Andy Carvin: How Wide's the Digital Divide? 2006

See http://www.andycarvin.com/?p=1118 . As the original link to the podcast's mp3 does not work anymore, this Amara page was created using a 2007 copy available from the Internet Archive.

(Applause)

(Andy Carvin) Good morning.

For a couple of moments there I really had no idea what Joey was talking about (laughter)

So, he'd ask me a few minutes ago to critique his introductory remarks

and, you know, all I did was this (laughter)

For those of you who are listening to the podcast of that,

I was doing a "We're not worthy" kind of thing on the ground. (laughter)

Yes, I am recording this.

For those of you who are contemplating taking notes fret not.

You really don't have to because the presentation, this powerpoint,

is already on my blog, andycarvin.com .

It's been released on what's called a Creative Commons license

and I'll talk about that later,

but that basically means you can use it almost any way you want.

And with this little digital recorder I have here I'm going to be taping my presentation

and making it available as a podcast on my blog as well.

So, if you're really obsessed about taking notes, you know, have at it.

But if you're on the fence about it like I am about these kinds of things,

don't worry about it, hang back and instead it would be better for you

to be thinking about some really good questions to throw me by the end of this presentation.

So, first of all what exactly is the Digital Divide?

The term has been around for at least 10 years, now,

probably since around 1992, 1993.

And it often gets used in very different ways.

In fact, one of the very first uses of the Digital Divide I ever heard

was on a Greatful Dead's discussion list in the early 90's,

where a Dead Head was describing the challenges he had

recording Greateful Dead's concerts,

and he was about to make the leap from analog recording to digital recording

and so, he was asking for assistance in bridging this digital divide.

He could easily have been the one to claim to coin it

but thankfully, the term has evolved since then to mean a variety of things.

But when I talk about the digital divide, I try to summarize it in three very basic ways.

In the most basic sense, it's the gap that exists between populations

in terms of who has access to ICTs, or Information and Communication Technologies,

and who doesn't.

So, that includes the internet, computers and the like.

For a long time, when people talked about the digital divide, the definition stopped there.

They would just look at who had internet access at home,

who had access at school,

and that was only marginally useful, in my perspective.

It -- I think it became much more important to treat also as equal factors

access to literacy skills and the ability to use ICTs effectively,

because if every person on the globe had internet access tomorrow,

if they weren't functionally literate, if they weren't IT-literate,

then their internet access would be rather meaningless to them.

Similarly, you'll need to have access to high-quality, robust and diverse content,

and the ability and the skills to create content yourselves.

And we'll talk a bit more about that later.

Sometimes these three ideas have been described as the ABC's of the digital divide:

Access, Basic skills and Content.

Now where does this term come from? (laughter)

It's a tough question and people have been tossing around the question

for a very long time.

Sometimes people are giving credit to Al Gore.

He may not have invented the Information Superhighway,

he did invent the term, though, interestingly:

he's been using the term Information Superhighway since the late 70's

and some have said that he tried claiming to have invented the internet.

Well, we'll leave that for historians to judge, but I think we all know better.

Similarly, occasionally people attribute Bill Gates as coining the term.

He didn't.

Perhaps it was some anonymous beltway bureaucrat in Washington.

The fact of the matter is, we simply don't know.

The term has been around since, at least, the early 90's.

I think the first time I've heard it was around 1993, from a -- early 1994 --

from a K-12 educator named Bonnie Bracey

who was working on an advisory commission that President Clinton had organized

about the information infrastructure, as this internet and everything else was called back then.

But the term had been around even prior to that.

When you ask people who are often credited with coining the term,

they always pass the buck and say:

"No, it wasn't me, I got it from someone else, but frankly I don't remember whom."

And so, in fact I think it is quite likely that the term may have been indeed created

by some anonymous betlway bureaucrat, or an anonymous educator,

or someone else who started using it in their professional networks,

online networks, and social networks.

And by the mid-1990's, it had become a term of art to describe this gap between the have's and the have-not's.

And I should also add that the have's and the have-not's, that term,

has actually been around much, much longer than the term digital divide.

In fact, it was coined by Cervantes.

If you go and read Don Quixote, you'll see that Sancho Panza describes his grandmother

as coming from a family who represented the have's rather than the haven't's.

And so, that term has been used to describe equity issues and poverty ever since.

So, the digital divide has been a policy issue at one level or another for over 10 years, now.

Much of it began in '93,

when President Clinton created this Advisory Council I mentioned a few minutes ago,

this National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council.

Basically, they were given the task to take a look at this Information Superhighway,

figure out where it was going, whether it was going to leave the country,

and what it was going to mean if some people had access to it and some people didn't.

By 1994, the Commerce Department was releasing a report, which eventually became a series of reports,

known as Falling through the Net,

and this became essentially a national benchmark on the digital divide.

And initially, they were just looking at who had telephone access and who had computer access

and who didn't.

But in the years since then it evolved to a much deeper look

at the state of the digital divide in America. (6:22)

As the years go by, a variety of things happen.

