Information Security in the Context of Digital Divide in Arab World

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3- The Multifaceted "Digital Divide" A digital divide is an economic inequality between groups, broadly construed, in terms of access to, use of, or knowledge of information and communication technologies (ICT). The divide within countries can refer to inequalities between individuals, households, businesses, and geographic areas at different socioeconomic and other demographic levels, while the divide between countries is referred to as the global digital divide, which designates nations as the units of analysis and examines the gap between developing and developed countries on an international scale. (Chinn& Robert ,2004) ICT includes networking technologies, telecommunications and information technology (telephone, T.V., Internet, computers, etc.) that directly or indirectly influence our socio-economic, educational and cultural activities. It takes many forms: Digital divide between north and south, it also refers to inequalities in access to and use of ICT between urban and rural areas, and between genders. This form of digital divide is a consequence of the social divide which is reflected as a knowledge divide. (Ollivier, 2006) argued that the digital divide is a multiple and complex concept at the same time, because it reflects innumerable inequalities between men and women, rural area and urban areas, "haves" and "have-nots", taking into account the technological level, the rate of being connected, the number of machines, ICT budgets etc. It reflects also differences in economic development (GDP per capita, costs of computer equipment), technology (bandwidth) energy (electricity), industrial (low development software production) or language. This is the reason for which technological development and the improvement ... ... middle of paper ... ...there is a high degree of penetration of ICT and the Internet in some Arab countries who have good IDI ranking. Besides, such countries correspond, to a large extent, to those ranking high on the use and access IDI sub-indexes. Other Arab countries show a lower penetration value, indicated by lower IDI ranking, where access and use of ICT remains a challenge. Neither the results of the study conducted by ITU are surprising. Digital divide, in most cases, is resulting from preexisting gaps in society, which affect adoption and strengthening of new technologies. The main factors that cause it are the level of income and its distribution, and the provision of communications infrastructure and level of education. That is why the high IDI ranking Arab countries are mainly the Arabian Gulf countries that have a high income economy as compared with other Arab countries.

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