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Question 2

1) Technology and market forces have failed to eliminate poverty in developed countries like the US, where the income gap between rich and poor has increased over 50% in the last quarter century. As new technologies advance, those already doing well tend to benefit most. 2) In multi-racial countries like Malaysia, economic inequality between ethnic groups can fuel racial tensions if left unchecked. Reducing the digital divide is important for promoting racial harmony and strong national identity. 3) For large tech companies, the digital divide poses a major business concern as it bars billions of potential customers from accessing and purchasing computer products. Narrowing the economic divide could help shrink the digital divide.

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Gowri Govidasamy
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Question 2

1) Technology and market forces have failed to eliminate poverty in developed countries like the US, where the income gap between rich and poor has increased over 50% in the last quarter century. As new technologies advance, those already doing well tend to benefit most. 2) In multi-racial countries like Malaysia, economic inequality between ethnic groups can fuel racial tensions if left unchecked. Reducing the digital divide is important for promoting racial harmony and strong national identity. 3) For large tech companies, the digital divide poses a major business concern as it bars billions of potential customers from accessing and purchasing computer products. Narrowing the economic divide could help shrink the digital divide.

Uploaded by

Gowri Govidasamy
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Question 2.

(a)
The rich will get more
Prosperity and the proliferation of technology are seen as the means to alleviate poverty
and ensure a better quality of life for the people living in developing countries.
Unfortunately, the power of technology has not managed to eradicate poverty even in a
country like the United States The national poverty rate remains at 11 percent essentially
where it was before the computer revolution in the mid-1970s. Nearly 40 million
Americans lack national health insurance and over 15 percent of its children are growing
up in poverty. Technology and market forces have thus failed in the eradication of
poverty in the United States (Venkat, 2002). If a country like the United States fails to
eliminate poverty within its borders, it is unthinkable to expect third world countries to be
capable of doing so. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, the income gap
between the rich and the poor in the United States has increased by more than 50 percent.
The inference that follows is that as the propagation of new technologies advances,
people who are doing relatively well are likely to benefit the most, reinforcing long
standing economic disparities.
Imbalance in nation building
The wealth of the nation is to be shared equally amongst all races and ethnic groups. In a
multi-racial country like Malaysia, if one of the ethnic groups is economically superior to
the others, dissatisfaction is bound to ensue and this will be enough fuel to fire racial
tensions. In the digital era, the difference between groups of people who have access to
digital information and those who do not will be an influential factor in determining their
economic success. If the situation is left unchecked, the economic inequality will grow
even larger. Correcting the situation will enhance the dignity of every ethnic group within
the society. This will bring about racial harmony and make a country strong and proud in
the eyes of the world. When a society has no digital divide, every group will be able to
participate in nation building and this will help towards the creation of a knowledge
society (Benson, 1998).

Loss of business
Where computer giants like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft Corporation are concerned,
the digital divide is bad for their business and is a major concern. The digital divide bars
billions of people from buying their products. If billions of people around the world are
not computer literate, the same number will have no use for computer products. The rural
poor in developing countries are not seen as business opportunity. From the business
point of view, reducing the digital divide will eventually lead to better sales of computer
products. Shrinking the economic divide will contribute to the narrowing of the digital
divide (Conradie & Jacobs, 2003).
The Government Policy
The Malaysian government has entrusted the direction of IT implementation and
utilisation to be guided by the National IT Council (NITC). The newly elected NITC
members have made a resolution to deal with the issue of digital divide in the country.
This can be seen as the governments zeal to get to the bottom of the issue of the digital
divide (Manecksha, 2002). Over the last decade, the government has introduced
supporting policies to assist its citizens to bridge this divide. Firstly, it has removed all
taxes on computers and related items, with the intention of bringing their prices down.
Factories have been built to produce local own computer hardware for both the local and
overseas markets. Citizens are allowed to withdraw their savings from the Employees
Provident Fund to purchase computers. Students are given low interest loans to
encourage them to purchase computers. Some

studies have indicated the existence of

high computer ownership in Malaysian homes but a relatively low usage of the Internet.
One such study observing the digital divide in a housing estate in Kuala Lumpur revealed
that 38.5 percent of the homes have a personal computer (Noor Bathi, 2001). This study
further indicates that the majority of Malaysian citizens are aware of the need to expose
their families to the use of PCs and perhaps only economic limitations prevent them
from owning a unit.

A strategy to overcome the digital divide.


The National Information Technology Council (NITC) has stressed that in order to
address the issue of the digital divide, all groups of society, including geographically
isolated communities such as the natives of Sabah and Sarawak, women, youths, the
disabled, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and senior citizens, must work
together (Manecksha, 2002).

Many researchers have studied and reported

their

perceptions and recommendations on how best to resolve the problem of the digital
divide (Gurak, 1999; Panchanathan, 2002; Pavathamma, 2003 and Briggs & McBride,
2002). In this paper, we propose that the digital divide problem can be resolved or
minimised with the involvement of four main players:
Institutions of higher education
The industry
The government
The rural community
The digital divide can be reduced by setting up community information centres to educate
the poorer rural citizens. These centres will be equipped with multimedia PCs and
relevant software to enable even those who are illiterate or those who do not speak
English to use the computers via icons and the mouse. Educated and unemployed youths
in rural areas should be equipped with skills to enable them to use software such as the
Microsoft Office and Internet browsers as well as gain access to Internet resources.

REFERENCES
Benson, P. B. (1998) Village people? The Net Generation, IEEE Communications
Magazine. vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 32-35
Conradie P. & S.J. Jacobs. (2003) Bridging the digital divide, Engineering Management
Journal, 13(1), 30-33..
Noor Bathi Badarudin. (2001). The digital divide at the urban area: The case study of
Taman Seri Sentosa, Kuala Lumpur. (in Malay). Paper presented at the Digital Divide
Workshop: The search of the Relevant Model. 16 May, Universiti Malaya.
Panchanathan S. (2002), Ubiquitous multimedia: bridging the digital divide, Multimedia,
IEEE Vol. 9 Issue 1 Jan-March 2002, pg 12-15.
Venkat, K. (2002). Delving into the digital divide. Spectrum IEEE, 39(2), 14-16.

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