Here in the United States, we don’t really think about people not being on the internet. We’re really privileged in that we are a rich country. It seems like even the poorest of people have the internet. I grew up in a small town an hour outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. I had dial-up internet for as long as I could remember. The whole wifi and high speed internet had taken over but in my town, if you were lucky to have it in the first place, didn’t get to see that stuff until later than most people. There’s also the fact that signals around my area are nonexistent. You go about 5-10 minutes outside my town and you have no service for miles. When you grow up around poor people and harder access to good internet you see how big the digital divide can be.
Pew Research did a survey this year and found out that 11% of US adults don’t use or have the internet. That’s a considerable drop from 48% in 2000 but 11% is still a large amount of Americans. There are many reasons as to why these people don’t use the internet and they range from just not having and interest in it to it being too difficult to use. But in 2013 they found that 19% of people didn’t go online because it was too expensive to own a computer or internet. While the US certainly doesn’t have the most expensive internet in the world, it can still be hard for some people to pay the price for internet.
So what can we do to make the internet and computers cheaper? No doubt in my mind that it will become cheaper over time. Things like laptops are certainly becoming cheaper. I bought mine for 99 dollars at a computer store. And it’s so easy to find computers and laptops online that people are selling second hand for cheap. The internet will probably be harder to make cheaper as demand goes up. But there are internet providers that have cheap internet plans (usually if you bundle things such as tv or phone). Cheaper internet is out there and hopefully the digital divide does become smaller.
Below is my video discussing the Digital Divide
