My response to the recent report from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Nominet Trust on young people living outside the ‘digital mainstream’ “On the Periphery  Understanding Low and Discontinued Internet Use Amongst Young People in Britain” is going to take a couple of blog posts – its such a rich and important piece of work. It is the first time I’ve seen an exploration of the “..significant minority of young people who are not able to navigate or connect properly with the online world” and the implications this has for the lives and opportunities of these young people. It vividly demonstrates how wrong it is to typecast young people as ‘digital natives’.

But for now I’m just going to take up one point  raised in the report – (somewhat predictably) about the references to mobile phones. The report states how important mobile phones are in the lives of young people – “Mobile phones were typically considered to be very important for communication, and for the majority of interviewees their phone better met their social needs than the Internet.” The researchers go on to say that “It is worth stressing here, that those who had any kind of experience of using the Internet on a mobile device tended to describe it as being quite limited due to issues with speed, usability and cost” and that therefore “The notion of the mobile as a solution to digital exclusion seems to us not sufficient and based on inaccurate assumptions about this group.”

Further on they say “We also found that while mobile phones or BlackBerrys can in some ways compensate for a lack of Internet, particularly when it comes to social functions and applications, they are not a sustainable solution with regard to purposes such as applying for jobs, education, and the search for housing, which were the main priorities for most of the young discontinued Internet users we interviewed.”

Anybody who has struggled to use mobile versions of websites might agree that its often a frustrating, time consuming process. For those young people described in the report who are challenged by a lack of cognitive resources – such as literacy skills – this must definitely be an issue.

But I have three challenges to the notion that mobiles aren’t a ‘solution’ to digital inclusion.

Firstly, there isn’t a single ‘solution’ to digital inclusion – as the report’s authors suggest in their conclusions (page 37) a raft of strategies are required.

Secondly, mobile technologies are very fast moving and the price of mobile data will change – so that may remove some of the barriers to ‘instrumental’ uses of mobile internet by young people.

Thirdly, there is the issue of user interface – and how we can address these challenges through better usability.

I just took a look at the Beta version of the gov.uk site on my Smartphone – checking out my entitlement to free childcare as an example of the kind of information a young, lone parent looking to return to work might be interested in. The stripped down, intuitive interface was easy to get to and clearly laid out and the language was plain and clear.

I don’t think mobile phones are ‘the’ solution to digital inclusion – what I do think is that the gov.uk site shows that a focus on usability has a role to play in overcoming digital inclusion by making it easier for anyone to access information about their rights and opportunities. We shouldn’t give up on mobiles just yet.

As I reflected in my last blog post, I’ve been wondering about how the capabilities approach might work as a lens for understanding technology and political participation in the UK, in particular when it comes to young women and the technology they love the most: the mobile phone.

Up until today I’d been looking at work from the ICT4D field so I was delighted to find a research programme at LSE on Equality, Capability and Human rights in the UK and Europe.

As I’m looking for a means to operationalise concepts to provide a framework for my research design it was great to read that one of the goals of the programme is to “ develop and implement a measurement framework based on the capability approach”. To this end, they worked with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to help them develop The Equality Measurement Framework “ a measurement framework that can be used to assess equality and human rights across a range of domains relevant to 21st century life.” covering 10 domains of freedom and opportunity:

I was particularly interested in chapter 13 which looks at ‘participation, influence and voice’ which has the following sub-domains of capability:

A. participate in decision-making and make decisions affecting your own life independently

B. participate in the formulation of government policy, locally and nationally

C. participate in non-governmental organisations concerned with public and political life

D. participate in democratic free and fair elections

E. get together with others, peacefully

F. participate in the local community

G. form and join civil organisations and solidarity groups, including trade unions

This an interesting list: frameworks like this are what I’m looking for to help structure my research.

There’s also some really valuable information in there about where key data on political participation can be found. For example, the British Election study tells us that only 44% of 18-24 year olds voted in the 2005 General Election (compared to 76% of those aged 45-64). The Citizenship Survey tells us that 29% of 18-24 year olds took part in political activity in the last 12 months (compared to 44% of those aged 45-64).

But I’m wondering where the technology is in these frameworks. If our political lives are now mediated by technology, how are we defining and measuring that? And what are we doing with our mobile phones that might fit into these frameworks?

There’s broader questions here as well – how are young, unemployed people (especially young women) having ‘voice and influence’ in British society and are existing national surveys collecting this data?

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.

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?