Ramifications of the Participation Gap

We must implement thoughtful training programs that engage the students that already feel marginalized. Warschauer states in his paper “Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide” that “access to ICT [Information and communication technology] is embedded in a complex array of factors encompassing physical, digital, human, and social resources and relationships. Content and language, literacy and education, and community and institutional structures must all be taken into account if meaningful access to new technologies is to be provided” (4). If students are guided correctly, the digital age has enormous power to reshape our world. “The primary benefit of moving to a global online culture that is more participatory and that requires higher digital literacy skills is that is may lead to stronger democracies…This stronger democracy will stem from more people becoming engaged in the making, interpreting, and remaking of meaning in the culture…but only if we manage to teach digital literacy effectively” (Palfrey 129). The ramifications of not addressing digital literacy in libraries and schools have great implications.

Nonusers are excluded from the same opportunities to remake meaning in our culture, but they will still feel the effects of their peers who are reshaping it. They will be living by someone else’s interpretations, someone else’s definition of meaning, and they will have less opportunity to shape their identities in the world. Palfrey and Gasser state that the digital native is increasingly “using networked public spaces as crucial environments to learn socialization as well as identity development" (26). This identity development creates different communities of social norms that will manifest in all areas of their lives. This experience is “central to a Digital Native’s emerging identity” (23). Digital Natives are creating more content than ever before, but the quality of content is questionable. “…the Digital Natives—the savvy users—are not in great danger. The people we should worry about instead are those users who fall on the other side of the participation gap: young people growing up in the digital age who do not have the digital literacy skills to control their identities” (37). These non-users will not have the sophistication to create content or control their “digital dossiers” that users of technology do (39). Palfrey continues to say, “If left alone, these digital gaps will cause other unhealthy gaps in society to widen” (279).

This participation gap then perpetuates certain norms that exist today that marginalize people of color and other groups that have historically had “other” status in society. “…those who are already marginalized will have fewer opportunities to access and use computers and the Internet…the goal of using ICT with marginalized groups is not to overcome the digital divide, but rather to further a process of social inclusion…a matter not only of an adequate share of resources, but also of ‘participation in the determination of both individual and collective life chances’” (Warschauer 5-6). Those who create meaning in society will continue to hold the power within it—leaving the rest to follow along beneath it unless the institutions of education explicitly create systems of inclusion. As Nick Couldry, professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London, writes, “If we agree with Jan van Dijk that ‘the position of people in media networks will largely determine their position in society,’ then solving this divide must be an issue for social justice” (251). Technology should be a “source of opportunity rather than as a reinforcement of privilege” (DiMaggio 3). Digital literacy must be taught for students to be socially included or we create more social exclusion in greater spectrums.

The quality of use should be of primary importance in developing training for users. “As was the case for education, we anticipate that high rates of Internet penetration will not eliminate inequality so much as increase the salience of new kinds of inequality—inequality among Internet users in the extent to which they are able to reap benefits from their use of the technology” (DiMaggio 8). This is not the vision of those implementing technology, but it is the dire reality of society today. Without training, students are left to flounder within the participation gap on their own—and often, it is a gap they cannot overcome. Furthermore, studies show that those who are just adopting technology do it in a realm with less support than those who were early adopters of technology. “More recent converts to the Internet are often less sophisticated and more isolated” (DiMaggio 12). These new adopters are then more likely to have less social support and may relegate themselves to using technology for games and social mediums that are less sophisticated forums than creating media and assessing information that furthers their educational opportunities.