Digital divide and social harm: towards co-designing community-led algorithmic ecologies

Abstract

The digital divide in rural Mexico represents a social harm that manifests through colonial continuities and neoliberal policies. Through qualitative research conducted both in social media and with a rural community in central Mexico, this work demonstrates how the digital divide is seen and lived through the lived experiences of communities harmed by the digital divide. Drawing from decolonial frameworks, the project shows how communities navigate these challenges while maintaining their own cultural practices and knowledge systems.

The research findings demonstrate different and contrasting approaches to the digital divide. While private providers of technology, state actors and NGOs address the digital divide through market driven interventions and control mechanisms, communities actively shape their digital futures by leveraging existing relational practices, communal decision-making structures, open technologies and transnational networks.

This work contributes to scholarship by moving beyond analysis of access, skills, and motivations or further calls for policies, and instead positions how colonial logics have formed and give continuation to what we call the digital divide. By centring community experiences and practices, this work establishes pathways towards co-designing algorithmic ecologies that grow from and strengthen existing forms of collective organisation.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yadira Sanchez: orcid.org/0000-0003-0998-3325

ORCID for Pamela Ugwudike: orcid.org/0000-0002-1084-7796

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

ORCID for Michelle Newberry: orcid.org/0000-0003-0085-3751

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