Digital Divides
Covid-19 continues to affect millions around the world. Yet, we have entered a new phase as governments, businesses and employers cast aside behavioural changes and precautions embraced during the pandemic as things return to ‘normal’. Such a move, however, should be attended by some introspection because the accelerated and expansive turn to the digital during the pandemic highlighted the need to re-think digital access, skills and cultural gaps prohibiting many from joining in the process (see Zhongxuan Lin & Liu Yang, 2020). A return to ‘normality’ ought to prompt questions about, on the one hand, the extent to which non-digital access to various services, industries or settings ought to have been safeguarded during the pandemic to mitigate for entrenched inequalities; and, on the other, how digital access can be expanded such that those inequalities are reduced rather than ignored (see Blomberg et al., 2021). The pandemic foregrounded key digital inequalities, e.g., between essential and office workers. The post-pandemic period appears to show not only that such inequalities are likely to endure but also that historically disadvantaged groups such as the elderly or the poor will continue to suffer due to the persistence of the intersections between digital and other forms of inequality and exclusion. This collection seeks to reignite reflections and discussions on how digital technologies can be used as tools to tackle some of the challenges brought to the fore by the pandemic or which have surfaced following the lifting of most of the public health restrictions. Equally, it is an invitation to think about how, why and what can be done about those same technologies when they become the source of more, or more deeply entrenched, inequalities and impact negatively on issues such as health, education, welfare and wellbeing. Finally, it alerts us to new forms of inequalities emerging from the diffusion of artificial intelligence and commercially-owned algorithms.
Edited by
Dan Mercea(City, University of London, UK)
Victor Ávila Torres(University of York, UK)