What is Digital Divde

Information Technology (IT), could be the use of computers or internet, is becoming increasingly prevalent in homes and also in workplaces in New Zealand. While on the other hand, at global level the technologically literate population has the ability to engage knowledge ecomony. Internet access can offer New Zealander the ability to build their skills and also participate in this knowledge ecomony.

An significant means of access a wide variety of information and resources is the Internet. People who are unable to access or lack the expertise to use internet or information technology are currently at risk from being completely excluded from the future developments. This could have a negative effect on the growth of an organization.

As compared to the world, New Zealand is considered to have the highest access rate in Internet. New Zealand raked 8th in the world in the year 2002 for number of internet users and 5th for number on PCs, according to OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)

The Internet can provide New Zealand Business organization with different ways to enter foreign market.

Thus in acknowledge with the need to include same opportunities for both rural communities to connect to the emerging technologies, the Government of New Zealand took and initiative to make the broadband Internet service available to all the schools and organization by 2004. This would provide the same level of access to internet to rural schools and organization in comparison with their urban counterparts.

According to the initial research, use of information technology such as internet was limited only to the high-income group organizations. This could be due to the high implementation cost of the equipments or due to  the lack of awareness of the benefits which can be gained from the use of technology or due to the lack of skills.

The Digital Divide can thus be defined as the difference between the individuals who has or has-not the implemented information technology or in other words, has or does not have access to internet.  The Digital Divide can also be characterized as the different types of organizations and different geographical areas in terms of their possibilites for accessing internet. This difference in the rate at which organization access internet will be calculated as divide.