In this week’s readings, I found the S-curve Pattern for digital diffusion interesting. On P. 30 of "Understanding that Digital Divide" it states, "The theory predicts that given saturated demand, prices will fall further to attract new users, allowing laggards to catch up, so that eventually access to digital technologies become pervasive." The article then went on to list different types of media saturation levels. Will the internet follow the same "S-curve"? What I'm curious about is at what point can there even be a saturation point for computer technology? It's constantly changing or becoming outdated by new innovations. Will eventual government regulations fix this constant change or will the competition of the marketplace, as stated on P. 70 in "Social Inequalities", normalize the differences of technology? I would think competition would aid the divide, not fix it.
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Just wanted to say that the NOTE on p.326 of Van Dijk and Hacker speaks to this question also...the note states that usually S-curves presuppose that the medium is "easy to identify" and "to mark from others"...and that this might not be true of this medium. It also states that "some new computer and network media are too advanced, complicated, and expensive to be ever adopted by 100% of the population". Anyway, not much of my own thoughts involved here--just wanted to note a relevant passage.
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