World Computer Literacy Day
By Isha Sathe
World Computer Literacy Day is recognized on December 2 this year. To commemorate the day, let us take a look at some of the inequities that exist in this digital age. The digital divide refers to the gaps in access to the internet and other information technologies between certain groups of people. Digital readiness is defined by the National Urban League as “a set of skills associated with using information and communications technology (ICT) to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information. It is the sum of the technical and cognitive skills people employ to use computers to retrieve information, interpret what they find, and judge the quality of that information.” Statistics show the inequity of this digital divide: “11 percent of white adults are digitally illiterate,” yet “this rate is much higher among Black (22 percent) and Hispanic adults (35 percent).”
We know that “universal broadband access has been a stated public goal of the US since the Telecommunications Act of 1996” (Schwartzbach, 2022). And the government has made significant investments in trying to achieve this goal. While they have succeeded in making the internet available across various areas they have failed to make means of adoption possible. For example, even if a household has access to broadband services it doesn’t mean they are able to afford them or they might have a “lack of awareness of the benefits of broadband, unfamiliarity with digital devices, [or] insufficient digital skills and digital literacy” (Schwartzbach, 2022).
Increasing the adoption of digital services is incredibly important. An analysis by the Brookings Institution found that “as of 2016, 70 percent of jobs in the more than 500 occupations they examined (which comprises 90 percent of all jobs in the US) require either a medium or high level of digital skills, a proportion that has likely gone up in the half decade since.” (Kulkarni et al., 2017). Beyond this, the adoption of digital literacy skills can help build local economies, and potentially end cycles of poverty.
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