Internet is dividing rich and poor

A report by the influential Joseph Rowntree Foundation has claimed that the internet is increasing the gap between society's richest and poorest people.
The report has looks at the effect of Internet-based Neighbourhood Information Systems (IBNIS), which allow people to select an area to live in based on the schools, housing and income profiles of residents. It fears that the UK will become increasingly split between people clustering into 'good' neighbourhoods of similar individuals.
"Given what we know about the benefits of mixed-income communities in promoting social cohesion, it is important that greater public access to the 'social sorting' technology used by market research does not pull in the opposite direction and lead to even greater segregation between communities," said Professor Roger Burrows, who led the research team from the Universities of York and Durham.
"We already have a 'digital divide' in Britain between those whose internet access makes them information-rich and those whose inability to afford computers or fast web connections makes them information-poor. But it seems only a matter of time before the kind of powerful neighbourhood search sites available in the United States start to reinforce the divide between the more and less prosperous locations in the UK."
He continued that while no-one wanted to ban such websites, their use needed to be monitored in case they had an overly negative effect. He said that in the past 15 years there has already been a decline in community diversity and the use of IBNIS would only make this worse.
-
- Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version
- 1606 reads
PDF version
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
GitLab Web IDE
| Record Terminal Activity For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server
At times system administrators and developers need to use many, complex and lengthy commands in order to perform a critical task. Most of the users will copy those commands and output generated by those respective commands in a text file for review or future reference. Of course, “history” feature of the shell will help you in getting the list of commands used in the past but it won’t help in getting the output generated for those commands.
|
Linux Kernel Maintainer Statistics
As part of preparing my last two talks at LCA on the kernel community, “Burning Down the Castle” and “Maintainers Don’t Scale”, I have looked into how the Kernel’s maintainer structure can be measured. One very interesting approach is looking at the pull request flows, for example done in the LWN article “How 4.4’s patches got to the mainline”. Note that in the linux kernel process, pull requests are only used to submit development from entire subsystems, not individual contributions. What I’m trying to work out here isn’t so much the overall patch flow, but focusing on how maintainers work, and how that’s different in different subsystems.
| Security: Updates, Trustjacking, Breach Detection
|
And here I thought money is w
And here I thought money is what separated the rich from the poor.
re: money
teehee, I heard that one!
----
You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?