单选题
A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the info (information) rich and the info poor. And that
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does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less
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then, however, were the new, positive
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that work against the digital divide.
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, there are reasons to be
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.
There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more
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, it is in the interest of business to universalize access—after all, the more people online, the more potential
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there are. More and more
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, afraid their countries will be left
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, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be
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together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will
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rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for
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world poverty that we"ve ever had.
Of course, the use of the Internet isn"t the only way to
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poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has
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potential.
To
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advantage of this tool, some poor countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices
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respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is a/an
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of their sovereignty might well study the history of
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(the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn"t have the capital to do so. And that is
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America"s Second Wave infrastructure
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roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on-were built with foreign investment.