The digital divide is the figurative border between peoples with access to technologies such as computers and internet and people who don’t have or have extremely limited access to computers, internet and other related technologies. The border of the digital divide is created by a variety of issues plaguing our modern day society such as culture, education, and poverty. Relating these issues of education and poverty often leads to certain races of people thus causes the digital divide to be a civil rights issue as well. The digital divide is a global phenomena and if not dealt with in a timely fashion, it may become worse and cultures and communities will only be spread further apart by the inability to interact with modern day technologies.

A good metaphor for the discussion of the digital divide in contrast to the metaphor of Windows and Macintosh is a comparison to a person who has a television with full satellite with access to thousands of channels compared to a person with basic air cable antenna access that would only receive one or two channels. Having access to only one or two channels would greatly reduce the amount of information the person watching the television would ingest and may only receive biest information on news coverage. The person with the thousand channels would have almost an unlimited amount of information to receive and could gather the sides of news stories from a variety of sources.

This idea of televisions could be a better metephor when discussing the topic of the digital divide because it actually deals with the distribution of information and it is also a topic that everyone can relate to. Everybody has witnessed the difference between satelite television and antenna television.

Work Cited

Carvin, Andy. 2000. “Mind the Gap: The Digital Divide as the Civil Rights Issue of
the New Millennium.” http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/Jan00/carvin.htm

Warschauer, Mark. 2002. “Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide.” First Monday.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/967/888