There have been, over the years, many proposals to eliminate, or at least lessen, the digital divide. Warschauer (2002) offers three narratives of intiatives that were taken to eliminate the digital divide in three different places (India, Ireland, and Egypt), and how each of them failed in their mission to educate users and get them using computers. I suspect that these initiatives might go over better today, over twenty years later, due to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; and as the COVID-19 pandemic wears on, even more people rely on computers and the internet for interconnectedness.
But despite the fact that Warschauer's paper is nearly twenty years old, there is plenty that information managers can take away from it:
[A] digital divide is marked not only by physical access to computers and connectivity, but also by access to the additional resources that allow people to use technology well. However, the original sense of the digital divide term - which attached overriding importance to the physical availability of computers and connectivity, rather than to issues of content, language, education, literacy, or community and social resources - is difficult to overcome in people's minds. (Warschauer, 2002)
Technology and society are closely intertwined, Warchauser goes on to say. The digital divide is not just about lack of access to computers and the internet, it is about the abiity to use those tools effectively.
Here, information organizations can help to solve the problem, and if information organizations are at the heart of a community, then they can work effectively to help navigate the digital divide and perhaps even bridge it. As library branch supervisor Cat Fithian pointed out, even when libraries are closed due to the pandemic, poorer students and people needed internet access can at least bring their laptop computers or other devices and sit in the parking lot and use access the library's wireless internet service (Fithian, 2020).
But what can be done for those people who have no internet-capable devices? Assuming the library has not closed, then they are able to use the library's computers and have library staff show them how to use them. And as more and more services, from health information access to tax preparation, move almost exclusively online, “crossover” approaches to technology education become even more important (see Bharat, Everett, & Vandana, 2020).
If information organization managers can find ways to engage users who have no access to information technology and encourage this sort of “crossover” training, then, they will find that their organization is even more valuable to critical to the community both locally and at large.