wairua » publications » Overcoming the digital divide

Andy Williamson, Wairua Consulting
October 2000

Last year, the question was how do we transform New Zealand into a knowledge economy. The downside of this vision is now apparent in the fashionable conversation on the digital divide or, more importantly, how we as a nation manage to heave ourselves onto the right side of the digital tracks. Unfortunately, the answer at the moment appears to be that a large proportion of New Zealanders won't.

Literacy is the key to our digital future. Not just literacy in terms of reading a book, but literacy in the online world. In the new economy, knowledge itself is not power, rather it is knowing how to obtain that knowledge that matters. In the early 1990's New Zealand was seen as having one of the greatest disparities between rates of traditional literacy; in other words a lot of us were highly literate but an equally large number of us were not. What future in the digital society for those who are already on the wrong side of the literacy divide?

Our government drip feeds announcements, reviews and conferences aimed at solving, so far with little real vision or impact. The fact is that to invest in the digital society means to invest at a grass roots level in the tools of knowledge. This means not only in the school classroom but also in terms of addressing adults, already disenfranchised from learning, who's digital literacy seems doomed to a satellite TV remote, if they are lucky.

Time and time again we hear the harbingers of gloom in the Business Roundtable complain about the direction this country is travelling, but are they any better? "Four legs good" has long been a motto for the New Zealand economy but to succeed in the next age, the information age, we need to use our brains, not our brawn if we are to bring home the bacon. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Alliance still hankers after dark-satanic mills pumping out smoke and pollutants, real people, making real things that other real people want to buy. Unfortunately, someone else makes them cheaper.

So where are we to go if New Zealand is to avoid economic relegation on the world stage? The answer is simple: The time has come to invest in the future not the past. We must invest in an education system that teaches us how to learn, we must invest in an education system that is flexible enough to ensure that those currently disposed and marginalised from society are able to partake and we must ensure that training in technology literacy is available as a life-skill to all. Having invested in our future, we need to make it happen. We need coherent local and national strategies, as well as targeted policies for Maori and others who are presently marginalised. We need strategies that support entrepreneurship, which recognise that reward comes from innovation, not systems which stifle it. Above all we need to build on the uniqueness of New Zealand and regain our "can do" attitude, only this time there's no need for number-8 wire, just a piece of fibre-optic cable.