Mobile Has Largely Erased the "Digital Divide"

The thing about "problems" is that you have to know when a problem has been largely solved, substantially solved or is so close to being solved that one has to move on to tackle the next set of problems. Internet access and broadband are, in many ways, those sorts of problems. Availability is less and less a problem. Redesigning life and business to take advantage of the changes is where the real work awaits.

Is Digital Behavior Gap Growing?

Over time, differences in technology adoption across generations or between regions tend to close. So some might argue the differences between younger users and older users in the U.S. market suggest a gap is widening.

Others might argue the differences in adoption only mean older users are going to start using the same tools younger users favor.

Gen Y is particularly mobile savvy, Forrester Research notes. Some 85 percent of consumers in the Millennial demographic regularly send or receive text messages, compared with 57 percent of all US consumers over the age of 18.

About 27 percent of Millennials access social networks on their mobile devices (compared with 14 percent of all US consumers) and 37 percent of Millennials access the mobile Internet, compared with 23 percent of all US consumers.

I tend to think this means older demographics increasingly will adopt those behaviors as well. It seems to have happened with virtually all earlier online and mobile behaviors, and one would do well to bet with the historical trend, rather than against it.

Forrester Research

"Digital Divide" is Closing

Policy advocates and policymakers have worried about a "digital divide" in U.S. Internet usage, as much as global policymakers have worried about the difference between communications use in developed and developing regions.

But a new study by eMarketer suggests that the U.S. digital divide is closing fairly rapidly. By 2014, in four years, Internet usage rates by Americans of black ancestry will just about equal rates of U.S. "whites" today, while Hispanic American use of the Internet will rise to within six percentage points of the current U.S. average usage by "white" Americans.

That is not to say rates will be identical, but the point is that almost nobody thinks "white" Americans generally are victims of a "digital divide" today, though there are more issues in rural or isolated parts of the country. In fact, most of the non-adoption factors now are of a "demand" sort rather than a "supply" sort. In other words, most people who want broadband already buy it.

If by 2015 Americans of "black" or "Hispanic" heritage have those same rates, the significance of the "divide" should be largely moot. That is not to say the issue is completely moot, but closing the last percentage or two of gap in any endeavor always is a matter of effort and reward. And since the primary issue these days is demand, not supply, some circumspection might be in order, in terms of the amount of effort expended, compared to the potential benefits. The markets, and consumers, seem to be doing a relatively good job, unaided, in terms of closing the digital divide.