OPINION JANE SEALE
Digital discrimination A
S AN EXPERT researcher working in the field of digital inclusion for the last 23 years, you’d think it would be easy for me to write about the benefits of digital technologies. And yet it is not. To explain my difficulty I will draw on two recent experiences: the first, reading the Manifesto for a Networked Nation; the second, attending a technology-related conference. Both experiences illustrate two opposite but influential positions regarding digital exclusion and how to ‘solve’ it. “I would be dead without the internet,” says Martha Lane Fox, the UK Digital Champion, in her foreword to her Manifesto for a Networked Nation, to begin an anecdote about a young man she met in Leeds who rebuilt his life from drug addiction through his engagement with a community IT centre that enabled him to learn how to use a computer. He went on to make and sell music online.
“ It is not about how many people
are digitally excluded or offline, but how few opportunities are afforded to such people
But what do we learn from this anecdote in terms of digital inclusion? I am concerned about the conclusion that readers of the Manifesto will draw: that all we need to solve digital exclusion is to provide access to technology and teach people how to use it, so that they can become economically productive. This is a simplification that overemphasises the remediation of individuals in terms of skills and motivation, and ignores the need to change society in terms of its attitudes towards disadvantage and acceptance of inequalities. “The digital inclusion debate is the enemy of progress and the digital divide is not as big as many claim.” This rather cynical statement was made by a keynote speaker at a recent technology- related conference I attended. The speaker had been CEO of a large corporate technology- related company and a school governor. They illustrated their statement with an example from their school governor days, when, they claimed angrily, progress towards using the internet in the classroom was hindered through concerns over exclusion; that not all the children would have internet access at home. It was only a small number of children who did not have internet
” 18 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2010
Who benefits from digital technology? Digital inclusion is more about social change than access to technology, argues Professor Jane Seale
access at home, so why couldn’t arrangements be made for these few, like giving them homework that did not require the internet? To ask such a question is to misunderstand or deny the digital divide. It is not necessarily about how many people are digitally excluded or offline, but how few opportunities are afforded to such people. Furthermore, such a question begs the response: why did it not occur to the school to find a way to provide internet access at home? If Martha Lane Fox has oversimplified the solutions to digital exclusion, the keynote speaker and the school they referred to have ignored the moral case for digital inclusion. To accept the moral case is to accept that everyone has a right to access and use technologies, and to believe that it is unjust and inequitable if anyone is unable to do so. To accept that there is a lack of justice and equity requires, in my opinion, passionate outrage. Such outrage is, unfortunately, rare in the digitally privileged echelons of our society. To move beyond oversimplified views of digital inclusion and to expand the moral case for action we need a collective examination of the prejudices and attitudes that exist towards the disadvantaged. These permeate the structures and systems that could enact digital inclusion-related policies and strategies.
If we do not focus on the broader structural social change required to ensure digital inclusion for all, then in another 23 years we will still be talking about the potential benefit of technologies, rather than the actual benefit. This, in a nutshell, is my difficulty with answering a question about the benefits of technologies. I don’t just want to tell you how valuable technologies are; I want to tell you how valuable the people, the communities and the social structures are that enable the benefits of technologies to be enjoyed by everyone. An inspection of the Digital Inclusion
Research Briefing produced by the ESRC-funded Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme provides some rich examples of this and sets a series of challenges for future research and practice, one of which is to contribute to the challenging of discriminatory practices. n
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Jane Seale is Professor of Education at the University of Plymouth, Convenor of the TLRP-TEL Programme Digital Inclusion Forum and former Co-Director of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (2007-2010)
Email
jane.seale@
plymouth.ac.uk Web
www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/home.php
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