This recent Wired.com article on Google's latest foray into the provision of cloud computing services probably seemed fairly innocuous, and at first glance certainly appears devoid of any social or political commentary, particularly for tech-savvy North American readers, who, one assumes, are the target audience for the piece.  Go ahead and read the link, then come back.  We’ll wait.

The assertion of "ubiquitous broadband" and similar statements implying some sort of fully resourced 'global tech-topia' are dismayingly common, and are not limited to pop-academic sources such as Wired.  Too often, academics and other individuals who should know better - who arguably have a responsibility to know better - make similarly sweeping statements without pausing for self-reflection.  They assume the ubiquity of fully connected digital environments in which everyone is a netizen, and a highspeed and hyperliterate one at that, apparently forgetting the vast swathes of the globe that barely have telephone lines, let alone broadband.

In assuming a perspective where everyone has the computer literacy and broadband capacity of a tech start up in Palo Alto, California, we start to lose sight of the reality of the global communications environment.  Ideals and visions of a connected globe (all floating in the cloud) certainly have their place, but they become self-serving and exclusionary when they are disconnected (in every sense) from the everyday experience of many, if not most, people today.  Those of us writing about and working in digital culture should be using our various privileges to imagine advances that include these 'others', or at least acknowledge their existence and our relative privilege.  The growing divides of access and participation is a situation that should be fundamentally unacceptable.   Moreover, a true comprehension of these inequalities and power structures requires more than a simple dichotomous approach identifying merely the 'haves' and 'have nots.’  The digital divide is a continuum, with varying levels of skills and access, and subsequently varying levels of experience, as you move along from those who have no access to those who have the best access (like those who write articles for Wired!).  We need to take a self-reflective and nuanced view that recognises our own position in a finely graded hierarchy of different kinds of access to technology.

The urban North American or South Korean experience of the internet, with its blisteringly fast fibre optic connection, needs to be put into context alongside experiences of the internet on dial-up connections, or connections paid for by the hour in public internet cafes.  For example, until very recently, there were hospitals in urban areas in nations as developed as New Zealand that had broadband at all, and only gained one through a community wifi initiative.  Full fibre optic connections to the region were only established last year.  In rural Australia, mobile ‘internet cafes’ cover great distances bringing connectivity in the same way that mobile libraries gave them access to book-based information.  The urban dwellers in these countries, complaining about their (relatively) slow, expensive broadband connection should remember their rural counterparts who only have access to dial-up connections, with no immediate prospect of change.  The farmers complaining about their dial-up should remember their fellow citizens without any internet access at all, or very little, due to a multitude of socioeconomic, political, ethnic, geographical, technological, educational, gender, and demographic factors.  These national divides in turn pale into significance in the global context of divides which led to the creation of programs such as OLPC, or government-led nation-wide broadband rollout.  By the same token, we should not default to a response of patronizing pity for those with less - there are many examples of people and societies doing amazingly innovative and advanced things without the ‘essential’ trappings of telephone switches or the latest processors.  Innovation and visions are not the sole domain of the developed world.

In reality, of course, our everyday lives are not this critical or self-reflective.  But in our role as researchers and writers, as individuals who have the privilege of sharing our views and sometimes even speaking for others - we have a responsibility to do better, and to remember that our experience does not speak for all experience.  The recognition of this fact does not, of course, play an explicit role in every single text or talk we produce.  But it plays, or at least should play a role in far more of our discourse than it does currently, both implicitly and explicitly.  When people read such casual techno-supremacy repeatedly from authoritative voices such as Wired, the yawning gulf of the digital divides is brushed over, pushed out of sight (and thus out of mind).  But the divides still exists, and unless we make a conscious effort to remember it will become an unbridgeable chasm.  And those down towards the disconnected end of the divide won’t have the channels, the skills, or the voice to remind us otherwise.

(co-authored with Tessa J. Houghton, PhD Candidate in Media and Communication at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Canterbury, New Zealand)