Digital Equity

The term digital divide was coined in the 1980s to describe gaps in access to computers and the Internet among individuals and groups based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, first language, disability, and other social or cultural identities. Early conceptualizations of the digital divide tended to conceive access only in terms of physical access to or ownership of these technologies. In other words, if somebody lived in a household in which the Internet or a computer was available, or if she or he attended a school with a computer lab, that individual was perceived as having Internet or computer access.

But in the 1990s, as critical cultural theorists, social justice educators, and other scholar-activists began to situate and analyze the digital divide within larger analyses of racism, sexism, classism, linguicism, and imperialism, they found these early conceptualizations of the digital divide to be lacking complexity as well as sociohistical and sociopolitical context. For example, by 2000 U.S. women had surpassed U.S. men to become a majority of the U.S. online population. This led many information technology scholars to hail the end of the gender digital divide. 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 while men were more likely to recognize computers and the Internet as tools for economic and professional gain. The equalizing of Internet access rates between girls and boys and between women and men was a significant step toward the elimination of the gender digital divide—a step toward equality. But when more critical scholars with a deeper understanding of equity and social justice looked through a different lens, one painted with the full historical scope of sexism at local, national, and global levels, a much more complex conceptualization for “access”began to emerge. If we are to understand authentically the cross-group gaps in computer and Internet access, these scholars insisted, we first must understand these gaps as symptoms of existing systemic inequities. They began reshaping the digital divide dialogue, broadening its scope, and asking deeper questions about the role of cybertechnologies in education and the larger society.

Emerging from these efforts was the digital equity movement. This movement was, and continues to be, dedicated to (a) challenging the notion that computers and the Internet are inherently the “great equalizers”of society and the world, (b) uncovering ways in which an uncritical endorsement of technological “progress”in the form of educational computer technology is actually contributing to the cycle of inequities, and (c) expanding the digital divide concept of “access”beyond mere physical access to include social, cultural, and political access to these technologies and the social and economic benefits of that access. The base concern of the digital equity movement is that most conceptions of the digital divide, and as a result, most programs designed to close it, are too simplistic and thus replicate the very privilege and oppression continuum they ostensibly aim to dismantle. The base goal of the digital equity movement is to contribute to the larger social justice movement by eliminating digital inequities—racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, linguicism, ableism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression—as replicated through these electronic media.

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