ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the growing importance of meaningfully bridging the digital divide. It describes a positive conceptualization for how to do this — digital enfranchisement — while also underscoring how the impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on participatory democracy must embrace the complex interplay of limited thinking spanning technological, political, economic, and civil society domains. Meaningfully bridging the digital divide requires a solution that provides both connectivity and the tools and resources for latecomers to meaningfully organize, self-govern, and attain truly equitable access. Solutions to the digital divide must be both holistic and realistic: connectivity with the tools for civic participation, self-direction, and self-government. Digital enfranchisement is ensured not only when people are brought into the network, but when the network is for and of its users and constituents. A twenty-first century civil society must, of necessity, engage in a new global effort to ensure full digital enfranchisement.
