Digital divide

Digital divide is the gap between people which effects their access to digital and information technology or gives them no access at all. It shows the unequal balance between societies.

Male vs Female

Recently I came across this website, Omegle, that allows you to talk to a stranger in complete anonymity. I thought this was a strange concept as we are always told; “do not talk to strangers!”

It basically puts you straight into a conversation with somebody, you are named as ‘You’ and the other participant as ‘Stranger’. You can talk and when you are bored you simply click ‘Next’ and then you get rid of that conversation and start another.

It’s the same idea as Chat Roulette, however you need a webcam for that and I havn’t got one so i can't try it out.

I was only on Omegle for 15 minutes yet I noticed the unbalance between males and females. The males seemed to have alteria motives as to why they were on such a website and their first sentence would be ‘Hi F? Cam?’ The other girls like myself were simply there to talk a bit and see what this new fad was all about.

Another way in which the divide is shown is within education. Not so much nowadays although in the 1990's the rich schools were more likely to have computers than the others.

There are 2 different types of digital division. These are global and social divide. Global shows where about in the world the people have access to the technology like the internet and social is in what different ways the people use it. Such as to gain infomation, talk to people, hobbies, plan and buy ECT.
I guess the main divide is comparing our western countries to those that are very poor and have no access to the digital world. Such as poor countries in africa. I think this divide is very hard to solve as we keep developing ours futher and futher it seems as if they are getting left so far behind making it impossible to stop the divide.

This picture shows a little boy in a less developed country who has made a mobile phone out of mud.. aww!!

Here is the problem with the digital divide shown in a diagram.

These images show where in the world the internet and computer is used and owned most. Here is a link to see the image close up http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ajanakir/20080910182710!Global_Digital_Divide1.png But just by looking at the map you can see there are more computers in North America, England and Europe and Austrailia.

I also believe a digital divide could be between generations. Both of my parents still use and buy CD's. My grandparents would think virtual chat rooms or worlds are completly ridiculous. Jenkins mentions this within the eight traits of media in the 'Generational' sector; "Young people and adults live in fundamentally different media enviroments."