In the late 1990s the world Internet map was still top-heavy, with a bias to the West: when infographics depicted data highways on a world map, the USA was brightly illuminated, with broad maritime corridors linking up with Japan and, on the other side of the country, with Europe. Just as in visualisations of global electricity consumption, the picture was still gloomy in South America, Africa and much of Asia. When the term »digital divide« first appeared in academic circles, as well as in the media and the world of politics around 15 years ago, it referred to awareness of this unequal distribution of access to information and digital means of communication. Cultural Studies circles, which always take the recipients, or, in this case, the users, as the point of departure critiqued the fact that precisely this form of exclusion exacerbated existing social inequalities.
It is not possible to categorise the term »digital divide« properly. Global organisations rapidly took the problem described on board. In this context it became part of discourse associated with civil society, and appeared in, in political papers and the idiom of NGOs. What does the »digital divide« signify nowadays? Over a number of years there has been a shift in its meaning, moving away from the unambiguous issue of access - in other words, the possibility of using technological tools - to focus on transmission speed for data packages and general scope to navigate in the information cosmos. Nevertheless, 46 per cent of the poorest households in the USA did not have a computer in 2010, and even today people still have to dial up a connection via modem in less populated areas of certain states in the USA. What’s more, the symphonic jingles of news programmes or soaps do not suddenly become audible after the peeping series of dial tones – a modem cannot transmit data fast enough to play Internet videos. You can count yourself among the happy few if you have a fibre-optic Internet connection.
More recent views of the digital divide are accompanied by more complex questions: how can the Internet be used intelligently? People who just kill time with online games don’t learn much. That is why worried teachers talk about a »time-wasting gap« when referring to gaming teenagers. Initiatives to teach »digital literacy« have now been developed. In this context Henry Jenkins, media studies expert and author of »Convergence Culture« (2006), uses the expression »participation gap« – everyone goes online sometimes but who actually participates in social and cultural projects? »The new ›hidden curriculum‹ (this refers to the social mechanisms in a school class, adjusting to the institution and its rules: author’s note) influences anyone who feels empowered and entitled to participate.«
The idea that refusing to participate can also be a political act is raised by Alejo Duque, co-initiator of the conference series »labSurlab«, which is held every year in a different country in South America and aimed at a network of media laboratories. For him, voluntary self-exclusion from networks that have »nothing ›valuable‹ to contribute to our local interests is a resistance practice«. That includes not joining large social networks at all. In a discussion with Xaver Ansgar from the collective la direkta in Medellín, Columbia last year in the context of »labSurlab«, he noted that there is a great deal of confusion in the way in which the »digital divide« is understood. For Ansgar the term describes illiteracy and access to technologies, whereas for Duque it refers to media camouflage and media-based influence. Duque turned the term around dialectically and gave it a positive spin. He turns the situation into one of »defence«: »I think that the crux of the issue lies in recognising differences and being able to configure the applications that function best in a particular context and a particular situation.«
For technologies always comprise cultural orientations that limit their usability. Just as Wikipedia cannot be an objective encyclopaedia – for where are most of its authors based? In Australia, the USA, Canada and Germany.
Media theorist and data lover Lev Manovich identifies a form of »divide« in an entirely different locus: he describes the differences in access to major social data sets as the »data analysis divide«. In his essay »Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data«, he describes the divide separating data experts from researchers without computer skills. According to Manovich people and organisations can be divided into three categories: »those who create data (both consciously and by leaving behind digital footprints), those who have the means to collect it and those who have expertise to analyse it. The first group includes pretty much everybody in the world who is using the web and/or mobile phones; the second group is smaller and the third group is much smaller still. We can refer to these three groups as new ›data-classes‹ of our ›big digital society‹.«
When the »digital divide« still described the online/offline distinction, English was the most widespread language on the Net. According to Wikipedia and global Internet statistics, English is still the language that Internet users write in most frequently – colonial history makes its influence felt in this respect, as in India, for example, English ranks as the second most frequently spoken language. However, due to China, Asia is now the largest Internet continent. Depending on whether a league table is drawn up on the basis of languages or on the basis of countries plus language, either China or the USA is number one. After a long period in which English was the language needed to explore broad swathes of the Internet, there are now large data bubbles in Russian, Chinese or Spanish. How should the »language divide« be handled?
A number of tools do of course exist: Google Translate offers an opportunity to find out, with ever greater precision, what a text is about, albeit with a certain degree of semantic untidiness. This service is integrated into more and more web sites. Users know that using this system they can gain an impression of the general gist of a text. In order to overcome the lack of clarity and offer a more precise way of approaching particular topics, blogs have developed recently that select thematic threads on the basis of the volume of comments, translate these and explain the relevant background – discussions that generate a particularly high level of traffic in the Internet cosmos. For Chinese Weibos – Twitter-blog hybrids with millions and millions of users – websites like »Tea Leaf Nation« or »Shanghaiist« take on an editorial role and translate rumours, user news and videos from Weibo-Mandarin – the sometimes rather metaphoric jargon specifically adapted to Chinese Internet censorship and its ideological filters – into English. In the Russian Internet, abbreviated as RuNet, the largest Net in Europe, the grassroots effect has also shaped use. Currently anti-Putin protests are generating considerable data traffic.
And apparently loud voices are popping up all the time in new realms of the Internet sphere: ever since Internet-capable mobile phones have appeared on the market, the digital divide increasingly seems to be narrowing. The propaganda film »Kony 2012« notched up 100 million clicks and its one-sided depiction triggered vehement reactions in the Ugandan web community. »A continent writes back«, as the headline in a Berlin daily put it. Criticism was directed above all at assertions that a search for the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army had already been underway to no avail for more than 20 years with military means, and that he is probably in a neighbouring country now. Although English is the standard language for international communication, active networks have developed on RuNet, inside the Chinese firewall and in countries across Africa, that are not accessible to outsiders without the relevant language skills (and of course it is entirely impossible to participate unless you speak the language).
Vice-versa: as Australian Cultural Studies theoretician Meaghan Morris, who teaches in Hong Kong, argues in her essay »On English as a Chinese Language: Implementing Globalization«, there are more and more situations in which English is spoken without American or British interests being involved. English has become a lingua franca which Chinese institutions use to do business in India, Thailand, Korea, the South Pacific or Mexico, whilst at the other end of the spectrum Chinese Bachelor students attend seminars in English.
When Morris once again became involved in the Anglo-American Cultural Studies discourse from her Hong Kong base while belatedly preparing her inaugural address as professor at the city’s Lingan University, she was shocked to see her discipline accused in the American journal »New Left Review« of having »a narrow-minded, national methodological disposition and an Anglo-American globalisation mission«. She describes her teaching method in Hong Kong as »locally engaged internationalism«, a lovely way of expressing the shift in thinking that has indeed already begun.

labSurlab: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/22816/labsurlab/
Latin American alternative to Facebook: https://n-1.cc/
Alejo Duque and Xaver Ansgar at labSurlab 2011: http://youtu.be/TQ7_4E5nH8Q?t=21m20s
Lev Manovich, »Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data«; http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/04/new-article-by-lev-manovich-trending.html
Tea Leaf Nation: http://tealeafnation.com/
Shanghaiist: http://shanghaiist.com/
Meaghan Morris, »On English as a Chinese Language: Implementing Globalization«; http://usyd.academia.edu/MeaghanMorris/Papers/370161/On_English_as_a_Chinese_Language_implementing_globalization

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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