The Digital Divide and Me

I am white privileged male alive during the time of human technology at its peak, so what do I know of the digital divide? The truth is nothing much.

I have grown up in a middle-class family with access to technology and all the information of humankind at my fingertips. But do I really have access to ALL the information of humankind? Well on surface value yes, pretty much anything I have ever wanted to know is but a few mere keystrokes and clicks away from me.

But what about the data and information that I am not purposefully looking for. What about the information and content that is aggregated and tailored specifically towards me and my interests based upon previous interactions with data and information the web? Big Data is no new term and digital companies have for years been tailoring what sorts of information a user will see on their site but is this tailoring of data creating more problems than it solves.

We all enjoy jumping onto YouTube and be greeted with videos by channels we enjoy and content that appeals to our interests, but this filtering of content is in a sense ‘gate-keeping’ us from discovering new content.

I know that sometimes I can be guilty of not wanting to discover anything new because I know what I like and I don’t want anything else. This is one thing when it comes to entertainment content creation such as videos and music but what about targeted ads, political content etc?

Should big tech companies be dictating what we see when we aren’t even aware that it’s being presented to us? The digital divide is no longer only about access to technology and information but also why type of information we are presented with. Tech companies whilst at the end of the day are aiming to generate a profit should strive to create features that do not further enable this divide but rather present all information to the user as equal, particularly in the case of serious information such as political campaigns etc.