Who Is Left Offline? The Digital Divide as a Social Issue

The digital divide is the gap between those who can use digital technology and those who cannot. The term spread in the mid-1990s after US government reports titled Falling Through the Net examined unequal access. Globally, the divide runs between rich and poor countries, cities and rural areas, men and women, and young and old. In the early 2020s the International Telecommunication Union estimated that roughly a third of the world's population had never used the internet, most of them in low-income countries.

Access alone is not enough: affordability, skills, content in local languages and electricity all matter. Mobile phones narrowed the gap in many places, letting people in Kenya, for example, send money with M-Pesa from 2007. The divide matters because more education, health care, jobs and civic life now happen online, so being offline can deepen other inequalities.