Discourses of the digital divide

Abstract

In recent years, closing the digital divide has become a central concern for numerous social actors and institutions, instantiated through a series of policy documents, strategic initiatives, diagnostic instruments, academic analyses and consultation exercises.This thesis critically analyzes the discursive construction and function of the digital divide within specific discourses.Case studies examined include the UK Social Exclusion Unit, the BT Social Policy Unit, the G8 Digital Opportunity Task Force Initiative, the work of Manuel Castells, and the talk of the `socially excluded'.The analysis emphasizes the heterogeneous local articulatory work that 'the digital divide' enables: the renewal of Third Way political discourse, the performance of corporate accountability, the privileging of a 'secular salvation story' of technological globalization, a buttressing of the Network Society thesis.Consistent rules of discursive formation are identified across discourses: the ethical equivalence of a concern with the social and the promotion of the techno-economic, and a teleological conception of causality.This thesis concludes that the digital divide can be considered as an incomplete and open-ended object of government, a brand of inequality, through which a particular understanding of technosocial formation, exemplified in the idea of connection to an autonomous and inevitable networking logic, is coming to dominate a sense of contemporary ethical possibility, political imagination and the government of conduct.A discourse analytic approach provides one way of demonstrating the assumptions, seductions and closures of this particular understanding, of recovering a sense of its historical specificity and purposeful construction, and of opening up the digital divide to close critical scrutiny.

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