New Technology and Digital Worlds: Analyzing Evidence of Equity in Access, Use, and Outcomes

TLDR: There is a broad consensus among educators, communication scholars, sociologists, and economists that the development and diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) are having a profound effect on modern life as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: is broad consensus among educators, communication scholars, sociologists, and economists that the development and diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) are having a profound effect on modern life. This is due to the affordances of new digital media, which bridge the interactive features of speech and the archival characteristics of writing; allow many-to-many communication among people without regard to time and space, including mass collaborative editing of texts; facilitate the creation of a global hyper-indexed multimodal information structure; and enable content production and distribution in both writing and multimedia on a scale previously unimaginable (Jewitt, 2008; Warschauer, 1999). For all these reasons, computer-mediated communication can be considered a new mode of information (Poster, 1990), or a "fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge" (Harnad, 1991, p. 39), following the three prior revolutions of language, writing, and print. The previous revolution, brought about through the development and diffusion of printing, took centuries to unfold, as its full impact depended on the industrial revolution that Gutenberg's printing press preceded by several centuries (Eisenstein, 1979). Today, though, the development and diffusion of computers and the Internet occur simultaneously with a new economic revolution, based on transition from an industrial to an informational economy (Castells, 1996). This helps explain both why new media have spread so fast and also why they are so crucial to enabling full social and economic participation. As Castells (1998) concludes, based on his exhaustive socioeconomic analysis of this postindustrial stage of capitalism, "information technology,