Digital deficitsPublic representations of digital communications technology

James Sumner

Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

University of Manchester, UK

james.sumner@manchester.ac.uk

Techno-utopianism: connectivity as the great leveller

Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped...

The traditional centralist view of life will become a thing of the past... While the politicians struggle with the baggage of history, a new generation is emerging from the digital landscape free of many of the old prejudices. These kids are released from the limitation of geographic proximity as the sole basis of friendship, collaboration, play, and neighborhood. Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony...

A previously missing common language emerges, allowing people to understand across boundaries... The access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different from the present... we are bound to find new hope and dignity in places where very little existed before.

Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995)

The Digital Divide

Two years ago, President Clinton and I challenged America to connect every classroom – inner-city, rural, suburban – to the Information Superhighway by the year 2000. We challenged the nation to ensure that all of our teachers and students have access to modern computers and engaging educational software. We challenged the nation to provide all teachers with the training and support they need in order to help students make the most of these wonderful new technologies. We challenged the nation to make sure that our children will never be separated by a digital divide.

And America has responded to that challenge. Last March, the President and I rolled up our sleeves and worked alongside 20,000 other volunteers in California to hook up one-fifth of California's schools to the Information Superhighway in a single day...

Al Gore, public speech, Knoxville, Tennessee

10 October 1996

Assumptions underpinning the Digital Divide model

Digital connectivity…

• is the crucial issue of our times

• is binary (present or absent)

• is progressive (presence is an improvement on absence)

• distinguishes empowered from powerless

• distinguishes development from underdevelopment

• can be quantified by counting Internet terminal access points

• can and should be remedied with reference to this quantitative understanding

Assumptions underpinning the Deficit Model in science communication

Science…

• is iconic in modern-day thought

• is a natural kind

• is a unitary, coherent and progressive enterprise

• distinguishes the wise from the ignorant

• must be central to public life in a developed nation, and may be an indicator of economic viability

• displays a spread or uptake which can straightforwardly be measured – as, correspondingly, can its absence

Points made chiefly in Brian Wynne, “Knowledges in Context” (1991); and in essays in Irwin and

Wynne, eds, Misunderstanding Science? (1996)

Modes of ‘expert’ intervention compared

Deficit Model in science communication Digital Divide model

Unconscious tendency Self-conscious movement

Assumes cognitive deficiency among the lay public

Assumes material and skills deficiency among the poor / ethnic minorities / elderly / rural communities etc

Consensus expert solution to be imposed from the top down, via education

Consensus expert solution to be imposed from the top down, via material provision with some training

Non-adopters are often exasperating/perverse (dissent is tribal)

Non-adopters are merely unfortunate (dissent is not seriously addressed)

‘Sufficiently’ equipped public are not, as such, brought into the community of scientists – although promotion of formal teaching and qualification routes often accompanies public understanding initiatives

‘Sufficiently’ equipped users are brought into the community of established users – conceivably (at least in principle) reaching the highest ‘expert’ levels through their own initiative

Identified and vigorously problematised from c1990, mostly in science communication studies and STS

Has drawn critiques practically from the point of inception c1995, from sociologists, those in STS, historians of technology, ethnographers

Problematisations of the Digital Divide

• Crude technological fix: social problems must be addressed at the social level (Rob Kling, Mark Warschauer)

• “The Internet” is not a monolith. Modes of use and engagement vary (Eszter Hargittai, Nathan Ensmenger)

• Non-use cannot be written off as irrational or backward (Sally Wyatt); whole “use”/“non-use” divide is problematic when dealing with extended systems anyway

• Current ethnographic work: digital connectivity doesn’t provoke wondrous learning revolution and empower disenfranchised (Andrea Press)

• We’ve been here before! Representations of the microcomputer – connected or not – as intrinsically educational tool of national salvation around 1980, later rejected (cf David Skinner, Neil Selwyn on this)

The Computer Book, BBC (1981)

In The Home Computer Course (Orbis partwork, 1983)

MicroLink advertisement, Atari User, 1988; Shades ad, unsourced, c1988

Feature: Commodore Format, December 1990

Divisions redivivus...

Principle of division

Saved Damned Period of greatest rhetorical relevance

Missionary zeal among saved

Technical awareness

Priesthood General public Pre-1980 Negligible

Technical access Economically privileged

Economically underprivileged

Clinton-Gore era Strong

Civic responsibility

Netizens Surviving priesthood; antisocial users irrespective of technical literacy

Late 1990s Strong

Social-technical savoir-faire

Minority of informed, independent users

Majority of relatively low-literacy users consuming mass-market formulations

Post-2000 Highly variable

The present: techno-cynicism?

While I manage to fend off pop-up windows with Mozilla, and spam with Spamassassin, most people don’t know about those programs. They live in the “hinternet”, that shanty-town of X10 pop-ups and porn adware, and endless, endless Hotmail and Yahoo spam. They’re tourists in the world of the Net, and like any tourist, they rarely get a good guide. They’re just taken down the back streets by disreputable but flashy showmen, and robbed for everything they’re worth. And it’s true, we don’t do as much as we should for them, because we’re okay in our little burbclaves.

Danny O’Brien

Posting to personal weblog, 15 April 2003

The manifesto

• Reject dazzling-light buzzwords (“digital,” “virtual,” “Web 2.0,” “e-”) and simplistic reductive categories (“using the Internet”): seek contextual understanding of actual technosocial processes

• understand that hands-on use is a poor indicator of use in general

• accept non-use as non-pathological; reject narratives of linear progress

• question divides: who presents them and why? Do they represent nature, or are they rhetorical devices for self-identification? (Or both...?) In the latter case, are they any less significant?