June 2022 – Kira Allmann

Over the last year, I’ve researched and written the 2022 UK Digital Poverty Evidence Review for the Digital Poverty Alliance, which launched yesterday in the House of Lords.

The report synthesises a great deal of important work on digital exclusion and poverty, and it was impossible to cite everything or give each topic as much space as it probably deserved (you surely wouldn’t read a 2000-page report – who would?!). But I’m a fan of “showing your work,” so I’m making the list of references I consulted available for anyone who wants to dig even more deeply into the research behind the report (as a Zotero library).

Digital Poverty References

The report spotlights three big-picture myths and three game-changing shifts that we need to address to tackle digital poverty in the pervasively digitised world of 2022. These are:

Big picture myths

The kids are alright

There are important demographic divides between those who are online with high levels of skills, and those who are offline with low levels of skills. On the whole, people over the age of 65 are more likely to be offline. This rather coarse statistic has given rise to the myth that young people are naturally “digital natives”: having grown up with technology, they will acquire the necessary digital capabilities simply through high exposure. The evidence increasingly refutes this assumption, with factors such as employment status, education, disability, income, and self-confidence cutting across age and impacting people’s level of exclusion. Often, unequal access to technology is a feature of schooling, with a growing inequity between affluent schools with more access to and choice about technology, and less well-resourced schools with more limited access and choices. As a result, technology provision in education is deepening existing differences in life chances.

Access is access

In the early days of digital divide research and policy, digital inequality was mainly thought of
as the gap between those who have internet access and those who do not. This was called
the “first-level digital divide,” and it has been thoroughly challenged by decades of further evidence showing that there are second- and third-level divides in skills, usage, and outcomes. Still today, digital inclusion is often treated like a switch that can be flipped on once and stays on for life. However, evidence shows that digital inclusion is a process rather than an event. Differences in quality, reliability, location, and experiences of access all influence whether an individual will be able to make the most of the digital world.

Digital exclusion will diminish or disappear over time without intervention

There is a common misconception that time will solve three of the biggest factors in digital exclusion in the UK – exposure, motivation, and confidence. The logic goes that the more people have to do online, the more people will spend time online, and the better acquainted with the digital world they will become. However, the digital divide has remained a problem for digitising societies since the beginning of the digital revolution – lower prices for hardware, more devices, and widespread connectivity have not solved digital exclusion. This is because digital inclusion is relative, the benchmarks are always changing as technology changes, and the solutions depend on social, political and technical responses to inequality. Ultimately, only concerted top-down and bottom-up efforts to address deep-rooted societal inequalities will help make progress on digital poverty. This dynamic approach demands thinking big and small at the same time, and putting the needs of people first.

Game-changing shifts

Digital is not a separate domain, sector, or agenda

In our increasingly digitised world, the division between online and offline has become completely blurred. One of the tensions in dealing with digital poverty is keeping the spotlight on digital and its contribution to disadvantage, while also stressing that digital is pervasive and cannot be treated as a separate issue or programme. A focus on digital poverty, like the one taken in this report, could be misconstrued to suggest that “digital” constitutes its own domain, separate or on top of other domains of social life, such as education or work. The reality is that digital is embedded in all domains. In the words of Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Dawes, digital is not a separate sector.

The digitally excluded are still digital citizens

Everyone is part of a digital society — whether they are online or not. “Datafication” is the process by which information about people is turned into data that can be processed by computers,32 and this occurs behind the scenes, whether the datafied person is digitally literate or not. It is important to recognise how the digital world affects everyone – even people who are not actively online or have long periods of digital absence33 – especially as more of our everyday lives are digitised through the Internet of Things and Smart Cities, for example.

The digital world can be unfair by design

A growing body of literature has emerged on the issue of algorithmic bias34 and automated discrimination. Tackling the determinants of digital poverty will entail an awareness of the assumptions that go into the design and deployment of technology and how these can replicate and deepen certain inequalities and exclusions. Digital poverty is not just about access to connection and devices; it is also about ensuring the digitised, algorithmic systems do not perpetuate, deepen, or create new disadvantages for people.36 The automation of many processes and services and the invisibility of algorithmic “decisions” can create a false impression that these decisions are objective and neutral. When frontline staff in essential services rely on these outputs, it can deepen inequalities faced by already disadvantaged groups. In addition, the design of platforms and technologies can actively exclude, mislead, or disadvantage certain users. For example, websites that have not been designed to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) exclude assistive technology users and other disabled users.

The evidence also pointed to several key recommendations:

Digital poverty does not respect sector siloes, and neither should the recommendations
for tackling it. These recommendations have implications for all sectors – Government, local authorities, industry, the private sector, the third sector, and academia or the research sector. They have also gone on to inform five specific Policy Principles, developed in consultation with the Digital Poverty Alliance community to take the agenda forward. These recommendations and principles will contribute to the Digital Poverty Alliance’s forthcoming National Delivery Plan.

