Information and Inequality
Do the information rich get richer?
In the age of technology, people tend to access information and services more easily than in the past. They can stay at home and engage with the world outside through internet-connected devices. For instance, they can do shopping, working, and ordering food, even voting or participating in the political debate groups online. The question is the information rich will get richer in the technological era, and the like-minded more similar?
According to Brundidge and Rice (2010), it is true that information rich continuously get richer. The ease of accessing the internet to get information will give people more chances to improve their lives compared to those who lack a chance to approach the internet. To be more specific, the people who have political knowledge tend to pay more attention to deliberative processes and get more out of them (Brundidge & Rice (2010). They make use of the information to gain the potential benefit for their business, obtain knowledge, improve their productivity in their jobs, or to create new products or services that may be needed in the future. They can also receive benefits from the policies that they were aware of and engaged in when public deliberations were held before the policies were made. In addition, they will update themselves about relevant information more frequently and in greater depth as they have higher expectations and can more easily process it. Updating their knowledge may become their routine and this helps them to improve their current status quickly to adapt as the environment changes.
And the like-minded more similar?
Technology assists strongly in finding the information that people need. However, every single time the people search the information on Google or the other websites, it means that the information is fed into machine learning. When searching for information, algorithms will provide information just in a few seconds. Machine learning can suggest the contents that we are interested in and visit often. The issue is how to know which information is trusted and not? Will a common thought become treated as fact? In reality, with the development of Wikipedia, people can contribute their knowledge to the internet freely and unlimited. Those who receive the same information and have the same interest tend to be like-minded in thinking if they cannot think critically about issues. For example, the people who search or click on their sites that interest them as democrats may only be shown results that align with their political views (Brundidge & Rice (2010). In the massive information age, to have a high-value evaluation of information that is outside the boundaries of information provided is quite difficult for those who tend to have a comfort zone, and cannot adopt opposite ideas on the Internet and in their lives.
Digital divide or inequality in New Zealand
New Zealand is a developed country in which the digital divide is not large. In New Zealand, a digital divide exists between different types of households and geographic areas concerning their opportunities to access information through the Internet. Some low-income households are less likely to access the internet and own technological devices than the others. This is because of not only income but also education and age. Low-income groups of people need to focus on surviving in the short term rather than focusing on investment in information and technologies to obtain potential benefits in the future. As a result, their children may lack certain conditions to approach new technological devices to serve for their study at school or their home. For example, the low-income households’ children can only use the computers or platforms at their school and the public libraries (with a limited time per session). This may limit their ability to learn and practice those skills related to technology. Over time, the digital inequality gap between high-income households and low-income households has become larger. Therefore, they lack opportunities to approach higher education, well-paid jobs, and vital skills that are crucial in the Internet environment.
Are youth, digital natives in a different situation compared to other groups in society?
Some people agree that the youth who were born in the age of technology can be considered ‘digital natives’ who tend to have more advantages than the other groups in society (digital immigrants). It is true that the digital natives have more chances to use and experience technological devices and use the technological applications more easily than the other groups as they have conditions to observe, practice and use it for a long time. However, technical literacy is not a natural-born knowledge and it is not automatically established without taking time to become familiar with it (Boyd, 2013). Youth may easily pick up the surface language of technology but not a savvy understanding of the process of building that technology, or its full applications. Hence, they may master the use of technological devices but may lack deep knowledge and experience of the things they use. For example, they can be involved in online debate groups or learning from an online school but how the debate or learning system works is outside of their knowledge and experience. Moreover, the other groups in the society (their predecessors) are the groups who built many of the systems that they are inheriting and using, so some of them are not only masters in developing it but also know how to use it more efficiently. Additionally, given the discussion above about the digital divide, although some people were born in the technological era, so might be considered digital natives, some of them, especially in low-income households will tend to have less chances than the high socioeconomic status families.
In conclusion, the information rich continuously get richer as they have more chances in terms of having and using information to serve their lives. A digital divide exists between low and high — income families in New Zealand which may make the gap between them larger. However, in some respects access to a wide choice of information may blunt the thinking of people when it leads to them only experiencing like-minded views. Both the youth digital natives and digital immigrants still have a lot to learn about using technology critically.
