| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, a virtual publishing industry on the "digital divide" has arisen. Academic books, research papers, government reports, private corporate position papers, and market research brochures have sketched its profile, pointed to its seriousness, and recommended public policies for alleviating it. The book by Pippa Norris is one of the more serious academic attempts to outline, on the basis of survey research data, the social, economic, and especially the political contours of the divide.

Norris discusses her topic in terms of a global divide, "divergence of Internet access between industrialized and developing societies"; a social divide, "the gap between the information rich and poor in each nation"; and a democratic divide, "the difference between those who do, and do not, use the panoply of digital resources to engage, mobilize, and participate in public life." (4)

Running throughout the book is a contrast between two positions. The cyber-optimists view the Internet as an opportunity for reducing social inequalities and engaging the disengaged, the alienated, and the dispossessed. The cyber-pessimists suggest that the Internet reinforces and may even intensify traditional social cleavages; they view the Internet as conferring advantages on large media corporations and governments to dominate political discourse rather than enabling interactive communications that could transform politics and government. Most of Norris' data appear to support the cyber-pessimists, though not without qualification.

Part One of the book is devoted to the socioeconomic divide between and within nations. Norris employs survey data collected by others (such as NUA Internet Surveys) to conduct statistical analyses showing that North America, western Europe, and Scandinavia are much more wired than the developing countries of sub-Sahara Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. Given the lack of much survey data collected in the developing world, Norris focuses primarily on the US and Western Europe to outline deep inequalities in access to the Internet by education, income, gender, occupation, generation, and race/ethnicity. None of this is new. Many other researchers have published and discussed the same kinds of statistics. But she takes these statistics somewhat further by engaging in regression analyses showing that technological diffusion and socio-economic development (per capita GDP and investment in research and development) have much more to do with who is online than a nation's level of democratization. A constant theme is the similarity between new media and old media, such as phone, fax, TV, and VCRs.

Part Two, devoted to the "virtual political system," is the main section of the book. Using data from various public agencies, Norris displays counts of the number of Web sites hosted by parliaments, government departments, electoral political parties, the news media, interest groups, new social movements, and transnational advocacy groups. Norris' regression analyses mostly show that technological diffusion explains national differences in "digital politics" more than socioeconomic development or level of democratization. Political organizations use the Web to extend what they normally do off the Web, such as the distribution of policy documents. Most of her analyses and arguments suggest that digital politics is more about the top-down distribution of information than a bottom-up interactive communications that might potentially create a new kind of dialogue or even transform institutional politics.

Part Three is a small section on the democratic divide. Norris presents data showing that Internet users in the US and western Europe tend to support a post-materialist cyber-culture somewhat more than non-users; users are somewhat more liberal in moral values on the environment, gay rights, lesbianism, censorship, equality, individualism, and secularism, but more conservative on some economic and political issues (more pro-business and republican). Norris appears to side with the reinforcement thesis (those most politically engaged through the Internet were previously engaged in traditional politics) than the mobilization thesis (the Internet will engage the disaffected and unengaged).

The value of the book is that Norris integrates international and national socioeconomic Internet access data with data on digital politics. She utilizes social and economic data on inequality of access to understand why some citizens are engaged politically through the Internet while other citizens are excluded.

Even though the book is cast at the international level, it privileges the US as the gold standard against which all other countries are to be judged. Her questions are not about comparative international differences in Internet access, but how other countries are similar to or different from the US. The comparisons are generally between the US and western Europe and the US and Scandinavia. There is hardly any data presented on the developing regions of the world. Nor is there any intensive analysis of why more than 90 percent of the world is excluded from the Internet.

We do write books from our historical and social vantage point. The author is located in the US at Harvard University in Boston. Privileged locations can provide instant Internet access to considerable data and information. They can also create blinders on the type of research conducted, the kinds of data considered legitimate, and the sensitivities to global cultural diversities and perspectives. There is nothing in her theoretical model that provides a rationale for the focus on the US. Nor is it defensible empirically, since on some measures other countries have greater Internet connectivity. It should also be noted that the percentage of world Internet hosts and clients located in the US has been declining, which receives only one mention in the book. English-language Web sites, as a proportion of all Web sites, have also been on the decline. Some of the greatest growth in the Internet in recent years has been in the non-English developing world (especially Asia), whose citizens want to view Web sites in their own indigenous language and culture. As Norris admits, some of her databases (AJRNewslink) are located in the US and are likely to reflect an American bias. To compensate, she cross-references Editor & Publisher, World News Index, and Yahoo. However, two of these indexes are also headquartered in the US, and are likely to contain similar biases. The one rationale for the focus on the US could be the Internet's historical roots in that country. But Norris does not make much of it, perhaps because of the importance of Switzerland in developing the concept of the Web through the work of Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web.

Almost all the empirical data presented in the book are based on statistical surveys or quantifiable data, such as numbers of Internet clients, hosts, and domains. Not only does this privilege data in the US and western Europe where the best and most numerous surveys have been collected, but it excludes qualitative data and analyses, other than anecdotal examples. This has a profound effect on what one considers important about digital politics: the number of Websites run by various political organizations. This sets up a bias in favour of institutional politics and large political organizations, and their well-financed and professional presentation of information through the Web. Such a methodological choice downplays grassroots political activism through interactive communications (e-mail, chat rooms, and listservs) spawned by new social movements and the international advocacy coalitions. The Web is essentially a medium for the presentation and distribution of information, not primarily a communications medium. The Web should not be confused with the Internet. Although there have been many software attempts to incorporate communication utilities into the Web, these are add-ons. It is the communication utilities that have been particularly important in grassroots campaigns by activist groups. As a result, new social movements and grassroots global protest campaigns only get a passing reference in the book. There is a growing literature on the twinning of social and political activism and the communication underbelly of the Internet that is not reflected in this book. There is no analysis of the anti-globalization campaigns that have made sustained use of the Internet's communication utilities to organize internationally. The book thus does a good job at outlining how traditional institutional politics make use of the Web, but fails to mount any sustained analysis of global and local electronic political activism.


Carl Cuneo McMaster University

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