I agree when David Nemer says the problem about digital divide research is that "quantitative approaches are addressed to answer the wrong questions" Digital Divide Research: one myth, problem and challenge by David Nemer. "Digital Divide" issues are with us every day in the Dadamac community, and they are much more complex than "the easily measurable".
Since the turn of the century Dadamac, and its pre-cursors OOCD and Cawdnet, have been crossing the digital divide between UK and various locations in rural Africa. Overcoming "digital divide" challenges has been "part of our being" for over a decade. Infrastruture-related challenges are constantly with us. People in our network are in a variety of situations, ranging from bandwidth-rich, through bandwidth-challenged to bandwidth-starved. Obviously this has serious implications for how we can communicate and collaborate. Other less obvious aspects of the digital divide also impact on us - such as different mother-tongues, oral rther than written cultures, time-zone problems, lack of opportunities for ICT skill development, and subtle cultural differences which influence online behaviour and our expectations of ourselves and each other.
I'm encouraged by what David Nemer wrote:
... in order to fully understand and propose meaningful solutions, the digital divide research requires local and context based research.... we need to understand that each country has its own set of policies, people have different cultural backgrounds, so solutions need to be tailored and not based on general analysis...
...Policymakers of the digital divide tend to have a technological deterministic perspective. They focus on single factors, such as “access”... easy to measure... policymakers are strung up on numbers, and how can we show them that subjective factors such as education and training can be of much better value to promote the digital inclusion that pure access? I don’t want to blame policymakers for approaching the digital divide quantitatively, but I’d like to leave this challenge for us, digital divide scholars, to realize a way to start conversations with people that can only see numbers.
I'm in total agreement with David Nemer that policy makers need to shift their focus away from the easily measurable, and that the research community has an important role to play in helping policy makers to be better informed about on-the-ground realities. Despite my high hopes of several years ago (Dadamac - the Internet-enabled alternative to top-down development) I see little hope of reality checks and grassroots knowledge ever feeding directly into the policy-making process. I shited my hopes to caolaboration with researchers, but my experiences of the academic-practiftioner divide at ICTD2010 almost caused me to abandon all attempts to link up with the academic community as well. However, David Nemer's thinking is source of encouragement.
If scholars do become interested in genuine local and context based research (rather than the top-down kind) then channels could open up between grass-roots reality and policy making. It would be to the benefit of all concerned. Maybe what David wrote is evidence that the gap between academia and practice in ICT4D and related discipines is finally narrowing enough for meaningful collaboration. I hope so.
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