Affordable and sustainable inclusion: Digital inclusion must be made more affordable and sustainable through both stop-gap digital inclusion initiatives, such as device distribution, and long-term community investment that recognises digital inclusion as dependent on broader (non-digital) community resilience and resources.
Inclusive and accessible design: Technologies, platforms, and digital services must be designed to be safe, inclusive, accessible and privacy-protecting from the outset, through participatory design – involving affected communities in the design of technologies that affect their lives – and through effective and enforceable regulation.
People-centred and community-embedded interventions: Digital inclusion policy, interventions, and research need to meet people where they already are by fostering and utilising existing community-based, formal, and informal spaces for inclusion, and focusing on helping people meet their own goals and objectives.
Skills to engage and empower: The skills needed to tackle today’s pervasive and complex digital world are more than technical competencies, like typing and internet searching. Digital literacy must treat digital as part of civic life, encompassing critical thinking and awareness of data rights, privacy, and consent.
Support for the whole journey: Digital inclusion needs to accommodate a shifting and increasingly complex digital landscape by supporting people throughout their entire lives and meeting them where they are in that journey – in school, on the job, through the health and care system, and more. Life circumstances and social context are important contributors to digital poverty, so this requires a focus on the offline, social dynamics of disadvantage.
Building the evidence base: Although a lot of research on digital exclusion and poverty exists, there are some significant gaps. Research needs to consider digital poverty in relation to social, economic, political, and health inequality, and vice versa – these issues cannot remain siloed. Data on digital poverty needs to be both quantitative (statistical) and qualitative (interview, observation, and lived experience-based), and it needs to be representative, comparable, longitudinal, and freely available to the public and research community.

And these recommendations went on to inform the Digital Poverty Alliance’s Five Policy Principles:

Policy Principle 1: Digital is a basic right. Digital is now an essential utility – and access to it should be treated as such.

Policy Principle 2: Accessing key public services online, like social security and healthcare, must be simple, safe, and meet everyone’s needs.

Policy Principle 3: Digital should fit into people’s lives, not be an additional burden — particularly the most disadvantaged.

Policy Principle 4: Digital skills should be fundamental to education and training throughout life. Support must be provided to trusted intermediaries who have a key role in providing access to digital.

Policy Principle 5: There must be cross-sector efforts to provide free and open evidence on digital exclusion.

Read the Report

Presented at the Digital Leaders 2022 National Digital Conference, Understanding the Evidence Panel

Thank you very much for having me here. Today I’m mostly going to speak from my experience writing the 2022 UK Digital Poverty Evidence Review for the Digital Poverty Alliance, which is launching next week.

For the review, I consulted more than 200 sources of evidence on the five determinants of digital poverty from academia, the third sector, industry, and Government. The five determinants, as outlined by the Digital Poverty Alliance are Devices and Connectivity, Access, Capabilities, Motivation, and Support and Participation. As you can probably imagine, these headings encompass quite a wide range of issues and supporting data and the reason comes down to this: digital poverty is at least as much a social issue as it is a technological issue. So, to tackle it, we need to know more about people – their day to day lives, their hardships, the inequalities they face – and we need to build technologies that take this diversity of experiences and forms of exclusion into account.

By way of an opening statement, I’m going to highlight three things about where we need to be looking for the evidence to end digital poverty, based on the evidence review that’s coming out on Monday in full. These are top-level observations, and if you want to dig into them, obviously check out the report on Monday, and I’ll be making my entire list of source material – including things that aren’t cited in the report – available then, too.

First, we need to look beyond the longstanding absolute divide between digital haves and have-nots – the classic online/offline distinction – to focus instead on relative differences and divides. On the face of it, the UK is a highly connected country: Ofcom reports that 94% of households have internet access. But these aggregate statistics can obscure the ways that the digital divide is deepening for some people – especially people who are already disadvantaged. There are regional divides, with rural areas especially in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland the least able to access decent broadband. And divides based on income, with households in the lowest socio-economic grades being more than 15 points more likely to use only a smartphone to get online compared to the highest socio-economic grades. And there are divides based on education, with those lacking formal qualifications being 2.8 times more likely to say the internet is “not for them,” according to research Simeon, who is here on the panel with us, conducted for Good Things Foundation. There are divides based on disability, with disabled adults 18 points less likely to be recent internet users according to ONS. Factors like the reliability of your connection, the speed of your connection, and the privacy of the spaces you have at your disposal to connect also all affect your experience of the digital world.

Second, digital inequality – and therefore digital poverty – is becoming a very complex issue in the digital world today because of what scholars call ‘datafication,’ meaning the collection of information about people and the processing of that data, which now underpins most digital services.

It’s not just about whether someone has an internet connection or an internet-enabled device anymore. It’s also about whether enough or too little data about them is being collected and whether data-driven decisions are putting them at a greater disadvantage, for instance in risk-scoring for housing or insurance. So we need to look at the evidence around issues like algorithmic bias, digital tracking and surveillance, and the commercial sale of data to understand how people are benefitting or suffering from digitisation. And all these issues are also contributing to what people think about the digital world – their motivation. People care more and more about privacy, and this affects their trust in digital technologies. Lloyds Bank reports that over half of people offline say they’re worried about their privacy. And the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation has found that people with low digital familiarity are the most likely to be worried about data security and risks. At the same time, people generally don’t understand how their data is collected and used, or how to identify risks to their data or their access to information. Again, CDEI reports that infrequent digital users mostly say they know little or nothing about how data about them is used or collected, but in the general population less than half of people say they know these things. These issues are all factors contributing to digital poverty.

Third, and this is related to the second point, we need to explore and address the double-edged sword of inclusion. What do I mean by that? Well, digital poverty doesn’t end when people finally get online or have access to a reasonable device. It’s not a switch that gets flipped from “off” to “on,” and now people will be able to experience the positive outcomes of digitisation. People may actually be exposed to more harms due to their digital disadvantage, so we need to include evidence about what those harms are, who is most likely to be affected, and how to mitigate them. This means building digital technologies and systems that are safe, accessible, and privacy-enhancing.

In summary, the evidence we need to take into account in order to tackle digital poverty goes beyond what we’ve traditionally relied on – statistics on digital connections and skills – and now needs to encompass all the complexities of a data-driven world and how these are embedded in people’s social contexts.

Month: June 2022

UK Digital Poverty Evidence Review 2022