The Digital Divide and Information Systems Research: Stepping Up or Stepping Away?

Contemporary interest in the digital divide owes much to the attention it receives in government and foundation reports, newspapers, and popular magazines. Commonplace notions about the digital divide are now entering information systems (IS) research. Under these conditions, IS scholars may see the digital divide as preconstructed with a set of questions to be studied and concerns to be resolved. To effectively participate in the discourse, we contend that IS scholars must amplify these questions and concerns to include both the technological artifacts as well as the socially organized fields of choices that shape the context of these artifacts. This more nuanced perspective can provide IS scholars a more potent platform to pursue basic aspects underlying the digital divide and avoid simplistic approaches that only address the preconstructed questions and concerns. In this paper, we discuss three areas in which digital divide scholarship in IS can profit from such nuanced insight: (1) the manner in which information and communication technology (ICT) artifacts are conceptualized, (2) the manner in which ICT artifacts in these domains are developed, deployed and evaluated, and (3) the manner in which educational experiences prepare students who can conceptualize and develop these artifacts.