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low income access to networking -- another view
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Date: 4 Nov 1994 11:55:55 U
From: "Bruce MacEvoy"
It's commendable to see advocacy on behalf of lower income groups for greater Internet access. However, the implicit model of the "information infrastructure" behind these efforts--the idea that access is primarily shaped by the traditional barriers of socioeconomic status--is misleading in several respects.
My research in consumer behavior shows that "socioeconomic status" is typically a very important dimension in aggregate consumption behavior. The second important dimension is related to age and physical energy; the third is gender. In most contexts, status correlates very highly with income and education. You can typically predict quite a lot about individual consumer behavior simply by knowing the person's position on these three dimensions--not only in the United States, but in any post-industrial urban culture abroad. Japan and Germany are indistinguishable from the U.S. at this broad level of social structure.
The picture in the telecommunications and computer markets is different in several important respects, however. Specifically:
* The dimension of status is powerfully associated with gender. In fact, being a male is more important to acquisition or use of high-status new technology products than is either education or income.* Education is far more important in predicting new technology access and use than is income. There do not seem to be significant cost barriers to new technology usage: essential are the mental skills to do so. In particular, low-education homes report more conflict or stress as a result of television, computer and videogame usage than do high-education homes. This theme is particularly relevant in light of this year's U.S. government report that about 40% of adult Americans have difficulty with "secondary" forms of literacy--reading a bus schedule, filling out a tax form, and the like. As regards new technology access, what's in people's heads is more important than what's in their wallets.* Occupational status (e.g., the kind of work you do) is more important in telecommunications and computer use than are any home or family applications. Professionals and managers--the latter especially--are eager to pass on computer skills to their children. Other groups are much less enthusiastic.* Finally, simply having a job or attending school is vital to new technology adoption. Partly, of course, this is a result of shifting costs such as Internet access or hardware acquisition from the individual household to the employer or educational institution. But the social aspects of training, modeling, support, and purpose seem important too. Work or school provide the useful reasons to get trained and get wired.
I don't mean to disparage the efforts on behalf of the poor. I'm suggesting, however, that a program targeted to low-income access--even in a tutorial, workshop environment--is based on large misperceptions. The most aggressive outreach would be toward women, the less educated, and the manufacturing and noninformational services sectors of the economy--perhaps including small businesses as the core intervention context for Internet access and training.
I have no information regarding the socioeconomic distribution of new telecommunications outreach and training efforts (e.g., by dollars spent or persons trained)--inside vs. outside work or school, by work status and occupational category, by type of residence or family, and so on. Such figures might reveal where in the social structure outreach efforts are most concentrated and what ideological biases or constituent interests they reflect.
My impression, however, is that these outreach efforts reflect our current political biases, and it is therefore the so-called "lower middle class" and the two-earner family that is most disenfrachised and most neglected in the distribution of these efforts. More to the point, as long as we focus on income as the primary indicator of need, we are not addressing the real dimensions of segregation and disenfranchisement which new techology creates. ```
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