[CALL News] Panel on digital divide at the CAP conference

[Soraj Hongladarom]

Dear colleagues,

While I am still trying to get the manuscript of the ITUA 2002 to the 
press, I would like to announce a call for papers for a panel on the 
digital divide for the upcoming Computing and Philosophy Conference, 
to be held at the Australian National University in Canberra from 
Oct. 31 to Nov. 2 this year. There may be some possibilities of 
funding for Asian scholars who present their papers at the 
conference. Those who are interested should submit their abstracts 
(around 150 to 200 words) to me by Feb. 1. The panel is an 
interdisciplinary ones, and papers from fields such as philosophy, 
sociology, internet studies, cultural studies, education, 
communication and others are invited.

The website of the conference can be found at 
http://www.csu.edu.au/faculty/arts/cappe/cap.htm

Yours,
Soraj

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THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

This panel aims at investigating the ethical and conceptual aspects 
surrounding the digital divide issue. Nowadays "digital divide" has 
become a hot topic in the discourses of information technology 
pundits and policy makers who talk as if the divide is a problem 
which can be solved easily through more diffusion of the technology. 
However, what is lacking in these discourses is sustained reflection 
on what the term 'digital divide' actually means, as well as on the 
many ethical issues involved. Albert Borgmann, in Holding on to 
Reality, says that many people seem to rush toward finding a solution 
to the digital divide problem, finding a 'bridge', without pausing to 
think whether it is really desirable to do so. For Borgmann, rushing 
to close the divide would seem to mean that humans are estranged more 
and more from bedrock reality. And there is the prospect of humans 
becoming less diverse since they would all end up being 'wired' to 
the Net. (But what is wrong with that really?) Moreover, there seems 
to be a dearth in clear thinking as to what the availabililty and 
accessibility of the technology would mean to those people to whom 
the technology does not have a real meaning. There was an attempt by 
a former government of Thailand to distribute computers to every 
school in the country. What happened, however, was that many 
computers are now laying there collecting dust, having become a 
sacred object or a symbol of the government's power, with no 
meaningful connection to the lives of the schoolchildren or to the 
villagers.

So some of the questions for the panel are: What exactly does 
'digital divide' mean? Is 'digital divide' an appropriate 
characterisation of current trends in information technology 
distribution? What does it actually mean for one to be separated by 
this 'divide' from another? Why does the divide need to be closed? Or 
is it really a good thing to do so? What else needs to taken into 
consideration? Is thinking about this issue essentially the same or 
different from thinking about the familiar indicators of social and 
international inequality, such as nutrition (the food divide) or 
income (the money divide)? How does the digital divide relate to 
globalization? What are the relations between it and local cultures? 
How can we conceptualize the whole problem so that we could 
understand it better?

*********


-- 
Soraj Hongladarom

Department of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
Bangkok 10330, Thailand
Tel. +66 (0) 2218-4756; Fax. +66 (0) 2218-4755
Home page: http://pioneer.chula.ac.th/~hsoraj/web/soraj.html
**International Conference on Information Technology and Universities 
in Asia, ITUA 2002** http://pioneer.chula.ac.th/~hsoraj/IT
Science in Thai Culture Project: http://www.stc.arts.chula.ac.th/