Towards a study of Information Geographies Reflection

The digital divide has often simply been labeled as the difference between those who have and those who have not, the haves and the haven’ts. But this divide can be further examined into who is creating the content that users around the world are either able to or not able to access.

When looking at various maps depicting where in various parts of the world this information is being created and generated it becomes much easier to see the divide in this respect. These areas can largely be split into 2 major categories / geographies: The Global North and The Global South.

The Global North can largely be surmised as the United States of America, large portions of Europe and smaller parts of Asia; some of the superpower nations of the world. Whereas the global South comprises largely of the rest of the world in particular Africa, South America and other ‘poorer’ regions of the world.

What is interesting to note is that the areas of the globe which are dominating in terms of content and information being created directly correlate to the areas of the globe where internet access is significantly cheaper than those areas where the rate of information and content creation is severely far behind.

Thus, a direct correlation can be drawn between the geographies of where information is being generated and access this information. This further disadvantages the have nots as they are being further and further sidelined from these information hyper lanes.

The Global South has a far deeper market penetration in the use of mobile devices for internet access than the Global North, in particular regions such as Africa and Asia have extremely high rates of mobile device use for access as opposed to other devices. If more information content creation was suited to mobile devices then I believe that over time we would see these information geographies begin to change to reflect a greater level of equality when the different regions.