This advisory council recommended that all schools and libraries

be wired to the internet.

And after the Telecom act of 1996 was passed, that became a reality

through the creation of the E-Rate program, which offers government

subsidies to cover the cost of intenet access at schools, libraries, and public health institutions.

By 1999, the digital divide policy debate had reached a fever-pitch

in which it was often in the national headlines, it was being discussed by

government leaders and business leaders all over the country.

And by December of that year, President Clinton hosted a national digital divide summit.

Which as it turns out is the first and only national level government summit on the digital divide.

It was a great time to be working in this field.

It was a bipartisan, or at least a non-partisan issue.

And essentially we were all engaging in a big retorical policy group hug.

It was a good time to be doing this.

But it's been rough over the last few years.

In many ways, some people have pointed specifically to September 11

as being the watershed moment for the digital divide,

because resources started going in other directions -- going to international policy issues.

Similarly at that time, No Child Left Behind was being developed,

and that changed many of the policy goals, specificaly in K-12 education.

At the same time, unfortunately, there was also a change in political climate,

in the sense that when you talked about certain issues the terms you would use

would often have a bent to them.

The rhetoric would often be seen as left or right.

In the case of the term 'digital divide', it got associated with Clinton and Gore

because they were very vocal about it.

And despite the fact that you had politcians from both sides

of the political spectrum supporting digital divide initiatives,

it started being discussed in a more partisan manner.

And it had started splitting coalitions that had once existed.

As time goes by we found ourselves in a situation where there was being

less emphasis being pitted at a national level on bridging the digital divide,

and instead it was being made a local issue, a state issue,

and issue for civil society in the private sector to deal with.

And so slowly but surely, the momentum in the national level leadership

that once existed on bridging the digital divide started splitting off

and going on in its own directions.

Meanwhie though, while the digital divide has become less of an issue here,

it's become a huge issue in pretty much every place on the planet.

In the late '90s, the U.N. decided to host a series of presidential-level world summits

on internet policy called the World Summit on the Information Society,

the first of which took place in 2003, and then the next one two years later

just in the past November in Tunisia.

And this was the first times that world leaders gathered

to discuss the digital divide and strategies for bridging it.

And so, while on the one hand you rarely ever hear

about the digital divide being discussed in the U.S. media or by U.S. politicians,

it's something that you find on a regular basis when you look at media accounts

from almost every other country in the world.

So this raises the quesion, are we at a point where

the digital divide has become a non-issue here in the U.S.?

There are some arguments to suggest that maybe it is a non-issue.

For example, the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington D.C.

which is an extraordinary research group that I have immense respect for,

and I have been a fan of their work for a very long time...

they came out with some startling statistics earlier this year in which they said:

60% of blacks, 73% of whites, and 79% of English speaking Latinos go online here in the U.S.

This completely defied conventional wisdom on the digital divide.

Historically we had always thought of whites as being leaders on the digital divide,

with African-Americans coming second and Latinos coming third.

But this data was suggesting something else.

Meanwhile, almost every single K-12 school in America is online today.

Almost every school of higher education is online today.

Almost every library is online today.

So just from those stats alone it might cause some people to think there is no digital divide.

In fact, there was an article in the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago

about the digital divide in African-Americans and the report interviewed Magic Johnson,

who along with being a basketball star has been a leading community technology activist

through his foundation for much of the last ten years,

and so when the reporter asked him about the digital divide

Magic Johnson responded by saying "what digital divide?"

So that raises some interesting questions.

When people like Magic Johnson and others, who once were seen as

the forefathers of the movement if you will, are beginning to suggest

that maybe we really don't have to be worrying about this digital divide any more.

But when I look at the issue, I think there are some flaws in these arguments.

Not all access is equal.

When you look at the data that came from

the Pew Internet and American Life project you'll see that they ask the question

of whether or not people have gone online.

They don't ask how you've gone online, or the qualitative situation

you are in while you are going online.

There's a big difference between having access somewhere,

whether it's at work, or in your community, or at school,

verus having continuous access at home.

Meanwhile, the Latino data, as I mentioned before,

only took a look at English-speaking Latinos.

Which is a sizeable part of the Latino population in the U.S., no doubt,

but the fact that they didn't factor in those households that don't speak English

or don't speak English well, in some ways causes concern for me

because these households are some of the least likely housholds to have internet access.

And it's really important for us to think about the digital divide

as being a home issue and a family issue, because for many people

that's where they have an opportunity to be most productive.

It's the place where you can work on your own schedule,

you're not limited to the infrastructure that exists publicly,

so even though 99% of the libraries in America have internet access

some libraries are only open one or two days a week,

for maybe three or four hours at a time.

So even though there is a large internet blanket covering

public libraries in America, if you add up the number of hours

for many communities, especially low-income communities and rural ones,

they simply don't have the capacity at the moment,

and don't have the resources to serve those populations that don't have internet access at home.

