Digital Divide in UK - Essay Example

It is right for countries like UK to consider their efforts to tackle the digital divide. More than ten years on from the trendy emergence of the opinion, the digital divide remains an imperative issue that requires renewed attention2. Today, we would argue strappingly against abandoning the digital divide as a feasible area for social intrusion. There is substantial evidence that the digital divide is neither dying through the maneuverings of the market, or being made out of date by improvements in technological developments; nor are the digital inequalities firmly following the well-established lines of social injustice and general inequality3.

As such, we would vie that the digital divide has continued to be the most significant social concern of recent times. In addition, it is a social issue that can be addressed by concerned stakeholders and concerned policy makers in the knowledge economy or information society – albeit requiring a carefully coherent loom to any intervention. The social rooted and complex nature of issues has prompted a logical reticence amongst sections of the IT industry and community policy, to feel that they are capable of engineering meaningful and sustained change when it comes to folks’ ICT use4. . This means the use of ICTs when necessary and where applicable.

Details of the Digital-divide      Causes The disparities in the use of information technology should not be assumed to be motionless in nature as individuals drop in and out of ICT rendezvous at different levels in life course as their state of affairs change6. Additional techno-utopian stakeholders go on storing substantial faith in power of market forces to ultimately lead to full dissemination of ICT use pretending that, its use will eventually spread from early adopters to succeeding majorities of users in the due itinerary of time7.

Many in the IT industry and policy community consider the digital divide as a dead issue, not laudable intervention of policy8. This has resulted to suggestions that, the digital divide is a historical object of 1990s and nothing like ‘last century concern’9. The primary challenge affecting policy makers is matching the affordances of ICT with daily needs, desires and interests of individuals. In this respect, the digital divided demands a complex set of responses which go beyond increasing levels of support and hardware provision, and then pretending the breach to have been bridged.

Current scenario The research carried out currently shows that, improving access will help in bridging the digital divide to some extent. Motivation and interest are the biggest barriers to accessing information and communication technology. Lack of perceived need follows this category. From the results of the analysis, 53 % of the grown up people who never use the internet say that, they “do not need to, want to, or do not have an interest.”10