Freedom of access to information and the Digital Divide: the answer’s in the palm of your hand.

Abstract

Freedom of access to information is a beautifully simple concept that presents enormous complications in practice. The world is full of hindrances to freedom of access, some of them small and merely annoying and others massive and seemingly insurmountable. There are also facilitators of access: social, psychological, political, legal and technical. Information technology is a great facilitator of access, but its effects are almost always exaggerated. Information does not reach people in some magical way once a technology is developed. Technology has to be appropriate and it has to be taken up and sustained by those for whom it offers benefits. This paper will argue that among the many contributions to freedom of access, cell phone technology (something which you can hold in the palm of your hand), offers unexpectedly large benefits. In particular it offers some first solid steps towards bridging the so-called digital divide. To show why this matters and why cell phone technology offers such important potential, it is worth going back to the basic principle involved and its implications.