Technological information inequality as an incessantly moving target: The redistribution of information and communication capacities between 1986 and 2010

This article provides first‐time empirical evidence that the digital age has first increased and then (only very recently) decreased global, international, and national inequalities of information and communication capacities among and within societies. Previous studies on the digital divide were unable to capture the detected trends appropriately, because they worked with proxies, such as the number of subscriptions or related investments, without considering the vast heterogeneity in informational performance among technological devices. We created a comprehensive data set (based on over 1,100 sources) that allows measuring information capacity directly, in bits per second, bits, and instructions per second. The newly proposed indicators provide insights into inequalities in access to, usage of, and impact of digitized information flows. It shows that the digital divide has gone into a second stage, which is based on a relative universalization of technological devices and a continuously evolving divide in terms of communication capacity.