That was a reminder how ideas build upon one another and that answers often must percolate a while—and be addressed from different perspectives—before they move forward toward implementation.
One focus of the “Building the Gigabit City” report was the urban core in Kansas City. Many of the participants in the urban core brainstorming session group were concerned about the digital divide. The question of whether urban core residents, particularly those who are older and with fewer economic resources, might be left even further behind once ultra-high speed Internet came to town was a particular focus in the brainstorming session. The digital divide has also been a recurrent theme in the work of the Mayors’ Bi-State Innovation Team and is reflected in its playbook.
The Google digital divide event provided additional data points, including an excellent take from John Horrigan of TechNet on why we should be concerned about the digital divide even if we are on the other side of it. In his talk, John Horrigan highlighted multiple impacts of the digital divide:
Horrigan also made the point that while mobile access to the Internet via smartphones does bridge part of the digital divide gap, it falls short in both quality of experience (because of the limiting nature of the small screen) and in depth of experience (because of increasingly onerous data caps and throttle).
At the Google digital divide event, Google unveiled some excellent research that not only quantified the the size and the geography of the digital divide, but also drew some conclusions about why it exists, and offered insights into how the digital divide might be bridged.
The reality of the digital divide is a reminder that truly profound innovation and creativity carries not only the burden of producing breakthrough ideas, but also of producing the path by which people can use those ideas in a broad and sustainable manner. –Barrett Sydnor
