User:Madisonheidler21/sandbox

Economic Gap

We are constantly evolving when it comes to technology in our world. For example, Apple, "an American multinational technology company that specializes in consumer electronics, software and online services", comes out with a new iPhone or iPad or some sort of new form of technology almost every year. It is quite impressive how quickly technology has evolved. The oldest dated form of technology was first dated all the way back to almost 2 million years ago! They created this object and called it "stone tools", which were used as a chopping tool and claimed to be a technological invention. The 1990's was a time for new technologies and reports to be introduced. "National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) began publishing reports about the Internet and access to and usage of the resource." Around this time, the NTIA created three very important reports that help us understand the importance of digital divide in different households. "The first of three reports is titled "Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the 'Have Nots' in Rural and Urban America" (1995), the second is "Falling Through the Net II: New Data on the Digital Divide" (1998), and the final report "Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide" (1999)." High expectations have been linked to digitization, and especially the internet, as a force to decrease divides in society.

The term "Digital Divide" is a widely known term when talking about different technological aspects of everything. "The digital divide is a term that refers to the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology (ICT), and those that don't or have restricted access." Examples that fit under the category of digital divide are the usage of internet access, laptops, telephones, televisions, etc. According to a survey article from Pew Research Center of U.S. ,"Adults executed from January 25 to February 8, 2021, the digital lives of Americans with high and low incomes are varied. Conversely, the proportion of Americans that use home internet or cell phones has maintained constant between 2019 and 2021. Four out of every ten low-income people (43%) do not have home internet access or a computer (43%). Furthermore, the more significant part of lower-income Americans does not own a tablet device." The survey is stressing the importance of the different incomes in the digital world and the resources that are available to each household. It stresses the difference in devices that different households own based off of their household income.

Different households own different forms of technology, whether that be a family computer, internet access, cell phones, land-line telephones, televisions, having a radio installed in your car, etc. Almost every household in the United States uses some form of technology. According to Pew Research Center, more than 97% of adults own some type of mobile device and more than 85% own a smartphone. "There were 307.2 million internet users in the United States in January 2022. The United States's internet penetration rate stood at 92.0 percent of the total population at the start of 2022. Kepios analysis indicates that internet users in the USA increased by 8.4 million (+2.8 percent) between 2021 and 2022." According to Nielsen Company, a global marketing research firm that collects and measures data, analytics, audience, and information, there is an estimate of 121 million TV homes in the U.S in 2020-2021, and around 122.4 million TV homes in 2021-2022. "Worldwide digital population July 2022. As of April 2022, there were more than five billion internet users worldwide, which is 63.1 percent of the global population." These statistics show the real-life (estimated) numbers of all the different types of household electronics people have or use daily.

Vogels, E. A. (2021, September 10). Digital divide persists even as Americans with lower incomes make gains in tech adoption. Pew Research Center. Retrieved October 10, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/22/digital-divide-persists-even-as-americans-with-lower-incomes-make-gains-in-tech-adoption.

ProQuest | Databases, EBooks and Technology for Research. (n.d.). Retrieved October 10, 2022, from https://about.proquest.com.

Museum, The British, and The British Museum. “Our Earliest Technology?” Smarthistory. Accessed October 12, 2022. https://smarthistory.org/our-earliest-technology.

Apple. Accessed October 12, 2022. https://www.apple.com.

https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/digital-divide

Bureau, US Census. Census.gov, October 6, 2022. https://www.census.gov/en.htm.

Wise, Jason. “How Many People Own Televisions in 2022? (Ownership Stats).” EarthWeb, September 6, 2022. https://earthweb.com/television-ownership.

Published by Statista Research Department, and Sep 20. “Internet and Social Media Users in the World 2022.” Statista, September 20, 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide.

“Digital Divide.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, October 19, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide.