May 4, 2012

The elephant in the room in the digital divide

The “digital divide” isn’t showing any signs of going away – more than 8 million adults in the UK aren’t online. I’m no statistician, but it appears there is a link between earnings and internet use: “Of those adults in employment whose gross weekly pay was less than £200 per week, 8.1 per cent had not used the Internet. The proportion of Internet non-users declines with each successively higher weekly pay band up to those paid £800 to £899 where there were no Internet non-users.”

I’ve been thinking about the digital divide in my professional life for many years, as I’ve worked with international NGOs exploring how technology can be used for political activism. But one of the many joys of PhD study is the opportunity to ‘go up a level’: to critically examine the assumptions underlying my professional life.

One of these assumptions is that there is a link between new media and democracy – that people want to participate in civil society, and that research on digital engagement doesn’t need to probe this issue.

In the academic context, Nick Couldry suggests that debates on the digital divide have been ‘fudged’. In an article written in 2002, but still deeply relevant today, he argues that we need to design research which doesn’t take it for granted that people are able to “name their own powerlessness”. Quoting a 76 year old respondent who “doesn’t want to be a full and active member of this stinking society”, he asks of researchers that we “avoid building in the researcher’s assumptions about what forms of wider connection are rational or desirable”.

Couldry, N. 2002. The forgotten digital divide: researching social exclusion/inclusion in the age of personalised media. Media in Transition: Globalisation and Convergence. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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April 17, 2012

Simulacra of support

My proposed research is set against a policy background of a crisis in youth employment in the UK – almost 1 million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are classified as ‘NEET’ – not in education, employment or training.  The Youth Contract, recently launched by the Department of Work and Pensions is intended to address this issue.

But the revelation published by the Guardian last week,  that ‘acceptable personalised support’ provided to young people under the Contract can amount to a single, weekly text message depressed me.  Is that ‘support’?  Thats a Simulcra of support; not the real thing. The Baudrillard quote for the world Simulacra on Wikipedia pretty much sums it up  ”The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.“

Is this what digital delivery of services means? Simulacra of support, simulacra of political engagement?

 

 

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March 27, 2012

Some thoughts on Polymedia

Academic writing on technology doesn’t reflect our contemporary experience of the ecology of communications; the choices we make about how we talk to the people in our lives and how we interact with institutions. Much of the literature on mobile communication that I’ve read focusses on voice or SMS.

But my Smartphone offers me the following ways of communicating; SMS, email, Tweeting, Google Plus, Instant messaging… Skype. Oh yes… and the phone! Each of these means of communication has its own texture, its own emotional nuance and range; a target audience. The communications ecology of my own family illustrates this. I wouldn’t Tweet my mum or my big sister, but I would send my little brother a message on Google Plus. I would send my big brother an SMS but I wouldn’t Skype him. I would email my dad but I won’t give him access to my locked Twitter account (sorry dad).

One of the many pleasures of reading ‘Migration and New Media’ by Mirca Madionou and Daniel Miller is how it captures what the authors describe as the ‘affordances’ of different modes of communications. The authors conducted a long term ethnographic study of Filipino women working overseas and the children they leave behind; looking at how these relationships are mediated by various kinds of communication technology.

The authors propose ‘polymedia’ as a means to understand a new territory of convergent communications which many of us now occupy;  beyond platform, channel or device. Within this framework people chose a means of communication (be it Facebook status update or shared meal over webcam Skype) not just because its convenient or available, but because the means of communication conveys a message too – “they become the idiom of expressive intent”. The structure as well as the content of the message conveys a message. A text message is a tool for ‘phatic’ (seemingly trivial) talk; checking in with loved ones.  In the book a young Filipino uses a blog for washing dirty family laundry in public, a woman who is separated from her young baby sings songs to her over a webcam; another young woman participates in a family funeral through a laptop which a relative carries through the event.

There is much else to say about this exemplary work – not least its engagement with the political economy of the ‘care chains’ which bring the Filipino  women to the UK in the first place – but I’ll save that for a journal review. For now, I’m figuring out what polymedia might look like for marginalised communities in the UK.

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February 12, 2012

Digital by default?

Since I wrote my last post I’ve been thinking more about what digital refusenik-ism looks like in the age of the age of digital government by default in the UK.

Two personal anecdotes in particular set me thinking.

Over Christmas I arranged to meet a friend. He turned up (uncharacteristically) 45 minutes late. The reason? He didn’t  have a mobile phone to pay to park his car. He doesn’t hate technology – he just doesn’t own a mobile. My mum recently told me she thinks it’s no coincidence that mobile phones emerged as the rail service went downhill in this country – so people need to make the classic “I’m on the train” phonecall to alert loved ones of delays.

