Entre la alfabetización informacional y la brecha digital: Reflexiones para una reconceptualización de los fenómenos de exclusión digital

This article analyzes the evolution of the concepts I–literacy, E–literacy, informational alphabetization (ALFIN as in Spanish) and Digital Divide, to find a common ground to complement conceptually the measuring of the divide. The convergence process between I–Literacy and E–Literacy has been retrieved, reaching the final concept of informational alphabetization (ALFIN as acronym of the Spanish expression 'ALFabetización INformacional'). To propose its differentiation into three levels: the basic level of verbal–technological codification, second level for meta–analysis, and upper level for ethical–critical action. This proposal aims to rethink the digital divide, raising questions about the meaning of measurement, and the necessary precautions to avoid confusing measurement with assimilation. We state that the concept of information literacy (ALFIN – informational alphabetization) should feed the study of the Digital Divide, and describe how this could affect the pyramid model of ICT appropriation developed by the author. In further research about digital exclusion The Pandora's box quality of the Web is emphasized. It can reinforce exclusion, threatens democracy and freedom in the absence of a literate digital citizen, if further simplification is carried under the access–to–infrastructure model, if the citizens' formation in capabilities that exceed the instrumental. We conclude that measuring these meta–analysis and ethical–critical action skills is the advisable way to build a metric for the digital divide. We warn about the possibility of finding a second–order divide much larger and complex than the access divide

Facing the emergent digital-informational divide. Informational culture: the case of university library users.

pp. 159-16

Online outsiders within\ud

Heightened attention to technological diffusion and informational inequalities is of\ud particular societal concern, given the increasing mediation of everyday life whereby\ud web-based initiatives abound and an increasing amount of information on critical\ud human services including education and healthcare are online or only available online.\ud As Cheong and Martin (2009) note, the digital divide is a significant, multi-layered access\ud challenge for institutions of higher education worldwide as they embark on e or distance\ud learning programs, including the incorporation of virtual course management systems.\ud Kreps (2006) also notes that the digital divide is an important health communication\ud problem as new technologies can help underserved populations retrieve relevant health\ud information, yet exacerbate disparities by reducing access to those most at risk for poor\ud health outcomes

Analyzing gender inequality through large-scale Facebook advertising data

Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online social media in particular are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can provide large-scale measurements across multiple countries. Here we show how the Facebook Gender Divide (FGD), a metric based on aggregated statistics of more than 1.4 Billion users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of worldwide gender inequality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender equality indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find gender differences in network externalities that suggest that using social media has an added value for women. Furthermore, we find that low values of the FGD are associated with increases in economic gender equality. Our results suggest that online social networks, while suffering evident gender imbalance, may lower the barriers that women have to access informational resources and help to narrow the economic gender gap

The impact of mobile telephony on developing country micro-enterprises: a Nigerian case study

Informational challenges-absence, uncertainty, asymmetry-shape the working of markets and commerce in many developing countries. For developing country micro-enterprises, which form the bulk of all enterprises worldwide, these challenges shape the characteristics of their supply chains. They reduce the chances that business and trade will emerge. They keep supply chains localised and intermediated. They make trade within those supply chains slow, costly, and risky. Mobile telephony may provide an opportunity to address the informational challenges and, hence, to alter the characteristics of trade within micro-enterprise supply chains. However, mobile telephony has only recently penetrated. This paper, therefore, presents one of the first case studies of the impact of mobile telephony on the numerically-dominant form of enterprise, based around a case study of the cloth-weaving sector in Nigeria. It finds that there are ways in which costs and risks are being reduced and time is saved, often by substitution of journeys. But it also finds a continuing need for journeys and physical meetings due to issues of trust, design intensity, physical inspection and exchange, and interaction complexity. As a result, there are few signs of the de-localisation or disintermediation predicted by some commentators. An economising effect of mobile phones on supply chain processes may therefore co-exist with the entrenchment of supply chain structures and a growing 'competitive divide' between those with and without access to telephony

Informational Capitalism and the Digital Divide in Africa

In this paper we present a critical theoretical notion of the digital divide in informational capitalism. Digital divides are seen as the result of the inherent asymmetry of accumulation processes in the economic, political, and cultural system of contemporary society and resulting structural inequalities. The empirical part of the paper discusses the digital divide in Nigeria as an example from Africa and shows besides the severity of the situation that the policies of liberalization and privatization haven’t improved the problem. In the last section we identify six potential strategies for the solution of digital divides. We argue that five of them are one-dimensional and short sighted, advanced a critique and deconstruction of neo-liberal solutions, and argue that an integrative strategy aiming at social, political-economical, and technological change is needed

Information ethics: an environmental approach to the digital divide

Peer reviewe

Equality and information

Traditional outcome-orientated egalitarian principles require access to information about the size of individual holdings. Recent egalitarian political theory has sought to accommodate considerations of responsibility. Such a move may seem problematic, in that a new informational burden is thereby introduced, with no apparent decrease in the existing burden. This article uses a simple model with simulated data to examine the extent to which outcome egalitarianism and responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism (‘luck egalitarianism’) can be accurately applied where information is incomplete or erroneous. It is found that, while outcome egalitarianism tends to be more accurately applied, its advantage is not overwhelming, and in many prima facie plausible circumstances luck egalitarianism would be more accurately applied. This suggests that luck egalitarianism cannot be rejected as utopian. Furthermore, while some argue that, in practice, luck egalitarianism is best realized indirectly, by securing equality of outcome, our evidence suggests that a luck egalitarian rule of regulation offers a far more accurate implementation of the luck egalitarian ideal than does an outcome egalitarian rule of regulation

Artificial intelligence's new frontier: artificial companions and the fourth revolution

‘The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com '. Copyright Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.In this paper I argue that recent technological transformations in the life-cycle of information have brought about a fourth revolution, in the long process of reassessing humanity’s fundamental nature and role in the universe. We are not immobile, at the centre of the universe (Copernicus); we are not unnaturally distinct and different from the rest of the animal world (Darwin); and we are far from being entirely transparent to ourselves (Freud). We are now slowly accepting the idea that we might be informational organisms among many agents (Turing), inforgs not so dramatically different from clever, engineered artefacts, but sharing with them a global environment that is ultimately made of information, the infosphere. This new conceptual revolution is humbling, but also exciting. For in view of this important evolution in our self-understanding, and given the sort of IT-mediated interactions that humans will increasingly enjoy with their environment and a variety of other agents, whether natural or synthetic, we have the unique opportunity of developing a new ecological approach to the whole of reality.Peer reviewe

Preliminary steps toward artificial protocell computation

Protocells are hypothesised as a transitional phase in the origin of life, prior to the evolution of fully functional prokaryotic cells. The work reported here is being done in the context of the PACE project, which is investigating the fabrication of artificial protocells de novo. We consider here the important open question of whether or how articifial protocells (if or when they are successfully fabricated) might be applied as “computing” devices—what sort of computing might they be suitable for, and how might they be “programmed”? We also present some preliminary analysis of a crude model of such “evolutionary protocell computation”