What I learned
I was actually very surprised at what I found. I was not expecting to find everything in my research to be so negative. I came in thinking that technology serves to help everyone, but I left knowing
that was definitely not the case.I was actually very surprised at what I found. I was not expecting to find everything in my research to be so negative. I came in thinking that technology serves to help everyone, but I left knowing
that was definitely not the case.1. The answer to my question was a resounding no.
2. Not only is the digital divide not growing smaller, chances are that it was growing bigger.
3. New digital communication technology is not designed with handicapped users in mind. As such any time something new comes out, it actually widens the divide as handicapped users probably wouldn't be able to use it.
4. The government does not care. There have been numerous laws enacted to help give handicapped internet users gain equal footing to the non-handicapped users, but the government itself doesn't bother to follow them. A study found that 90% of government federal home pages did not follow the guidelines provided by the government.
5. 75% of disabled people are un-employed, and only 5% to go college.
I used the UW library search engine to find most of my articles using the booleans. I found a couple just searching in google scholar, and I would use it to find how often most of my articles were cited. Finally I imported everything to refworks and got to work.
I was interested in any current topic concerning the digital age. I had a hard time finding an actual research question until I came across the idea of the digital divide, and was immediately interested in it. I narrowed it down to include the handicapped because I was also interested in learning how today's technology effected people with disabilities as well.