Hello Integrating Technology colleagues,
You may be an advocate of digital inclusion or digital equity. You certainly know the "digital divide" metaphor. Here's a Brookings article, "Neighborhood broadband data makes it clear: We need an agenda to fight digital poverty" that re-frames these concerns about digital equity, and that may interest you.
It begins, "How would you feel if half of the homes [in] your neighborhood didn’t have electricity? Or if a quarter didn’t have running water? It’s hard to imagine, mostly because the United States benefits from near-universal access to electricity and water. That’s not the story for another crucial utility: broadband, or high-speed internet service. Digital platforms have transformed most parts of daily life, from how we talk to one another, to how we consume media, to how we travel. But those platforms are only meaningful if you can access them via broadband."
It continues, "The majority of digitally disconnected households live in metropolitan areas, and the gaps are especially large when comparing neighborhoods within the same place. Effectively, some residents live in digital poverty even as their neighbors thrive."
Intrigued by these new data? It could be that you live in an urban metropolitan area where digital poverty for some is part of the same community that also has -- for others -- reliable, high speed, broadband internet access. What can be done about that?
Please read this short article and share your thoughts here. If you know of national, state or local groups that are "fighting digital poverty" tell us about them and what they do.
David J. Rosen, Moderator
LINCS CoP Integrating technology group
Comments
I appreciate the concern expressed and well supported by the Brookings article. Indeed, there is a huge divide separating those who have digital access and those who do not.
I serve programs and students in a vast rural area where residents simply cannot access the benefits offered by reliable connectivity, even where the equipment is richly and abundantly there! I also fully realize that that the challenge is not limited to rural areas, as the article described.
On the other hand, far more challenging to so many is that huge numbers of people in urban and rural face poverty. Period!
The article states, “How would you feel if half of the homes your neighborhood didn’t have electricity? Or if a quarter didn’t have running water? It’s hard to imagine, mostly because the United States benefits from near-universal access to electricity and water.” Not so! I don’t have to imagine it. I observe it every day!
Large numbers of people who are students in our rural adult-education programs do, indeed, lack electricity and running water! They also lack food, transportation, and the ability to meet basic survival needs. Never mind, digital access!
Yes, I support efforts to encourage funding to provide equitable digital access. However, I am also generally aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Before digital access becomes central to our educational efforts, we might address basic survival needs.
Having said all of the above, let me stress that I am a huge proponent of integrating technology into education. Yes! Let us close the digital divide while recognizing the need to close the poverty divide at the same time! Leecy
We don't have to look much farther than our health care system to find inequality of access while people can make profits from that same access. As long as a "necessary" service is allowed to be profitable, there will be inequity of access to that service. As Leecy already shared, some of our necessary services are still not accessible by our most impoverished or rural citizens. Let's look at electricity as an example...
In 1881, a small poplulation in Godalming UK tried to set up the first public electricity system to power it's lights and replace gas lighting. Within a year, they had a hydroelectric system powering 10 houses and the quality was decent, but the profits were not there and the project was abandoned as being too expensive.
Joseph Swain in the UK and Thomas Edison in the US were both pushing to develop some sort of electrical distribution to promote their new invention of the carbon filiment lightbulb. There were many attempts with some shutting down because of dangerous failures, but even those that found success could not economically subsist. Governments in UK and US both moved to privatize the generation and provision of electric in the hopes of increasing inovation and public access.
Increased technology advances helped to push the spread of public access but it was still slow and by 1930, 70% of the US households had electricity. This was 50 years after that first little villiage tried to supply electricity in 1881. Worldwide, it was not until the 1950s-1970s that electricity access really took off. That is almost 100 years after the first attempt.
After some time, many different companies experimented with different pricing structures which further complicated access to electricity. The state and federal government worked for many years to develop some way to regulate at least the costs of the electricity and then later the costs of the transmission. Effectively, they had to regulate how much profit could be made while demainding providers offer their service to all areas people lived in over a certain population. Efforts to adopt aspects of this intervention into our healthcare system have failed miserably so it is very likely that any modern attempts to tie in digital access using the electric regulation model will not likely work.
Fast forward to our broadband discussion and the report shared. When I was a teenager, home internet was not existant. The first access was over phone lines and only really allowed one to read text. Even at that level, providers each had their own transmission protocols and pricing structures. These variances were enough to cause the FCC to step in and demand that the companies standardize their transmission protocols or they would all be shut down. Begrudgingly the companies capitulated and there were a good number of providers that had to close up shop because they could not afford to comply with these new regulations on modems and their protocols. This decrease in competition as well as the imposed regulation resulted in increased costs for people to access that poor internet connection. We then get companies offering "budget" Internet services that looked so much more affordable but were quite inferrior to existing services provided by those companies charging much more. With the move from phone line technology to data lines, access to the Internet at home really started to take off. While this move to data lines was only a few decades ago, there was never really an attempt to regulate how much people would have to pay to get access to those data lines and very little has been done to extend those data lines into less populated areas.
In the state of Maine, politicians agreed to fund the creation of a fiber optic network that would run through the most rural of Maine areas, Down East and Northern Arroostook counties. Millions of dollars were spent getting this fiber backbone set up that could facilitate more bandwidth than all of Maine's citizens could logically utilize at that time. The problem was that the state program expected that Internet providers would be willing to tap into that fiber backbone to connect those final mile communities that were close to the trunk line. That did not happen and companies immediately pointed to costs as to why they had no interest in connecting fiber to communities, especially those with such a small population. As state libraries and universities all started connecting to this new fiber network, there was hope that the Internet providers would then find reasons to connect people up. That did not happen.
Recently, major tech companies, like Microsoft have invested money into connecting a token community to broadband to experiment with what the effect would be. Of course they heavily tied in access and training to their expensive office software as the hook to encourage families and businesses to try to participate. So, small villiages like Perry Maine, population 889 by 2010 census, were chosen and there were millions thrown into this project. Participating families and businesses are to be hooked up with broadband, given Microsoft's software and training and all of this is being offered only during the testing period. The fine print reads that after the testing and data collection period, people would have to purchase the software they had been trained on and their new broadband connections would no longer be subsudized. It is not clear if Microsoft is really looking for data on what digital access may mean or if they are just looking for another marketing angle to sell their software.
Amazon, SpaceX and dozens of companies have been launching satellites into space with the intent to make a global Internet service available to everyone, everywhere. They are running into costs problems that the small town of Godalming in 1881 ran into. The costs to provide and the quality of the service are just not there yet. While these serious investments may provide the capability of equitable access, it remains to be seen if the costs to access any of these digital services will limit how practical it will be for the common person to utilize.
I have hopes that companies like Amazon and Google, companies that clearly make their money in other ways than the direct service they offer, may find some success early on in this race to be a global Internet provider. A company like Amazon can justify nearly free connections for all simply to increase the number of people using their established services. In our world where profits drive almost everything, I think our hopes of digital equity lie in supporting efforts that may not directly make profits from the digital access they provide. Equity will come from a company's need to have everyone in it's flock to access all of it's other services as a consumer. As we have seen here in Maine, even when millions of dollars have been given to create the backbone and framework for everyone in rural areas to get some connection, it just is not profitable enough for providers to make those household connections.
Bowing in your direction, Ed, as always, Thanks for expanding on this issue! Leecy