Intro

Journal of Human Rights and Social Work volume 6, pages 130–143 (2021)

The role of technology and importance of access to high-speed broadband has become glaringly obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic. High-speed Internet is a tool people rely upon to conduct the daily business of their life and interact with each other, the economy, and government. However, millions of people in the USA still have no home access to high-speed Internet. Low-income, people of color, older, Native Americans, and rural residents in particular are on the wrong side of the digital divide. This structural reality perpetuates social, economic, and political disparities. Consistent with a social work human rights approach, the United Nations General Assembly declared access to the Internet a basic human right in 2016. This calls upon social workers to engage in advocacy efforts to advance policy and programs to alleviate the digital divide. In this article, we examine the digital divide in the USA and discuss why it is a social justice and human rights issue. We provide a policy context and recent examples of state or local policy initiatives to reduce the digital divide. Prominent among them is California’s Internet for All Now Act. We also identify and share promising practices and advocacy tools being used in the field that provide guidance to community practitioners as they engage in work at state and local levels aimed at closing the digital divide.

Imagine your day-to-day life without reliable, consistent, and rapid access to the Internet.

What kind of impact would this have on your ability to communicate with others, stay in touch with family and friends, complete your schoolwork, look for a job, keep up on current events, or take care of your daily financial transactions? What kind of impact would this have had on your life during the pandemic of 2020? The role and importance of technology has become glaringly obvious in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where society has been forced to rely even more heavily on technology for basic daily living including accessing basic goods, maintaining connections with others, working from home, and having the ability to complete schoolwork.

However, completing these basic tasks is a major challenge for millions of people who either lack access to high-speed Internet or do not adopt it, creating disadvantages that affect their ability to participate in social, political, and economic lives in the USA. A high-speed Internet connection, also known as broadband, is an essential infrastructure for functioning in today’s society. Those without access or adoption are in the digital divide. This structural reality effectively results in what has been called “digital redlining” and further perpetuates social and economic disparities in society (Neidig 2017; Gilliard 2016). This injustice calls on social workers to engage in policy and program initiatives to close the digital divide.

In this article, we examine the digital divide, who does and does not have access to an essential service that is part of the daily fabric of living in the digital era. We discuss why the digital divide is a human rights and social justice issue: one that social workers should be actively working to close through policy advocacy work. We examine what some states are doing to reduce the divide and are encouraged by steps in some communities to extend Internet service to many rural and marginalized groups. However, there is still much work to do in order to ensure everyone has access to reliable and high- speed Internet. In the final section of this article, we examine promising practices and advocacy tools utilized in the field that can assist community practitioners to engage in work at state and local levels aimed at closing the digital divide.

The Digital Divide

Librarian Jessamyn West (2011) offers a definition of the digital divide: “The digital divide is a simplistic phrase used to explain the gap between people who can easily use and access technology, and those who cannot. The term digital divide has been in common use to refer to the sense of technological haves and have-nots for over a decade” (Introduction, p. xxiv). In other words, some people are privileged in their access to and use of technology compared with others. This is due to a variety of factors, including computer ownership, high-speed Internet access and adoption, and digital literacy.

Mossberger et al. (2003) conceptualize the digital divide to consist of multidimensional aspects of technological inclusion: “an access divide, a skills divide, an economic opportunity divide, and a democratic divide” (p. 2). High-speed Internet is a tool people increasingly rely upon to interact with the government, the economy, and each other. Increased home Internet use is associated with a significantly higher probability of contacting government officials in various ways. In a 2010 study by political scientists Dari Sylvester and Adam McGlynn, Internet usage was found to increase political participation by providing information that can increase one’s political efficacy, including acts such as letter writing, phone calls, and sending e-mails to government. The results demonstrate that those who do not use the Internet at home, whether due to inadequate knowledge or lack of access, are less likely to be civically active. Thus, the digital divide can have significant negative consequences for political participation.

