From the analogue divide to the hybrid divide: the internet does not ensure equality of access to information in science

Abstract

New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science offers a distinctive understanding of new infrastructures for knowledge production based in science and technology studies. This field offers a unique potential to assess systematically the prospects for new modes of science enabled by information and communication technologies. The authors use varied methodological approaches, reviewing the origins of initiatives to develop e-science infrastructures, exploring the diversity of the various solutions and the scientific cultures which use them, and assessing the prospects for wholesale change in scientific structures and practices. New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science contains practical advice for the design of appropriate technological solutions, and long range assessments of the prospects for change useful both to policy makers and those implementing institutional infrastructures. Readers interested in understanding contemporary science will gain a rich picture of the practices and the technologies that are shaping the knowledge production of the future.

The chapter investigates whether the internet has improved the information access for scientists which did not participate fully in the transfer of information in pre-internet times. Several empirical analyses over the last decade have nurtured the hope that the internet had this effect. We argue that these findings were mostly due to the low level of dissemination of the internet in the early 90s. Based on a large European data set we show that internet use is consistently higher for male, highly recognised, and senior researchers. This suggests that the internet has become the domi¬nant means of communication in science - to such an extent that any scientist, regardless of whether they are established or not, has to use the available internet tools in order to communicate effectively. The previous ‘analogue divide’ of information access has become a ‘hybrid divide’ including the analogue and the digital communication media.