Spatial Pattern of Digital Divide in Turkey

Koramaz, Turgay Kerem and Nasrollahzade, Somaiyeh and Ozdemir, Zeynep (2019) Spatial Pattern of Digital Divide in Turkey. IS THIS THE REAL WORLD? Perfect Smart Cities vs. Real Emotional Cities. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2019, 24th International Conference on Urban Development, Regional Planning and Information Society. pp. 685-691. ISSN 2521-3938

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Abstract

Digital divide, which highlights the access to, use of and skills for information and communication technologies in a regional discrepancy reasoning, is a new field of research, measuring spatial associations in urban and regional studies. In lierature, the emergence of, and formation behind the digital divide concept have been associated with absence of hardware, financial and infrastructural deficiencies, barriers ofbecoming online and use of technology. Especially with the leading international conventions related to telecommunication networks, technology and innovation associations, the literature stresses the necessity to investigate different domains of this issue, advocating the right of access to technology in favour ofdisadvantaged geographies and communities. In the late 1990s, owing to the proliferation of digital divide, the growing gap between different groups who are imparted from new information services and those who are not, became more significant and obvious than in former initial studies. This issue has increased in importance among different parties, such as policy makers, scholars and advocacy groups, in relation to their different roles, varying from supply of technology infrastructure and affordability of obtaining related services. The most significant aspects cited in empirical research are inequality in obtaining new services of information and inequality in patterns of getting access to information technology, akin to regional discrepancies in conventional studies. Especially in Turkey, many scholars studied the divide concept in terms of descriptive statements and few of them undertook exploratory investigations of conventional statistics, neglecting geographical tendencies and spatial autocorrelation effect. Spatial pattern, as associated with the digital divide concept in this paper, is primarily investigated with officially published parameters related to household profile and technology use. However, this fundemantal field of regional science needs comprehensive and focused understanding of changing barriers to, and attributes of affordability and access to technology by communities. This study aims to depict the spatial pattern of the digital divide phenomena in Turkey, in an index comprised of variables of access to, use of and skills of information and communication technologies. Since the spatial function of digital divide research is mainly missing in conventional studies in Turkey, this paper investigates the spatial associations with the digital divide in the officially published figures and statistics of information and communication technology. In the paper, spatial association is established through Getis and Ord G statistics, with the measure of provincial highway distances, instead of operational uses of Euclidian distances that commonly licenced geographic information systems may offer. Preliminary findings indicate that spatial autocorrelation and clustering methods show the significance of mono-centric development pattern of Turkey, whereby most populated and in-migrated provinces also dominate in all domains of access to, use and skills of technology. Although figures from officially published data depict spatial heterogeneity superficially, the results of this study indicate the importance and necessity of a prospective comprehensive social survey, with high level of representation capability and spatialsampling. This paper presents also primer investigations of further research, which will compare Istanbul province, as the dominant province with unprivileged provinces in terms of socio-economic development and technology use and supply.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	digital divide, spatial association, Turkey, spatial correlation, ICT
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Depositing User:	REAL CORP Administrator
Date Deposited:	28 Jan 2021 21:47
Last Modified:	28 Jan 2021 21:47
URI:	http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/572

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