The cultural divide and the digital divide are both manifestations of the Desert Syndrome.
Australia’s dispersed population and its vast tyrannies of distance has created a major, ongoing, cultural divide.The relative costs of consuming culture between bush and city are starkly skewed in favour of the city, and may be getting worse as culture goes digital and the disparity in access, speed and reliability of broadband makes the bush relatively worse off.
The bush-city disparity between communications services in general, and broadband specifically, was one of major factors that drove key independents to install the minority Labor government last year.
Arts Minister Simon Crean wants Australian culture to play a significant role in binding the social fabric of the nation. This needs to play out not just in terms of publicly-funded culture reaching beyond the established middle class supporter base, who already possess significant cultural capital. It also must be centrally about addressing our great geographical cultural divide.
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