Most people who talk about digital divide approach it from a very Marxist perspective. You know, the capitalists are going to have those means of augmentation or means of communication and, you know, the underclass or the lumpenproletariat is going to be forbidden this and they're going to be walled out and kept away from these things. And that is not the way that this really host of digital media works. I mean, that's not the way that the process of digitisation works. And when there are divides, they are not divides that are class-based or economics-based. There are aspects of that but there are other forms of division, which are more powerful and really have the upper hand on the ground.
Stuff like, you know, the division between early adopters and the mass consumer base. Mass consumer base does not even see the stuff that the early adopters are wrestling with. The guy who's got the 0.9 rollout of the software and is asked to contribute, you know, to bug test for it, he's really in much more of a division space than say a rich guy whose secretary is answering his cell phones and taking his e-mails, right?.
I mean, in terms of the impact of the technology and the impact on the technology the social actors who are really causing it to have the form that it has, that's where the action is. And these earlier ideas of how these things are based they're just 20th century paradigms, sort of gated communities or toll-based highway systems or, you know, commons being appropriated by... for profit-based reasons and so forth. I mean, those were real issues 40 years ago, they don't have much to do with what's really going on now and they actually cloud an understanding of what's really happening.