Work and Wealth - Ethics for the Information Age - page 473

denied to people without access to these devices. The idea of a digital divide became
popular in the mid-1990s with the rapid growth in popularity of the World Wide Web.
According to Pippa Norris, the digital divide has two fundamentally different di-
mensions. The global divide refers to the disparity in Internet access between more
industrialized and less industrialized nations. The social divide refers to the difference
in access between the rich and poor within a particular country [62].
10.5.1 Global Divide
There is plenty of evidence of what Norris calls the global divide. One piece of evidence
is the percentage of people with Internet access (Figure 10.10). In 2012 about 2.2 billion
people, representing roughly 34 percent of the world's population, had access to the
Internet. Access to the Internet in North America, Oceania/Australia, and Europe was
significantly above this average, while access in Asia and Africa was well below. Only
about 16 percent of the population—one out of every six persons—had Internet access
in Africa in 2012 [63].
What is hampering Internet development in less technologically developed coun-
tries?
1. Often there is little wealth.
In many of these countries there is not enough money to provide everyone in the
country with the necessities of life, much less pay for Internet connections.
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