So where do we stand right now?

We're running a little behind in terms of having a good national snapshot

of the digital divide at home.

The Department of Commerce usually does a study every couple of years

and we're over-due for one now.

So the last one came out in the fall of 2004.

So, if you go back almost ten years ago, almost 20% of homes had internet access.

But by the time they did the study two years ago, it was around 65%.

So I would venture to guess that the access level is probably closer to 70% or even 75% at home.

Similarly, that study suggested that there were around 25% of homes that were online.

I would assume it's now one-third are now online with broadband.

But we're still waiting for the latest data to come in.

The digital divide becomes more stark when you break down the numbers

on a variety of factors.

First here is internet and ethnicity.

It's a contrast to what the information coming out of Pew suggested.

Here we have white households and Asian-American households

being highly online, though I find the Asian data

a little misleading because it lumps all Asian communities together

and it doesn't differentiate between Japanese-Americans and Korean-Americans

and Chinese-Americans who may have been in the country for three, four, five generations

and are all middle-class and well-established, versus Asian immigrant populations

that may have come over in the last generation, still struggling sometimes with

language and literacy issues and are often on the lower end of the income brackets.

But the data collects them as one large ethnic group and I think that skews it.

African-American households have about 50% access online,

and Latinos were behind at about 37%.

So that's in stark contrast to what the Pew data was showing.

Now if you look at the trends over the last ten years regarding internet and ethnicity,

you'll see that in some ways the digital divide has actually widened.

If you go back to 1994, there was a much smaller point spread

between white households, blacks, and Latinos,

versus where it is today.

And in fact, at one point Latinos had slightly higher access than African-Americans,

but then sometime around 2000 it started to switch and that gap has widened as well.

We also have an income digital divide gap,

in which households that earn more money are much more likely to be online

and those people who live at the poverty level are least likely to be online.

That should come as a no-brainer in many ways, it shouldn't be a major surprise.

The biggest gap though appears to occur when it comes to education.

So if you have a Bachelor's degree or higher, there's a very very high chance,

85% chance or higher...that 85% of those households are going to have internet access at home.

But meanwhile if you look at households that don't have a high-school diploma,

or a GED, at least two years when this data came out it was only 16%.

Have those numbers gone up a bit?

I'm sure they have somewhat, but as long as people lack

a broad range of educational skills to use technology effectively,

then it's very unlikely that many of them are going to have internet access in their home.

In many ways, we've got a very bizzare situation,

what I often call the access paradox.

And that is: the more people are online, the worse the digital divide gets.

Now, even when I say that it doesn't even feel right,

because you think "well, okay if you've got a community

where 80-90% of the population is online,

you've bridged the digital divide, right?"

Well, maybe not. Because we're in a situation now where

the vast majority of main-stream, middle-class America is online,

whether at home, or somewhere else in the community.

Marginalized America continues to be offline in many ways.

These include: recent immigrant populations, people with disabilities,

people with limited literacy skills, etc etc.

And the reason why this has become more of a problem is

we've reached a point in time where internet access

is generally assumed among a population.

Just before I started speaking, Joe asked the question

how many of you were moving services online that

were solely going to be online, and many of you raised your hands.

Well, you're not alone out there.

The federal governments and local governments are doing the same thing.

They are shutting down services that previously were only available

in an offline circumstance, whether it was at a store-front of some kind

like a post office, or through a telephone number, or through mail-order

and moving those services to the internet.

And across society we're seeing this happen.

In schools there's more pressure for students to have internet access and internet skills

because a lot of the assignments they're getting are going to require internet access.

In fact, the state of Michigan is just getting ready to

implement a new part of its curriculum.

In order to graduate from high school in Michigan,

you're going to have to have completed at least one online activity of some sort...

an online research project, or something to that effect.

And that makes sense in a world where 100% of all households are online and are internet literate,

but how do you enforce things like that when you have communities that are not online?

It's a real challenge. But since we're not discussing the digital divide

as a major national policy issue, we're just assuming that everyone's online

or if they really wanted to they could get online, so maybe we could just strong-arm everyone to do it

by moving these services to the internet and somehow that will solve the problem.

A big part of the problem from my perspective at least is the content aspect of the digital divide.

There's a group here based in California called the Children's Partnership

who came out with a seminal report on content and the digital divide about six years ago.

And they took a look at low-income and minority communities

to see what their content needs were and how they were accessing it,

and whether they were getting what they needed.

And they found four things that were lacking.

Populations were having a hard time finding content that was locally-relevant,

culturally relevant, linguistically relevant, and appropriate for their particular literacy levels.

And I think these four factors still hold true today in many ways,

but I would add a fifth point to that list...is that you also have to discuss

content and its accessibility for people with disabilities.

Nearly half of all Americans at some point in their lives

will experience a chronic disability, and if you have motor skill impairments,

or have hearing impairments, or in particular visual impairments,

the internet can be a very very daunting place, and we don't always address that.

(20:21)