We should all care about digital equity
Online access for everyone is a necessity for building a better world together
“I think …”
Hesitating, I closed my eyes and blocked out the audience for a moment.
“I was about to make a strong statement,” I continued after a breath, “… and I wanted to pause for a second to see if I really mean it, but I think I do. I think digital access is a human right in this digital world we now live in.”
It was during a Q&A session following a keynote presentation I had just given to fundraising professionals on using social media to share the world we want to see. (The tagline of this newsletter!) An audience member asked something about how non-profits serving rural areas without digital access could use social media to support those communities.
I can't remember the exact question because it sparked a rapid vision for me of what life without digital access might look like in our networked world. It was disconnected, uninformed, and lonely.
These words from Deb Walker, Community Engagement and Public Affairs Manager at Ting Internet, a company that offers qualifying Colorado Springs residents access to fiber internet at no cost, were fresh in my mind from an event a few weeks earlier:
We believe fiber internet has the power to transform communities, remove barriers, and it allows local businesses to remain competitive and prosperous.
We know that in our post-pandemic world, fast and reliable internet connectivity is crucial for anyone to participate in the digital age. It enables people to access healthcare and education and engage in civic life. It’s why our team at Ting is working to build a strong foundation for the internet of the future: one that is more accessible, equitable, and innovative for everyone.
The negative discourse around social media — the rhetoric about all the ways it’s ruining everything and all the reasons we should opt out — implicitly assumes we have a choice. It assumes we have internet access and the devices we need to use it … and that the best choice is to limit our use. It also assumes we have other ways of staying informed (like paying for print newspapers and magazines), learning things (by paying for educational experiences), staying connected with people (by paying for transportation to visit them in person), and staying physically and mentally healthy (like paying for doctors, therapists, and gym memberships).
In The Social Dilemma, a 2020 documentary focusing on negative aspects and impacts of major social media networks, several tech executives with deep experience in those platforms made it clear that they don’t and won’t allow their own children to use them. They, like all parents, have to make whatever decision they think is best for their family, but focusing solely on the negative and lobbying to take the positive power of social media away from other children frustrates me.
It reminds me of the debate regarding the downsides of digital reading (another digital world innovation often maligned by people who have ample access to non-digital alternatives). Only people who can easily access physical books and are used to them being the primary delivery method for “book” content would insist that digital reading isn’t really reading. As world-renowned thought leader on global policy and education Jordan Shapiro says in his book The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World:
Nobody is having that discussion in places with emerging economies … because in these places, where the underprivileged have historically had little or no exposure to books, smartphones are like a godsend. Suddenly, the contents of the world’s biggest and best libraries are available to people who have never had access before. In other words, the debate about digital reading is exclusively a first-world problem.
When technology is perceived as a welcome world-opener, there is far less hand-wringing over its ills. People overly preoccupied with the downsides of social media are likely doing just fine without it. Social media isn’t a positive game-changer for them (it might even be an uncomfortable disruptor), so they don’t thoroughly consider the ways in which it’s a lifeline for others.
Take, for example, oft-discussed fears about teen girls falling prey to ideas and individuals on social media who are dangerous to their mental health and well-being. Some concern may be merited, but severely limiting access because of those fears can detrimentally impact girls’ educational and economic opportunities. According to a 2023 UNICEF report on the gender digital divide, globally, girls and young women have less access to internet, devices, and networks than boys and young men. According to the report, this is at least partially due to harmful gender norms and perceptions that the internet is unsafe for girls but not for boys.
The positives of being online far outweigh the negatives for young women and girls because, as the UNICEF report notes, our world is becoming “increasingly reliant on digital skills to access employment and key services.” It issues “an urgent call for action for equitable digital skills development” saying that for young women and girls to “succeed in an increasingly global, digital and hyperconnected world requires multiple efforts to bridge the gender digital divide.” The report warns that failure to bridge the divide means “risking an ever-deepening state of gender inequality.”
For people who face barriers, limitations, or lack of community in the physical world, social media is a vital tool for surviving … and thriving.
In Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Alissa Quart, author and Executive Director of the non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, documents the difficulties many Americans are facing as well as the lack of an official, structured safety net to support them. She demonstrates how “many are at least partly getting by on what they are able to collect from friends and even near-strangers on the internet.” This reliance on social media connections to survive is part of what Quart calls “the dystopian social safety net” — a mishmash of organizations, programs, and volunteers that “patches over holes in our systems.”
As one example, Quart recounts the experience of James Fauntleroy, a man suffering from end-stage renal disease, who turned to crowd-funding sites to pay his bills. He received emotional, physical, and financial support from people he’d connected with online — especially like-minded Bernie Sanders supporters and enthusiasts he encountered in digital spaces. “They checked in on him online and direct messaged him,” Quart writes.
“A follower on Twitter who was a political fellow traveler doing some Florida tourism picked him up at his apartment and went with him to a Starbucks for two hours, accompanied by his wife. It sometimes felt to him as if the Sanders campaign itself had become part of the dystopian social safety net.”
Digital access was a prerequisite to Fauntleroy finding this support and community. For social media to open the world, provide opportunities for life-affirming connections, and allow people to participate meaningfully in co-creating society, they must first have up-to-speed internet and digital devices.
Which brings me back to my statement that digital access is a human right. I don’t say that lightly. Living in a country where food and shelter aren’t universally accepted as human rights, it may seem ridiculous to assert that digital access should be recognized as one as well, so I did some research to see if my intuitive answer at the keynote presentation had merit beyond my own musings.
I probably should have already known this, but I discovered the UN has called for universal connectivity by 2030 and the United States has allocated $42 billion for universal broadband access by that date.
In “Our Common Agenda,” a report laying out the UN Secretary-General’s vision for the future of global cooperation, digital inclusivity and trusted digital space are included as key components of a “renewed social contract anchored in human rights.” The report also proposes improving global digital cooperation by, among other things, connecting all people to the internet and recognizing digital commons as a global common good.
I’ve long believed that positive and purposeful social media can help us find new ways forward together. It’s exciting to see global organizations, governments, and community-minded companies validating the importance of online interactions by investing in affordable access and exploring ways of ensuring digital spaces function as common goods. I’ll be paying more attention to digital equity in the future.
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Postscript. For a humorous and scary take on what digital inequity might mean for the not-so-distant future, check out Upload, an Amazon Original Series now in its third season, where people who can afford it are uploaded after death and live on in simulated resort (with all sorts of extras available for a price). Those with less money can only access a budget afterlife plan with limited data where they reside in the basement of the resort with no amenities and freeze when they run out of data for the month. Seeing the injustice of this, one of the main characters was working to launch a free version of the uploaded afterlife before his untimely death in a self-driving car accident and subsequent upload.
I find it fascinating this is an Amazon series since it’s set in an unnervingly believable consumer dystopia where conglomerate companies like Oscar-Mayer Intel and Nokia Taco Bell dominate every aspect of life.
For more on the nightmarish (but possible) technology and corporations in the show read this article by Roger Cheng at CNET. And for a deeper dive on the depiction of economic inequality in Upload and the moral and ethical questions it raises, read (or listen to) this article by Christine Persaud at Digital Trends.
MISCELLANEA
I’m usually a pretty fast reader, but I spent nearly six weeks drinking in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organzing without Organizations by Clay Shirky. I’d come across references to this book in many other works on the power of digital connection, and now I know why. It’s chock full of examples and explanations about how the world we live in now is dramatically different from everything we’ve ever known. I’m sure I’ll be referencing the book a lot in the future, but for now, here’s one of my favorite passages:
“For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven’t had all the groups we’ve wanted, we’ve simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation; the difficulties that kept self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing. The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.”
Thanks to website and book designer Berenice Howard-Smith of Hello Lovely I now have a new logo (and will soon have a new website) for my writing/speaking endeavors. I love Berenice’s work!
Digital Kindness and Digital Grace journals are underway! They’re designed as stand alone journals, though they also can be used alongside the books. I’m hoping to release them in time for holiday gift giving and new year intention-setting. Fingers-crossed I’ll be able to accomplish that goal. (My dear friend Jenny suggested this to me while reading Digital Kindness soon after its release. I’m finally getting around to acting on her advice.)