I’ve been working lately analyzing 47 models that describe — explicitly or implicitly — the Information Society. Some of them speak of access as the existence of infrastructures; other cannot conceive any effective access without capacity (i.e. digital skills); some others do have quite a broad understanding of what access is and include many nondigital/analogue variables to explain their model.
On one hand, all models (or almost) have their reasons: depending on what are your objectives, you are measuring a different thing and/or think of different conceptions of the Information Society — and the digital divide.
On the other hand, the problem is that this is just like speaking in different tongues, a Babel Tower, where quite often people, institutions, projects, indicators and indices, etc. do tell different and incomparable things.
Almost two years ago I draw what I then considered a framework that could gather up all kind of approaches:
I’ve now drawn the following one:
Share:
