Information and communication technologies (ICTs) change how people and organizations interact with each other. They reconfigure and disrupt social networks, value chains, geographic spaces, information flows, and many other facets of the human experience.
In reconfiguring these networks and spaces, ICTs can empower, disempower, entrench power, and circumvent power. It is these reconfigurations that our Digital Inequality Group (DIG) seeks to understand, because we believe that questions of equality and social justice are as important as ever in the information age.
Our goal is to understand the differences that ICTs and changing connectivities make at the world’s economic peripheries; to ask and uncover who the winners and losers of new and reconfigured connectivities are; and to critically consider what ‘development’ is, and should be, in a hyper-connected age.
The Digital Inequality Group is a multi-disciplinary group of researchers based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. This website is our digital home, and we hope to use it to share our work, to start conversations and dialogues, and ultimately to consolidate our findings into forms that may be useful to other scholars, practitioners, policy makers, and anyone else thinking about who benefits and who doesn’t from the world’s changing connectivity.