I really enjoyed this post by Paul Clarke on the shifts in design thinking necessary if digital by default is going to work – meaning that digital infomation delivery channels aren’t  crudely bolted on to existing information systems. He crisply outlines the three choices; redesigning from the ground up, forced channel shift to digital delivery by removal on non-digital choices, and thirdly making digital channels more attractive than non-digital channels.

The Cabinet Office are doing some nice work on making government services accessible and usable on a variety of platforms  - the Gov.uk beta site is a vast improvement on Direct Gov. But good design may not be enough.

If we take it as a given that for economic reasons digital by default is happening, how are vulnerable groups (such as the young people not in education, employment or training my research is concerned with) going to be mediating their relationships with government agencies?  If you don’t have the cash to pay for mobile data and you don’t have home internet access are you no longer entitled to receive information from government agencies?

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January 6, 2012

Digital refuseniks and mugging proof phones

Digital refuseniks and mugging proof phones

One of the perils of being related to a PhD student is that at some point you might be seen as research fodder, or to put it more politely, an informant. This was the case over the holidays.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the spectrum of digital refuseniks; from people who don’t want to be online at all to the ‘non-upgraders’ who refuse to swap their antique but reliable Nokia’s for a smartphone. This led me to quiz the non-upgraders amongst my family and friends about why they were sticking with their distinctly non-smart phones. An 18 year old living in West London wanted a mugging proof phone (a smart decision in a city where phones make you a target for assault), whilst busy women in their forties were sticking with the phones they knew how to use.

Others were being forced by their partners to turn off their phones over Christmas – expressive of a broader cultural shift into a more considered, measured use of technology – a digital diet.

The crudest interpretation of digital inclusion – which is one of the framing ideas of my research – equates familiarity and ease of access to technology with economic and social benefits. Whilst some great work has been done on ‘typologies’ and gradations of internet of use (Livingstone and Helsper, 2007) examining the degrees and types of engagement with digital tools, where does that leave the people who just don’t want to play the digital game?

I enjoyed Haddon’s work on domestication (2011) as he grounds an understanding of what people are doing with technology in the context of the non-technological aspects of their lives, and suggests that this may be a way to view these non-users as rational, critical consumers. What could be more rational than refusing to carry a device which might get you mugged? Or refusing to upgrade to a phone which has an unfamiliar – and probably unintuitive – user interface?

John Holmes (2011) has done some great work analysing Ofcom data on internet use by young people. He suggests that the ‘cyberkid’ discourse – which assumes that all young people are digital natives – disguises more complex truths about how our use of technology is informed more by our societal location than our peers.

In an important policy brief published last year Ellen Helsper (2011) warned of the emergence of a digital underclass characterised by socioeconomic and educational disadvantage, who might become unable to access public services which are becoming digital by default. My research is framed around the idea that young people who are ‘digitally excluded’ in some way might use their phones to get access to services.

I’m interested in finding out about how young people are playing the ‘cyberkid game’ with their phones. Are they playing it differently by sticking with their mugging-proof phones or not using the internet to access information? Are girls only interested in using their phones to maintain relationships ­ through BBM and Facebook?

References

Haddon, L. 2011. Domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life. Canadian Journal of Communication, 36, 311-323.

Helsper, E. 2011. The Emergence of a Digital Underclass Digital Policies in the UK and Evidence for Inclusion, LSE Media Policy Project: Media policy brief

Holmes, J. 2011. Cyberkids or divided generations? Characterising young people’s internet use in the uk with generic, continuum or typological models. New Media & Society, 13, 1104-1122.

Livingstone, S. & Helsper, E. 2007. Gradations in digital inclusion: Children, young people and the digital divide. New Media & Society, 9, 671-696.

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December 22, 2011

Finding out about finding out

First a note on what I’m doing here. This blog is a space to play with ideas in a loose, informal way – a way of recording my trains of thought outside of the constraints of formal academic writing. So forgive me for trains that go nowhere.

I’ve been ‘finding out about finding out’; exploring methodologies that have been used by researchers to concerned with people’s use of their mobile phones and smartphones. I’ve been keen to go outside the boundaries of science and technology studies to see what other disciplines might offer.

This has taken me from feminist critiques of the paradigms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies, studies of social networking in Krygystan to large scale quantitiative studies of Finnish teenagers mobile phone usage habits. Studies using micro-ethnographies and day-long shadowing exercises to explore the material culture of modern motherhood. And reflexive anthropological studies of youth culture and mobile phones in Mozambique.