While an extensive discussion of the history of Internet development is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that there is good reason to argue that broadband should be a public utility. Indeed, billions of dollars in public funding are responsible for the mobilization and development of the Internet (Tarnoff 2016). The roots of the Internet go back to the 1960s when the public entity Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) began to invest heavily in computing, building mainframes at universities and other research sites. The precursor to the Internet was the network built by ARPA called ARPANET. Through public funding, scientific collaboration, experimentation, and innovation ARPANET flourished. In the mid-1970s, the development of Internet protocols emerged as a common language between very different networks and made it possible for ARPANET to evolve into the Internet. The National Science Foundation undertook initiatives to bring the Internet to universities across the country. These efforts culminated in NSFNET, a national network that became the new backbone of the Internet. As popularity of the Internet grew, so did congestion and demand beyond capability (Tarnoff 2016).

Beginning in the 1990s, the US government began a process of privatizing a network built at tremendous public expense. The free market and deregulation climate of Clinton Democrats and Newt Gingrich’s Republicans framed private ownership of the Internet as beneficial and inevitable. NSFNET director Stephen Wolf believed privatizing the Internet could avoid political and technical challenges and that liberation from government control would allow the Internet to become a mass medium. Today, the Internet backbone and broadband are held by relatively few large corporations that dominate the market (Tarnoff 2016). Developing the Internet was historically a radical and financially risky idea. It took decades of public funding and planning to bring it into existence. The development of the Internet can be thought of as akin to other public utilities such as water and electricity. It can be compared with the US road grid or the US Postal Service that reaches everyone. Left to its own devices, the private market will not provide access to everyone at affordable prices but rather systematically provide expensive services for the richest people in order to make profits at the expense of the social good (Klein 2014).

Thus, there is an argument to be made that the Internet should be a publicly owned and controlled utility. Indeed some municipalities have forcefully responded with publicly owned and affordable municipal broadband. For example, Chattanooga, TN, using a fiber-optic network built in part with federal stimulus funds, offers some of the fastest Internet speeds in the world at affordable prices (O’Toole 2014). The “Chattanooga model” has inspired movements for municipal broadband in several other cities (Tarnoff 2016).

The digital divide not only includes the obvious issues of access to computers and connectivity but also includes issues of inequity affecting those who either lack the skills and opportunities to access information technology or who are in a less equal position in terms of use (Makinen 2006). As research into the digital divide progresses, the need for digital literacy is highlighted. In some cases, those with low digital literacy may begin to gain access and enter the “haves” in technology but may demonstrate reluctance to the use of technology simply because they do not know how (Real et al. 2014). Educating and training both individuals and library and information (LIS) professionals are crucial components in the digital divide in order to provide information congruent with ever-changing technology and points of access.

A goal for using information technology (IT) becomes the promotion of social inclusion among marginalized groups. That is, closing the digital divide requires access and enhancement of the abilities of individuals and groups to use IT to engage in meaningful social practices. Access to broadband Internet has been credited with effects on individual empowerment, community development, and economic growth (Jayakar et al. 2016). Historically, people have relied upon the US Postal Service (USPS) for access to information, a means of communication, and their ability to deliver essential items like medication, legal notices, and ballots. USPS’s overall financial condition has been deteriorating for several years (GAO 2017), and its sustainability is under attack by the Trump administration (Waldman 2020). Thus, perhaps now more than ever, it is important for social workers to advocate for an inclusive high-speed Internet that replicates in the digital age what the postal service originally sets out to do in providing the nation with a reliable, affordable, and universal service (USPS 2011).

Broadband Access

While Internet access has grown among all socioeconomic categories, significant differences by age, income, ethnicity/race, and educational level persist (Warf 2012). Geographical location is also a leading factor, with rural communities much less likely to have access to high-speed Internet (West and Karsten 2016). A large disparity also exists for those living with a disability. Approximately 81% of adults use the Internet; however, only 51% of adults living with a disability access the Internet (Fox 2011).

According to the most recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deployment report (FCC 2019), an estimated 21 million Americans still have no home access to high-speed Internet service, defined by the FCC as a download speed of 25 Mbps and upload speed of 3 Mbps. The majority live in rural areas (McGill 2018). These data most likely underestimate the number of people who do not have access to broadband, as the FCC’s data are widely considered to overestimate broadband connectivity (Pew Research 2020; Lecher 2019; GAO 2018). Other sources estimate this number as high as 162 million people across the USA who are not using the Internet at broadband speed (Microsoft 2019). Based on the 2018 Broadband deployment report, as of the year end 2016, 92.3% of all Americans had access to fixed terrestrial broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps/3 Mbps, up from 89.4% in 2014 and 81.2% in 2012. While the overall trend in access is improving, patterns of exclusion persist (FCC 2018).

