The term “digital divide” gained popularity in the late 1990s, when American politicians and journalists used it to describe the widening gap in access to information technology. Twenty years later, Brazilians are growing more and more connected to their smartphones. Yet, the divide is only becoming more apparent. As private schools develop increasingly advanced digital literacy programs, those without the same means are being left behind.
Barriers to access can be physical, informational, financial or temporal—and all are tightly correlated with demographic information, particularly region and class. Language is one of the key determinants in...