Ethical concerns and issues of access can take many forms. An HCI study where fieldwork took place in a shelter for women fleeing domestic violence (Dimond, J. P. 2011) showed how feminist action research can help minimise harm and intrusiveness. Researching ubiquitous computing in developing countries, an American team in Central Asia (Kolko, B.,2011) needed to state their opposition on the Presidency of George W Bush to gain the confidence of respondents.

Taking a broad disciplinary view has yielded great results. Shadowing techniques used in organizational studies (McDonald, 2005) seemed to throw up some great data on people’s sense of themselves and their roles, so it was a delight to see it used for a very different purpose – ‘micro-ethnographies’ of modern motherhood – by a research team at the Open University.

I’m also in the process of theoretically framing my work: aligning with or positioning against other theorists. Looking at where my work might fit in in the broader theoretical picture. Finding out how others have captured phenomena I’ve long observed in my professional life; such as Saskia Sassen’s descriptions of the complex ‘imbrications’ or layering of digital and material worlds.

These two processes are firing off each other. So, if we take the use of a mobile phones as mediated: what are the best methodologies for exploring that space, the mediated cultures between people and technology? What kinds of immaterial or affective labour are women doing with their phones? How might we find out what the digital divide looks like in the era of ubiquitous computing?

References

(Apologies for references from inaccessible scholarly journals – read a great rant on this topic by Danah Boyd!) 

Dimond, J. P., Fiesler, C. & Bruckman, A. S. 2011. Domestic violence and information communication technologies. Interacting with Computers.

Kolko, B., Putnam, C., Rose, E. & Johnson, E. 2011. Reflection on research methodologies for ubicomp in developing contexts. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 15, 575-583.

Mcdonald, S. 2005. Studying actions in context: A qualitative shadowing method for organizational research. Qualitative Research, 5, 455-473.

Sassen, S. 2002. Towards a sociology of information technology. Current Sociology, 50, 365-388.

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December 8, 2011

Don’t shoot the (BlackBerry) Messenger….

This is a post I wrote in August 2011 reflecting on the role of the BlackBerry Messenger in the riots in the UK.

The causes of the riots which tore apart the UK’s inner cities this week are unclear, yet a technological scapegoat is emerging which I couldn’t let pass by without comment.

My research interest is in the potential role of mobile technologies in overcoming social and digital exclusion in young people not in education, employment or training (or ‘NEET’) and this seemed like an opportune moment to share a snapshot of some unexpected findings from my Masters Research earlier this year.

The messaging service BlackBerry messenger has been blamed for providing a communications channel for rioters, leading to calls from UK MPs to shut down the service and a critical response from those concerned about the implications for UK civil liberties of such actions.

My recent research on mobile phones and the digital divide was carried out with young people from the same communities that were being ripped apart during last week’s riots. These committed, hard working and inspiring young men and women were designing and creating mobile apps aimed at tackling social issues in their communities, on an inspiring pilot course run by Apps for Good.

Inspired by Rich Ling‘swriting on the significance of mobile phone brands to young people, I explored technology choices with participants. They all spoke about the ubiquity of the BBM use amongst young people (which resonates with OFCOM research on smartphone use). To quote one of the young people:

“EVERY teenager from the age of eleven, not even twelve, eleven… I see kids younger than that with BlackBerry’s now…

Because of that… thats the appeal for them?

“The appeal is for the messaging.”

Because you can use it internationally as well?

“Yeah….Here and message to the States. And to me thats what every kid do. You go on the bus now and you see a kid thats over twelve you can see him with a BlackBerry typing…. They would be broke and still find money to put on their pin [referring to purchasing more credit for their BB messaging account]”

One participant in my study spoke about the need to buy a BlackBerry to exploit weak ties – in this case connections to colleagues in the music business with whom he was loath to share his mobile number but happy to share his messaging ID.

So what does this tell us?

Young people are tied into platforms which are compatible with their peer’s devices. In the case of the BlackBerry – the networks they are using are created by the manufacturers – and are limited to other people using the same device. But does that mean we should shut down the networks if they are abused for criminal purposes? The reductive technological determinism implied by this idea jars with the complex, ‘polymedia‘ world inhabited by young people in inner city communities.

From a research perspective, it’s gratifying to note that ethnographic approaches can reveal unexpected and useful findings about our relationship with technology.

I’d love to discuss these issues further and share more information on my PhD research – if you’re interested please get in touch.

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