What is digital determinism?
Writing during the boom, but unfortunately published on the cusp of the crash, Australian media theorist Trevor Barr falls into the trap of digital determinism: If there is any aspect of contemporary information society that is clearly revolutionary it is the technical capability, reach and intelligence of information networks. (Barr 2000, p. 29) This is what I call the ‘digital utopia’ formulation; it invests the hardware with the agency of radical social change inherent in the use of the term ‘revolution’. It is a big call to make, and one that is, unsustainable in the face of the growing digital divide, the gap between the information ‘rich’ and the information ‘poor’ which, strangely enough, seems to follow the same territorial patterns as other indicators of growing gaps in the distribution of social and individual wealth, such as income, ethnicity, education, healthcare and life expectancy. A number of issues in the debate about emerging communication and news technologies in the
