The digital divide must not be considered on an individual scale, but on a collective one.

And what if, instead of thinking of the "digital divide" at the level of individuals, with or without Internet access, the real divide was between companies with complete mastery of data management and use (the GAFAMs) and other organizations, whether public or private.

Alain Foucaran, University of Montpellier

The real digital divide would be between GAFAM and other companies. Daniel Eledut / Unsplash, CC BY-SA

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Let's start with three assumptions:

  • Electricity will be the major and unavoidable vector for the evolution and influence of mankind, in other words, any action whatsoever will only be made possible 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 singleton constituting information or data - is no more and no less than a small packet of stored and moved electrons. And moving electrons means electricity. What would happen to the magma of data produced, exchanged, stored and searched (cloud, web, data canters, etc.) without electrons? So it's essential to understand that the major challenge will be to produce this "indispensable" electricity with the smallest possible ecological footprint, across the entire value chain of production and conversion.
  • Electronics, computing and robotics have become indispensable to scientific progress in all disciplines.
  • If the twentieth century was the century of technological leaps (we went from walking to space), the twenty-first will be the century of leaps in usage, and if we're talking about usage, the human and social sciences (SHS) need to be repositioned at the heart of scientific developments. Take the example of cloning, a twentieth-century technology that will find its full applications and uses in the twenty-first century, once the ethical and deontological aspects have been addressed by the SHS.

Based on these three postulates, everything is in place for an almost natural proliferation of data, since we are driven by necessity to create data about data in order to manage it, given its phenomenal volume. We are literally submerged by data.

The flood of data poses problems

This flood of bytes raises a number of issues:

  • Data storage space management (notion of relevance of stored data, keeping it "alive", associated energy considerations, data ownership and elimination of redundant data.
  • The actual places where data is stored have become "quasi-unique", making them highly strategic.
  • Aggregating data gives it economic and strategic value.
  • The choice of IT tools (machines and software) on which to base the right "decision" resulting from a synthesis based on an analysis of an increasingly "monstrous" amount of data.

In my opinion, it's important to focus on this last issue.

The real digital divide

It's impossible to overlook the tremendous societal transformation brought about indirectly by GAFAM-type structures (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), thanks to the data enhancement and, above all, ease of access they have made possible, almost universally (whatever the social level or global location of the "requester").

To meet the exponential demands of ever-increasing numbers of data-hungry users, the GAFAMs have very quickly been forced to develop IT tools (machines and software) whose performance far exceeds that of tools owned by other entities (manufacturers, states or local authorities).

In the end, that's not the key point of this issue: to meet this "exponential" demand, GAFAMs have had to "catalog" each user so as to accelerate and anticipate access to the information they are looking for, according to their profile: what a comfort!

So the very existence of these "user catalogs", which are absolutely necessary by the way, represents not only an inestimable economic value, but, more embarrassingly, a politico-strategic weight of colossal and hardly estimable proportions.

Yuval Noah Harari, in one of his latest books, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", makes a remarkable point about the urgency of the situation with this sentence

"In a world awash with irrelevant information, the power belongs to clarity.

In fact, as I explained above, only GAFAM-type structures, initially out of necessity and later out of strategy, have been and are capable of extracting the "right" synthesis from the analysis of colossal masses of data, most of which are irrelevant.

It's in this context that the notion of the "digital divide" is presented to us as being about users with or without access to data because they don't have computers or smartphones, which of course is partially untrue: in the most remote regions, and among the most disadvantaged social strata... the smartphone is there.

On the other hand, what can we say about "entities" (manufacturers, governments, local authorities, etc.) who, for the sake of ease, speed of implementation and initially attractive costs, have entrusted their data and associated management to GAFAM-type structures, thus becoming, unbeknownst to them, totally dependent on the latter, not only economically, but also - and this is much more annoying - strategically and politically. In my opinion, this is where the real and worrying "digital divide" lies, between those entities that do not have the capacity to invest and those that do, in order to equip themselves with IT tools (machines and software) guaranteeing them the means to analyze and sort through this "world awash with irrelevant information", and to retain decision-making power because they will be able to display clarity.The Conversation

Alain Foucaran, Director of IES, the Electronics Institute, University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.