There’s long been concern about the lack of access to increasingly essential use of the internet. Federal, state and local governments appear to have declared that they’re building the most critical bridge across the divide with expansion of broadband access.

But that approach, while helpful, doesn’t go far enough, according to a September National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper that presents strong evidence that wide gaps in digital literacy extend way beyond “the availability of essential IT infrastructure at the local level.”

Titled “The New Digital Divide,” the paper’s multiple authors analyzed a 2023 Microsoft dataset, and concluded that their findings call for “comprehensive strategies that address access usage and skills development.”

For example, looking beyond the availability of local IT infrastructure, the paper finds that variance in usage correlates strongly with the urban-rural divide. In fact, the paper’s statistics indicate that the most extreme variance in terms of both low and high usage connect with rural and urban settings. At the same time, large disparities were also found within Metropolitan Statistical Areas. 

Higher levels of education and income also led to more computer use, with lower levels of use associated in areas with older populations. These conclusions are not surprising but help to point out that broadband access – while critical – does not close the digital gap without focused initiatives focused on skills. 

According to the working paper, the data – collected by Microsoft during operating system updates – provides the fullest measure of the use of computing within US households that has been assembled to date. 

This analysis, which covers 28,000 US Zip Codes, looks both at computer use focused on “media and information consumption” and computer use that is more specialized – for example, engagement with software developer tools or the manipulation of images. Both play a strong role in helping to promote individual achievement, success and connection in today’s world, “including enabling economic opportunity, social inclusion and participation in civic activities”. 

With government initiatives and services increasingly dependent on digital access, the conclusions of this paper should be of strong interest in the development of policy and management approaches that build computer literacy. As other studies have found in the past, just having access to computing doesn’t guarantee its use, with the need of more policy and management attention to educational approaches and focused outreach.

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