The expansion of the digital divide 1

The famous Hubble’s Law states that the speed at which galaxies move away from each other is proportional to their distance.

Something similar happens with the so-called digital divide.

Let me reason through a few simple examples.

Ringtones for cell phones are becoming popular these days (a ringtone costs between 1 and 3 dollars on average, and maybe more if it’s polyphonic). Most people are moving from the old cell phone, with no way to change the ringtone, to buying phones with monophonic ringtones, but the more privileged have access to phones with polyphonic ringtones. And some of us, "luckier" still, can use an MP3 of our favorite artist instead of little tunes synthesized in MIDI.
Meanwhile some of us can get cell phones with a 128 MB MMC memory card, and we can download MP3s and send them over bluetooth to our phones, or thanks to USB adapters we can use the MMC as a removable disk, without paying the carriers a single peso for it (they fleece us somewhere else, of course).

That is the digital divide

Worse still: some time from now, when phones with MP3 players and external MMC memory are common and are given away with cell phone plans (if those still exist down the road), it’s likely that, if luck keeps smiling on us, we will have some other technology that lets us communicate with any part of the world through a subvocalizer, or through a "phone" that will probably be a millimeter across, with room for who knows how many terabytes of data to store enough music that we will never get around to listening to.

That is the digital divide.

The cheapest cell phones don’t auto-lock their keypad, which causes their users to make calls by accident, spending money from their plan or from their prepaid cards. If you buy a high-end phone, on the other hand, you get automatic keypad lock, and you will never spend a cent on unwanted calls.

That is the digital divide.

Today a low-priced personal computer is being offered on credit, payable over 36 months. According to Moore’s law, by the time someone finishes paying for their poor PC, the market will have machines with at least 4 times the storage and processing capacity.

That is the digital divide.

It turns out that in the last 2 weeks 10,000 PCs have been sold through the MPPC campaign, and in that same time the MPPCDV campaign has gathered the same number of signatures. (Source: http://aguayoki.cl/eduardo/2005/08/20/diez-mil/)

That is the digital divide

But with every month that goes by this divide gets bigger, and some time from now those of us on the digital side will be moving at a speed proportional to the distance that those at the non-digital end will have to cover.