Editorial
| Pages | 238-241 |
| Date | 13 August 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-08-2018-074 |
| Published date | 13 August 2018 |
| Author | Jenifer Sunrise Winter |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information & communications technology |
Editorial
The digital divide at the nexus of social justice, media justice and ethics:
introduction to the special issue
The digital divide is a dynamic and evolving concept representing disparities in
information and communication technology access and use that can be viewed at
global, regional, local or even household levels and be measured by penetration rates
(e.g., fixed and mobile broadband), affordability, quality of connection (e.g. speed and
reliability) or education and skills. These divides are conceptually complex and often
closely parallel gaps in income, social class, language, education (e.g. digital skills or
literacies), race and gender. As digital information technologies become increasingly
intertwined with nearly every aspect of modern life, new areas of digital divide
scholarship have focused on the growing array of ethical issues arising owing to
widespread data accumulation and analytics made possible by artificial intelligence
and big data. Zuboff (2015) describes this logic of accumulation as “surveillance
capitalism”and warns that it is characterized by growing asymmetries of knowledge
and power. In this age of big data, the analytic processing of data to beget new data is
as important as the collection and aggregation itself (Mai, 2016). Amidst these technical
and social changes, we see that data analytics has been linked to a range of emerging
privacy and civil rights violations owing to its use to make inferences and judgments
that may lead to disparate impacts for individuals and groups (Noble, 2018). Scholars
are also increasing focus on unequal access to digital content and knowledge and the
tools needed to make use of it, as well as how media platforms may enable or constrain
efforts to promote equity. A greater understanding of the underlying values, interests
and priorities of these systems, and how they might be better harnessed to mitigate
disparities, rather than exacerbate them, are central areas of concern.
The Partnership for Progress on the Digital Divide (PPDD) is a not-for-profit
organization that brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary array of individuals and
organizations connecting academic research to policymaking and practice to forward
progress on the digital divide and related challenges. PPDD convenes researchers,
practitioners and policymakers at a series of biennial international conferences, yielding
high-quality interdisciplinarycollaboration and scholarship that highlights new solutionsto
long-standing problems of great social significance and explores emerging contours of the
digital divide. This special issue features eight selected papers from the PPDD conferences
in 2015 (Scottsdale, AZ) and 2017 (San Diego, CA) to address the intersection of the digital
divide and social justice.
In the opening article (“Digital Footprints: An Emerging Dimension of Digital
Inequality”), Marina Micheli, Christoph Lutz and Moritz Büchi address the impacts of
big data, artificial intelligence and algorithms on personal privacy. They argue for a
new conceptualization of digital inequality focusing on the emerging concept of digital
footprints, which are personal digital traces created during both active content creation
and more passive online participation. Arguing that the digital footprints of different
social groups may lead to systematic biases that unjustly provide advantages or
disadvantages, they encourage scholars and policymakers to address individuals and
groups situated “at the margins”. This work also positions digital footprints as an
aspect of digital literacy reflecting one’s ability to mitigate negative consequences of
JICES
16,3
238
Journalof Information,
Communicationand Ethics in
Society
Vol.16 No. 3, 2018
pp. 238-241
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/JICES-08-2018-074
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