Broadband Adoption

Availability of broadband does not equal adoption. Adoption of broadband is equally important to ensure the benefits (including economic benefits) that go along with Internet use to everyone. While broadband may be available, broadband adoption refers to the extent to which US households subscribe to and use broadband. Populations who continue to lag in broadband adoption, even when available, include people with low incomes, older adults, minorities, the less educated, non-family households, the unemployed, and limited English-speaking households (Kruger and Gilroy 2019; Ryan 2018). According to Census data from the 2016 American Community Survey, 81.4% of American households have a broadband Internet subscription. Census data from July 2015 show that 68% of Americans use the Internet at home. However, in 2015, 73.3 million (almost a quarter of the nation’s population) lived in neighborhoods where in-home broadband subscription rates fell below 40%. These residents tend to be older, have lower incomes and lower education levels, and subscription rates remain lowest in rural America. These numbers also include 17.7 million children under the age of 18 (Tomer et al. 2017). For children, living without in-home broadband means losing the benefits from digital curricula or developing digital skills for the future workplace among other things. And the challenges are great for schools and school districts serving non-subscribing households. Data from the Pew Research Center demonstrate that certain groups, unable to afford the cost of monthly subscriptions, continue to lag in the adoption of broadband including people with low incomes, older adults, those with less education, rural households, and those on tribal lands and US territories (Kruger and Gilroy 2019).

Digital readiness/literacy also plays an important role in adoption rates. Digital readiness (digital skills such as ability to use hardware and software to communicate, manage information, navigate the Internet, identify threats and safety issues) and access to equipment are other consistent adoption barriers. A lack of digital readiness is most prevalent among older, non-Asian minority, less-educated, and lower-income individuals (Horrigan 2016).

Low-Income Households

The main reason some families do not have home computers or subscribe to the Internet is because they cannot afford it (Rideout and Katz 2016). People who fall lower on the economic ladder are more likely to be people without access or unable to adopt the Internet resulting in falling further behind and widening the digital divide between rich and poor. According to 2015 National Telecommunications and Information Administration data, the digital divide varies by family income. Americans with family incomes between $75,000 and $99,999 per year adopted the Internet at an 83% rate, compared with 80% with incomes between $50,000 and $74,999 and 70% for those in the $25,000 to $49,999 range. Pronounced disparities exist for those living in rural areas compared with urban ones (Carlson and Goss 2016). Nearly half (48%) of all households have “high connectivity” meaning households with a laptop or desktop, a smartphone, a tablet, and a broadband Internet connectivity. However, among household with an income of $150,000 or more, 80% of households had high connectivity while this was true for only 21% of households with an income under $25,000 (U.S Census 2017). Additionally, states with higher incomes reported high rates of use and access while low-income states including Arkansas and Mississippi had the lowest rates of broadband use at 71%. (Ryan 2018).

The majority (91% overall) of people living in poverty have at least some form of Internet access (Rideout and Katz 2016). However, lower-income adults rely more heavily on smartphone-only access. In 2019, 26% of adults making $30,000 or less relied on smartphones for Internet access compared with 20% of those making between $30,001 and $49,999, 10% of those making $50,000–$74,999, and only 6% of those making $75,000 and above (Pew Research 2019). Mobile-only families are less likely to do certain types of online activities including staying in touch with family and friends, getting news, looking for general information, bank or pay bills online, shop online, and apply for jobs or services. With just a mobile device, it is very difficult to do things like help children with homework (Rideout and Katz 2016).

This pattern of income variation in broadband connectivity not only affects households but also occurs at the neighborhood level. Tomer et al. (2017) found that low-income neighborhoods have the lowest subscription rates and that the opposite is true for high-income neighborhoods, where only 3% of residents lived in low-subscription neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, these patterns support the notion that those left behind in the digitally connected economy are those who are already struggling economically.