I had the privilege last week to speak to the English Speaking Union International Relations Conference, which brought together a wonderfully diverse group ranging from Bulgarian doctors to a Ghanaian social enterprise founder to an Indian estate agent.
What they had, generally, in common, was being quite young, so I suspect I shocked them slightly when I spoke about remembering times BTI - Before the Internet.
I told them that was an age of information drought. You often hear people complaining about the flood of information they have to cope with, but that's not something you'll hear me saying.
On my first daily newspaper in Australia, we'd regularly get a panicked 9pm phone call from a parent.
The conversation would run: "do you know anything about loggerhead turtles/igneous rocks/Mediterranean climate. I've just found out Johny has to present a project on it for tomorrow morning."
Once the library had closed, people were reduced to some pretty dodgy, desperate sources of information.
If you're tempted to be nasty about Wikipedia, as lots of academics I know tend to be, then you should remember there was a time when it didn't exist – and you'd get projects based on the doubtful knowledge of a collection of sub-editors from a provincial newspaper.
Now of course, if you want to find out the how the Utah state budget is coming along, how lamb prices are doing in Wagga Wagga today (that was the city near where I started my first job in journalism), or if I want to find out what festivals are on this week in the Morvan national park in Burgundy in France, which I visit regularly, I can do so very, very easily.
If, however, I want to find out what is happening in Guineau-Bisseau, Vanuatu or Bhutan, unless there's a coup, a drought, a famine, or some other dramatic, and usually negative event, or possibly some highly photogenic festival, I'm still likely to be out of luck – they are still, in terms of news, barely into the internet age.
There's often a lot of talk about the digital divide, about how developing countries, and the poor in developed countries, are being left even further behind by being left without access to the riches of the information age.
But there's a lot less talk about the drought in the production of information. Which is odd really, because if you go back to the 60s and 70s, this was the focus of a great deal of academic work, and international aid efforts, around the shortage of information links between the states of the periphery, and of news being generated from there.
But ability to speak to the world isn't just an issue of access to technology, to the simple computer and internet connection - an obvious hurdle that is to degree being overcome
It's also an issue of media literacy, of understanding how, and why, you might want to do it, how to structure your story and tell it.
Understanding the power of the media – and how it can rebound on you – should perhaps be an essential element of education these days, and something that anyone who's providing the technological access needs to think about.
Bridging the "first" digital divide means providing the opportunity to access the internet and its feast of information; bridging the second, which may be nearly as important, means ensuring everyone can bring their own morsel to contribute to that feast.
Natalie Bennett is the editor of the Guardian Weekly
