The Digital Divide and Politics
The impact of the Internet goes beyond the social and economic implications of societies and enters the world of politics. Politics is a crucial and dynamic part of human society, one that dictates and influences people’s lives. With the emergence of the Internet, countries, as well as people, have become more globally connected, making the Internet an important tool in both domestic and international politics and affairs. However, the presence of the digital divide is also evident in politics on the domestic and international levels, in terms of where the Internet is actually present and its accessibility and efficiency.
The Domestic Divide
The influence of the Internet is ever so great in the United States, for the Internet is a major aspect of most American’s everyday lives. People use the world-wide-web to pay bills, shop, chat and find information on practically anything imaginable. In addition to the social aspects, the Internet can serve as a forum of democracy and politics for the real world via the virtual world. The Internet began as a government program and should continue to be used to the citizens highest potential to further engage in politics.
Many advocates of online democracy, such as Howard Rheingold, Rhonda and Howard Hauben, and Andrew Shapiro, hope that the Internet or cyberspace would inspire citizens to get online to discuss and raise issues they feel are important as well as increasing bleak citizen participation (Harper 2003, 232). Political activists or “netizens” are an example of groups that use the Internet as a medium to express and share political values and interests that need to be raised or further examined. E-mail, newsgroups and websites provide low costs and chances for new coalitions to be established that otherwise would have difficulties in the “real world” (Harper 2003, 232). For example, minor parties such as the Reform Party, the Libertarian Party and the Green Party find great success and support online, although these groups lack support from traditional forms of the media. To such groups, the Internet is seen as a tool in making political issues that are usually bypassed by majority parties more conscious, as well as an alternative source of information other than the media (Harper 2003, 239).
The two major parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, gain more media attention as well as a more links to their internet websites compared to their minor party counterparts. During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Democratic and Republican party websites ranked in the top 100,000 of websites, while the minor party websites ranked below the top 100,000 except for the Libertarian party, which ranked in the top 100,000. However, these three parties also have the most links for their parties available on the web; Democratic and Republican parties and candidate websites have from one and a half to six times as many links than their minor party competitors (Harper 2003, 239, 242). Major parties also have a larger influx of financial and staff resources to actually maintain elaborate websites (Norris 2001, 156). Interestingly, the minor party candidates’ websites were more popular than their party websites and the major party candidates. Whatever the case may be, there is an apparent disparity between the amounts of coverage major parties receive in contrast to that of the minor parties (Harper 2003, 239-242).
Albeit the amounts of internet coverage major parties have in comparison to minor parties, Green parties have taken full advantage of what the internet has to offer. The internet gives these groups the opportunity to organize, discuss and mobilize at the local, the domestic and the international levels. Almost three-quarters of all Green parties have a website, even though other political groups such as communists and social democrats have fallen victim to the power of the web (Norris 2001, 200). A reason why Green parties have taken such a great advantage of the internet may be perhaps of the membership of these groups who are most likely to be highly educated professionals. This piece of information brings about the correlation between social/economic class and usage of the internet, for people who are more educated and have a higher economic standing are more likely to use and have access to the internet (Norris 2001, 158).
Voter participation is a concern among United States government officials for participation is at an all time low. Electronic voting or e-voting is a hopeful solution to the low voter turnout problem; however, there is much controversy and debate over the practice of voting online. One concern is the issue of online privacy and security. For purposes of this paper, another concern with e-voting deals with the social aspects of the digital divide (Harper 2003, 245). Voting online maybe convenient for those who have access to a computer or the Internet, but for those who do not have access to the Internet and are active citizens, e-voting will be a concern. With online voting, a portion of the population will be unfairly disadvantaged, in particular people with lower incomes who cannot afford a computer or access to the internet. Although the number of Internet users increases year after year, the numbers are still not high enough to switch on e-voting. Recently, in 1999, the percentage of households that had access to the Internet finally reached fifty percent (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2000, 39).
Advocates of online democracy firmly believe in the power and the influence the Internet is capable of having on US politics and democracy. The idea is that people share equal access to the power of sending and receiving a substantial amount of information, thus making online politics closer to a true democracy (Harper, 237). Nevertheless, if a digital divide is present within US politics and society, than online politics is far from a true democracy.
The International Divide
The influence of the Internet extends beyond the realms of the United States and its society and into the hands of a globalize world. The Internet may not have a political entity to maintain total control over its distribution and its existence, but it does appear to have a great amount of influence from certain societies of the globe in comparison to other societies. For many, especially democratic nations, the Internet is viewed as a “democratizing” force to the rest of the world, lead by the influence of the United States. This notion further implicates the fact that the West, in particular the US, impacts the Internet in relation to less developed countries (Wade 2002, 457).
The issue of political party inequality on the internet is not only a problem in the U.S, but it is a concern in the international stage as well. Western states are more likely the have more political websites compared to less affluent nations. Established democracies are six times more likely to have online political websites than nondemocracies; richer nations are eighteen times more likely than poorer nations. For example, Western Europe has a total number of 374 websites of all parties (each party is counted once) compared to Sub- Sahara Africa, in which there is only a total of 81 party websites (Norris 2001, 154).
In terms of information and communication technology (ICT), the West has a higher ICT concentration in comparison to developing nations. Nevertheless, ICT has been thought as an effective way to bridge the digital gap between more affluent nations and developing nations, but these developing nations should be aware of what they are bargaining for. ICT has been distributed to less developed nations in order to “digitalize” these nations public sector into one of “e-governance” (Wade 2002, 448). The state of Andhra Pradesh is the first in India to adopt the idea of e-governance. It established a statewide computerization system on all levels of the administration whose goal was to make access between government officials and citizens faster, easier and more equal. Unfortunately, this system was not very effective because it only aided on a small scale for the price of the program came at a high price. Computers were accessible to government officials, but there were not utilized to their advantage. A change in the infrastructure is needed in order for the effects of this program to come into place (Wade 2002, 447).
Tanzania is another example of a country in which e-governance has been a step in the reform of the local government. As one of the poorest nations in the world, donors have made computerization a way to monitor and evaluate local government’s service delivery as a way to keep costs down for other things such as paper, pencil, time and storage (Wade 2002, 447). Once again, the infrastructure of the community made it difficult for such a program to flourish. In some portions of the country, electricity was not available, while in other parts, the effectiveness of electricity was unreliable (Wade 2002, 448).
For the more technological Western states, the thought of no access to electricity, a computer or the Internet, in that matter, seems to be unthinkable. Advanced nations such as the United States have long established an infrastructure in which the Internet can be used anytime, anywhere, by anybody.