The digital divide should not be considered on an individual basis, but rather on a collective one.
What if, instead of thinking about the "digital divide" at the individual level, with or without Internet access, the real divide was between companies that have mastered data management and use (GAFAM) and other organizations, whether public or private?
Alain Foucaran, University of Montpellier
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Let's start with three assumptions:
- The main and essential driver of human evolution and influence will be electricity. In other words, every action, whatever it may be, will only be possible thanks to electricity: mobility, information and communication technologies, for example. Indeed, let us not forget that what we commonly refer to as a bit, a byte, 1 "Mega," in short, the singleton constituting information or data, is nothing more and nothing less than a small packet of electrons stored and moved. The movement of electrons means electricity. What about this mass of data produced, exchanged, stored, and searched (cloud, web, data centers, etc.) without electrons? It is therefore essential to understand that the major challenge will be to produce this "now indispensable" electricity with the smallest possible ecological footprint, across the entire value chain of production and conversion.
- Electronics, computer science, and robotics have become indispensable to scientific progress in all disciplines.
- If the20th century was the century of technological leaps (we went from walking to space travel), the21st century will be the century of leaps in usage, and when we talk about usage, the humanities and social sciences (HSS) must be repositioned at the center of scientific developments. Take cloning, for example, a20th-century technology that will find its full applications and uses inthe 21st century once the ethical and deontological aspects have been addressed by the HSS.
Based on these three assumptions, everything is in place for an almost natural proliferation of data, since we are forced by necessity to create data about data in order to manage it, given its phenomenal volume. We are literally overwhelmed by data.
The flood of data poses problems
Faced with this flood of bytes, several issues arise:
- Management of data storage spaces (concept of relevance of stored data, keeping it "alive," associated energy considerations, data ownership, and elimination of redundant data).
- The actual locations where data is stored have become "virtually unique," thus making them highly strategic.
- The aggregation of data gives it economic and strategic value.
- The choice of IT tools (hardware and software) to rely on to extract the right "decision" resulting from a synthesis based on the analysis of an increasingly "monstrous" amount of data.
It is this last issue that I believe is important to focus on.
The real digital divide
It is impossible to ignore the tremendous societal change indirectly brought about by GAFAM-type structures (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) through the promotion and, above all, the ease of access to data that they have enabled, almost universally (regardless of the social status or geographical location of the "requestor").
Very quickly, GAFAM was called upon to respond to the exponential demands of an ever-growing number of users who were "hungry" for data, to develop IT tools (hardware and software) whose performance far exceeded that of tools owned by other entities (industrialists, states, or local authorities).
Ultimately, that is not the key point here: in order to cope with this "exponential" demand, GAFAM companies have had to "categorize" each user in order to speed up and anticipate, based on their profile, access to the information they are looking for: how convenient!
Thus, the very existence of these "user catalogs," which are absolutely necessary, represents not only an inestimable economic value, but, more embarrassingly, a political and strategic weight of colossal magnitude that is difficult to estimate.
In one of his latest books , "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Yuval Noah Harari remarkably highlights the urgency of the situation with this sentence:
"In a world flooded with irrelevant information, clarity is power."
Indeed, as I explained above, only GAFAM-type structures, initially out of necessity and subsequently as a matter of strategy, have been and remain capable of extracting the "right" synthesis from the analysis of colossal amounts of data, most of which is irrelevant.
It is in this context that we are presented with the notion of the "digital divide" as being between users who have access to data and those who do not because they do not have computers or smartphones, which is obviously only partially true: in the most remote areas and among the most disadvantaged social groups, smartphones are present.
On the other hand, what about "entities" (manufacturers, states, local authorities, etc.) etc.) that, for the sake of convenience, speed of implementation, and initially attractive costs, have entrusted their data and associated management to GAFAM-type structures, thereby becoming, without their knowledge, totally dependent on the latter not only economically, but also, much more worryingly, strategically and politically. It is at this level, in my opinion, that the real and worrying "digital divide" lies between entities that do not have the capacity to invest and those that will have the capacity to acquire IT tools (hardware and software) that will enable them to analyze and sort through this "world flooded with irrelevant information " and retain decision-making power because they will be able to display clarity.
Alain Foucaran, Director of IES, the Institute of Electronics, University of Montpellier
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