Steve Jobs: Technological Progress.... For Whom?

The passing of Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, has reminded us of the great technological advances that our world has witnessed in the last decades. Media outlets throughout the world have praised Jobs as a “true visionary” a “creative genius” and someone who “transformed everyday technology from the personal computer to the iPod and iPhone.” Jobs’ influence on education, innovation, learning and teaching has undoubtedly made a difference for many individuals, organizations and educational institutions, especially in the western world.

Nevertheless, his death also reminds us of the lack of access to information and communications technologies that continue to exist throughout the world.

In the mid 90s the concept of digital divide was used to describe the lack of accessibility to technology to individuals with respect to their socioeconomic status. In 2000, The National Telecommunications and Information Administration explained that the term digital divide refers to “the disparity between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ in the technology revolution.”

Since then, the term global digital divide has been coined to describe “the information technology disparities between different regions of the world in relation to generalized rates of social and technological development. It is evident that the global digital divide increases as new technologies and access to them become more sophisticated.

Furthermore, Hwang & Joonho (2006) argue that the “discourse of the global digital divide is not only an emerging discourse in the current age of globalization, but also is the succession of the modernistic discourse of technology and development constructed by the dominant power countries since World War II.”

An article published in the Chronicle clearly points out that the digital divide in “American society is getting worse, not better, and it is perpetuated in part by a technology gap between elite universities and minority-serving colleges.”

In the Guardian newspaper, Timothy Sowula, when writing about online social networks reminds readers that while a lot of people in Britain and America are signing up on Facebook there are “over a billion people in the world who have never made a phone call, let alone used the World Wide Web.”

At UNC for the last three years I have had the opportunity to meet and work with Latin American elementary and secondary rural school teachers from the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua who have participated in a six month teacher training on our campus. Although they may have demonstrated some familiarity with new technologies they also commented on the limited accessibility that their students have to the digital world in their rural communities. In fact, they mentioned that in some of their schools there is no electricity, thus, technology is inconceivable.

Steve Jobs’ creative and innovative ideas, in the era of information age, have indisputably contributed to the transformation of societies vis-à-vis new technologies. However, if we are to provide equity and promote social justice and inclusion for all, we should all address the issues of inequity of access –in all societies- to new forms of information technology and commit necessary resources and means required to provide for all, and for a more equitable and just world.