The Digital Divide: An Inhibitor to Integral Human Development

This essay examines the digital divide through the lens of integral human development and identifies strategies for erasing or, at best, mitigating, the chasm. It proceeds in four parts. First, I will introduce the digital divide, identifying critical demographic and sociological data, to demonstrate how more than half of the world is digitally handicapped. Second, I will offer a critical assessment of this inequality from the perspective of integral human development. Next, I will propose the virtue of solidarity as a concrete way to motivate the global community to resolve the digital divide and, in turn, bring access and distribution of information technology in line with the demands of solidarity. Finally, I will demonstrate solidarity in action for integral human development through various in-place practices and long-term proposals for rectifying the technological gap. Since its introduction into the public square thirty years ago, access to the World Wide Web (Web) through the Internet has transformed social communication, commerce, and politics in revolutionary ways. This explosive growth of information communication technology (ICT) is often celebrated as a democratic and participatory medium where everyone is ‘LinkedIn’ on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. This popular sentiment, however, fails to acknowledge that the transformative impacts of communications technology have been limited in its reach. Such a claim of universal unfettered connectedness is based on an uninformed understanding or a lack of exposure to scientific data. A sizeable portion of the global village remains disconnected entirely from accessing the WEB and enjoying its “significant positive impacts.” While the “new velocity” of communications technology has enhanced the quality of social, economic, and political participation and increased exchanges in all these areas, there is a large portion of the world’s population which does not has or has limited access to the Internet. The socio-economic political construction of what has been termed the “digital divide” has marginalized an often already vulnerable segment of the global 1 This is not to ignore the ways that ICT has impacted cultures and peoples in a negative way. Pope Francis in Laudato Si offers an honest appraisal of ICT teaching that “The social dimensions of global change include the effects of technological innovations on employment, social exclusion, an inequitable distribution and consumption of energy and other services, social breakdown, increased violence and a rise in new forms of social aggression, drug trafficking, growing drug use by young people, and the loss of identity.” (Pope Francis, Laudato Si, retrieved June 23, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html, no. 46). While this may be true and well-documented by scholars evaluating some of the significantly challenging imports of ICT on societies, I would argue that overall the positive advancements ICT offers outweigh the negative ones. (See: Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. [WW Norton & Company, 2011]; Keen, Andrew. Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. [Macmillan, 2012]; Schmidt, Eric, and Jared Cohen. The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives. [Vintage, 2013]; and, Powers, William. Hamlet's blackberry. [HarperCollins, 2010]). 2 Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice, Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection, retrieved June 23, 2015, http://Web.pcgp.it/dati/2012-05/04-999999/Vocation%20ENG2.pdf, nos. 11-12. 3 Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection, p. 2.