Not One Divide But Three: Physical, Linguistic and Intellectual Issues in Global IT

摘要

As we suggest here, through our snapshot of U. C. D. research, there are strong reasons to be optimistic that the physical and linguistic divides can be bridged by researchers rather than politicians. This optimism is grounded in the realization that the pace of technological development is now equalled only by the scale of public anticipation for this development and the speed with which an eager society rapidly adopts the fruits of new ICT research. Indeed, the pace of adoption is such that in developing countries, new technologies are leap-frogging over what were previously held to be precursor technologies. For instance, in developed countries the infrastructure of fixed-line telephony preceded that of mobile telephony, but in many parts of developing Africa, it is proving cheaper and more effective to proceed directly to the mobile variant. This readiness to leap-frog will make the physical divide all the easier to bridge in coming years.