Center for the Education of Women announces 2001 scholarship recipients

Digital divide is just a new face on old problems, researchers find

ANN ARBOR—The digital divide, both in the United States and in most other nations, is a social problem rather than a technological one and is merely the most recent expression of earlier social and economic divides. These are among the conclusions that an international workshop of digital divide researchers—known as the D3 group—will present at the annual conference of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) meeting here Oct. 19-21.

The D3 group is sponsored by the Alliance for Community Technology at the University of Michigan, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the U-M School of Information.

The CPSR audience also will hear a report on the conflicting results of digital divide research done by government and commercial interests. Government-sponsored research in the United States has tended to show the digital divide gap increasing, while recent industry-sponsored research—which often gets more media coverage—has shown an opposite trend. D3 researchers say conclusions from the government-sponsored research are more reliable because that work has looked at larger and more representative data sets, mostly from the U.S. census.

The D3 group comprises 23 doctoral students from more than a dozen countries. Largely a virtual group, they first met face-to-face this past August in Ann Arbor to focus on their shared research interest in bridging the gaps between the infotech haves and have-nots. At that meeting, they presented working papers on such topics as differences in effective digital divide policy across developed and developing nations, the role of community networks and technology centers in narrowing the gap, and gender and cultural aspects of the divide.

D3 group researchers include Adam Banks (Pennsylvania State University), Peter Benjamin (University of the Witswatersrand/Aalborg University), Carmen Pérez Camacho (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), Batsirai Mike Chivhanga (City University London), Christina Courtright (Indiana University), Blanca Gordo (University of California at Berkeley), Eszter Hargittai (Princeton University), Leigh Keeble (University of Teesside), Cliff Lampe (University of Michigan), Yan Li (Peking University),

Rowena Martineau (University of Michigan), Bharat Mehra (University of Illinois), Rafael Avilés Merens (University of Havana), Rory O’Brien (University of Toronto), Dara O’Neil (Georgia Institute of Technology), Randall Pinkett (MIT), Sal Rivas (University of Michigan), Moussa Sarr (University of Laval), Florencio Ceballos Schaulsohn (Ecole de Hautes Etudes en SciencesSociales), Tangi Steen (University of South Australia), Kent Unruh (University of Washington), Stefan Welling (University of Bremen), and Kate Williams (University of Michigan).

More information on the Oct. 19-21 Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility conference can be found at www.cpsr.org.