While the digital divide might bring up the idea that enterprises will be able to sell more and more computers during the next years another truth looks as if there was no hope for a certain percentage of the population to get out of their marginalization, their position of being "have nots".
Studies show that the issue of different colors of skin play a role in this, but more than "racial" issues it is income, age and education that decides about the have and have nots.
There exist ~ 103 million households in the USA.
~6 million do not even have telephone access. Why should they care about computers?
The digital divide cuts the world into centers and peripheries, not into nations, as it runs through the boarder between the North and the South as well as through nations.
The most different institutions with various interests in their background work in that field; not rarely paid by governments, which are interested in inhabitants, connected to the net and economy.
see also:
Searching information about the digital divide one will find informations saying that it is growing all the time whereas other studies suggest the contrary, like this one
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The Net connections can be based on wire-line and wireless access technolgies.
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Usually several kinds of network connections are employed at once. Generally speaking, when an E-mail message is sent it travels from the user's computer via copper wires or coaxial cables
Satellite communication
Although facing competition from fiber-optic cables as cost-effective solutions for broadband data transmission services, the space industry is gaining increasing importance in global communications. As computing, telephony, and audiovisual technologies converge, new wireless technologies are rapidly deployed occupying an increasing market share and accelerating the construction of high-speed networks.
Privatization of satellite communication
Until recently transnational satellite communication was provided exclusively by intergovernmental organizations as
Scheduled privatization of intergovernmental satellite consortia:
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When Intelsat began to accumulate losses because of management failures and the increasing market share of fiber-optic cables, this organizational scheme came under attack. Lead by the USA, the Western industrialized countries successfully pressed for the privatization of all satellite consortia they are members of and for competition by private carriers.
As of February 2000, there are 2680 satellites in service. Within the next four years a few hundred will be added by the new private satellite systems. Most of these systems will be so-called Low Earth Orbit satellite systems, which are capable of providing global mobile data services on a high-speed level at low cost.
Because of such technological improvements and increasing competition, experts expect satellite-based broadband communication to be as common, cheap, and ubiquitous as satellite TV today within the next five or ten years.
Major satellite communication projects
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Source: Analysys Satellite Communications Database
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Nadia Thalman is director of
Ever since the publication of her Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway has been providing widely received theoretical contributions to the debate around artificial life. In the "Manifesto" she considers the political and social implications of the advent of artificial beings. A radical feminist, Haraway combines in her theoretical approach philosophy, cultural studies and gender studies.
Hyperlink to Donna Haraway: