The digital divide should not be viewed at the individual level but rather at the collective level
What if, instead of thinking of the “digital divide” in terms of individuals—those with or without Internet access—the real divide actually lay between companies that have mastered the management and use of data (the GAFAM) and other organizations, whether public or private?
Alain Foucaran, University of Montpellier
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Let's start with three assumptions:
- The primary and indispensable driver of humanity’s evolution and influence will be electricity; in other words, every action, whatever it may be, will be made possible only by electricity: mobility, information and communication technologies, for example. Indeed, let’s not forget that what we commonly call a bit, a byte, 1 “mega”—in short, the basic unit constituting information or data—is nothing more and nothing less than a small packet of stored and moving electrons. And the movement of electrons means electricity. What would become of this vast mass of data—produced, exchanged, stored, and mined (in the cloud, on the web, in data centers, etc.)—without electrons? Thus, it is essential to understand that the major challenge will be to generate this electricity—which has “become indispensable”—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 across all disciplines.
- If the20th century was the century of technological leaps (we went from walking on foot to space travel), the21st will be the century of shifts in usage; and when it comes to usage, the humanities and social sciences (HSS) must be repositioned at the center of scientific developments. Take the example of cloning, 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 humanities and social sciences.
Based on these three assumptions, all the conditions are in place for an almost natural proliferation of data, since we are compelled 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:
- The management of data storage spaces (including the relevance of stored data, keeping it “active,” associated energy considerations, data ownership, and the elimination of redundant data).
- The actual data storage locations, which have become “virtually unique,” are thus highly strategic.
- The aggregation of data sets with one another thus gives them economic and strategic value.
- The selection of IT tools (hardware and software) to be used to derive the right “decision” resulting from an analysis of an increasingly “enormous” volume of data.
In my view, it is this last issue that we should focus on.
The Real Digital Divide
It is impossible to overlook the tremendous societal transformation indirectly brought about by GAFAM-type companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) through the utilization and, above all, the ease of access to data that they have made possible on an almost universal scale (regardless of the social status or global location of the “user”).
Very quickly, the GAFAM companies were compelled—in order to meet the exponentially growing demands of an ever-increasing number of users who were “hungry” for data—to develop IT tools (hardware and software) whose performance far surpassed that of the tools owned by other entities (manufacturers, governments, or local authorities).
Ultimately, that is not the key issue here: in fact, to cope with this “exponential” demand, the 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 seeking— how convenient!
Thus, the very existence of these “user catalogs”—which are, incidentally, absolutely essential—represents not only an inestimable economic value but, more troublingly, a political and strategic influence of colossal proportions that is difficult to quantify.
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 key."
In fact, as I explained above, only GAFAM-type organizations—initially out of necessity and later as a matter of strategy—have been and remain capable of deriving the “correct” conclusion from the analysis of colossal amounts of data, most of which is irrelevant.
It is in this context that the concept of the “digital divide” is presented to us as a distinction between users who do and do not have access to data because they lack computers or smartphones—which, of course, is only partially true: even in the most remote areas and among the most disadvantaged social groups… smartphones are present.
On the other hand, what about “entities” (manufacturers, governments, local authorities, etc.) that, for the sake of convenience, speed of implementation, and costs that seem attractive at first glance, have entrusted their data and the associated management to GAFAM-type entities, thereby becoming, without realizing it, entirely dependent on them—not only economically, but also, and far more troubling, strategically and politically. It is at this level, in my view, that the true and troubling “digital divide” lies—between entities that lack the capacity to invest and those that will have the means to acquire IT tools (hardware and software) that guarantee them the ability to analyze and filter through this “world flooded with irrelevant information ” and retain decision-making power because they will be able to provide clarity.
Alain Foucaran, Director of IES, the Institute of Electronics, University of Montpellier
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