higher rates than women, who were more likely to conceptualize these technologies as gateways for pursuing hobbies and friendly correspondence. The equalizing of Internet access rates between girls and boys and between women and men signified a significant step toward digital equity. But if we look through a different lens, one painted with the sociohistory of sexism and male privilege in the U.S., a much more complex conceptualization for "access," the heart of digital equity, emerges.
This conceptualization, which continues to emerge through the critical study of a fairly...