Weekly Task III: Digital Divide

The term digital divide has appeared to denote a dissidence in the family where the husband spent too much time behind a computer to the prejudice of everything else, and his wife could not live with it. Now this funny etymology has been forgotten long time ago, and now describes the fact that the world can be divided into people who do have and people who don't have access and the capability to use the Internet. For example, in Finland, more than 50% of the population have access to the Internet, while in India only 0.05%.  

According to generally accepted views on the information society, its specificity is that the free exchange of information contributes to overcoming poverty and inequality, but for those who disconnected from this exchange, the prospects are dramatically deteriorate. Hence the idea of ​​deliberate "policy of exclusion," which is led by one or another countries and communities - instead of the previous policy of repression.
After we have defined what is "digital divide", we can write our ideas concerning it, based on four governmental and persons points of view.

View 1: Jack Kemp, Freedom Works
Jack Kemp has stated, "The real issue is the lack of wealth-creating opportunities and access to capital in the inner cities and depressed rural areas – the access-to-capital divide." He thinks the government should let private enterprise solve the market problems and should stick to lowering interest rates and removing regulatory barriers. This problem, as two-sided coin – from the one hand, government should solve economical problems, and on the other hand, take actions regarding issue of digital divide. We all know that for access to the Internet, not only the connection is needed, but also a computer, an ADSL modem and and everything else costs money. We believe, that this problem will be solved, if only the government take care of increasing income and life level of the people of rural areas. To sum up, our group agrees with Mr. Kemp's idea that on the way of solving this issue, the first things to be solved are lack of job, education in that areas and a high crime level.

View 2: UK Government
According to the British government's plan, students would be offered free computers for their online studies at home. Though it may seem very sweet at first, in reality no one can prove in which purposes the leaned computers will be used (gaming, watching movies, social networks, etc). That is why this project may be just a loss of huge amounts of money. Speaking about the second project ("digital challenge prize") it seems not so profitable as well. Firstly, it is difficult to understand, how a local authority may influence citizens minds so much. Only a small amount of people would get interested by this, because mostly, people tend to be independent and to have their own mind about what they need. It depends on the citizens themselves, to trust or not. Moreover, lots of authorities in Great Britain are using the Internet in lots of ways already, then why does the government has to create such strange projects?

View 3: Howard J. Blitz
Mr. Howard J. Blitz points that the government budget consists of the taxes and are paid by the taxpayers. In the world exist some countries where citizens get low salaries that give an opportunity only to live, the percent of taxation is very high and no dramatic changes in quality of life. They pay taxes, because they are fear of violent actions that can be taken by the government to punish them. Moreover, people don’t know where money are going and what they are working for. In our opinion that is not right, government should not be the oppressor, nation is just an employer of the government. Of course, that would be nice if the government help to solve this problem of digital divide using our tax money and may be the situation will became better. To solve or not to solve the digital divide problem, that might be the question. The answer will give the audience – nation. Government must make a survey and decide who would like to have 100 Mbps Internet.

View 4: Commission May Declare Broadband 'A Universal Right'
As the  European Commission states, the Internet connection may be established as a universal right for every single person. Now the set connection speed is extremely low - only 28.8 kbits/second dial-up, and the EC wants to establish a broadband connection, which means much higher speeds. High speed Internet access is needed because of the progress and innovations, no one wants to lag behind. Moreover, the dial-up connection speed is totally uncomfortable, that is why the Internet may seem frustrating for beginners, people, who have just started using the Internet and want to try it for themselves without any payments to the telecom companies in order not to loose money, if they (beginners) would not like it.