Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide

Technology and Social Inclusion

Technology and Social Inclusion

Rethinking the Digital Divide

Mark Warschauer

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

First MIT Press paperback edition, 2004

© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warschauer, Mark.

  Technology and social inclusion : rethinking the digital divide /

Mark Warschauer.

     p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-262-23224-3 (hc. : alk. paper), 0-262-73173-8 (pb.)

  1. Digital divide. 2. Marginality, Social. I. Title.

HN49.I56 W37   2003

303.48’33—dc21                                                      2002075130

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2

d_r0

For Keiko

Contents

Acknowledgments     ix

Introduction     1

1  Economy, Society, and Technology: Analyzing the Shifting Terrains     11

2  Models of Access: Devices, Conduits, and Literacy     31

3  Physical Resources: Computers and Connectivity     49

4  Digital Resources: Content and Language     81

5  Human Resources: Literacy and Education     109

6  Social Resources: Communities and Institutions     153

7  Conclusion: The Social Embeddedness of Technology     199

Notes     217

References     225

Index     247

Acknowledgments

This book has been nearly ten years in the making, and its completion would not have been possible without the great deal of institutional and personal support I received over those years.

Most of the actual writing took place in 2001, while I worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. The department has been quite generous in allowing me to devote time and resources to this book, and I would especially like to thank the chair of the department, Rudy Torres; the former chair, Louis Mirón; and the former acting chair, Robert Beck, for their full support. Other colleagues in the department have also been extremely helpful, including Hank Becker, Joan Bissell, and Ann De Vaney.

I am also affiliated with the UC Irvine Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO), and my participation in CRITO seminars has been very helpful to the development of my ideas. I would like to thank CRITO and its former acting director, James Danziger, for involving me in the center and its seminars.

During the summer of 2001, I took research trips to China, India, and Brazil. I would like to thank all the individuals who took time to meet with me, and especially to thank the following people who helped with my arrangements and provided invaluable advice and assistance: Dr. Chen Hong of Beijing Capital Normal University in China; Chetan Sharma of Datamation in New Delhi; Naveen Prakash of Gyandoot Samiti in Dhar, India; Senthil Kumaran of M. S. Swaminathan Foundation in Madras, India; Aditya Dev Sood of the Center for Knowledge Societies in Bangalore, India; Vera Mello of the University of São Paulo, Brazil; and Solange Gervai of Yázigi Internexus in São Paulo.

During 2001–2002, I had four grants from the University of California to examine the availability of, access to, and use of information and communication technologies in low-income neighborhood schools. This book has benefited from that research, and I would like to acknowledge the support of UC Nexus, directed by Charles Underwood of the University of California’s President’s Office; the University of California All Campus Consortium on Research on Diversity, directed by Jeannie Oakes and Danny Solorzano; and the University of California, Irvine, Center for Educational Partnerships, directed by Juan Lara. I would also like to acknowledge and thank LeeAnn Stone, Michele Knobel, Melanie Wade, Fang Xu, and Jodie Wales for their collaboration on that research.

In 2001, I also visited several Community Technology Centers in California. Linda Fowells and Richard Chabran of Community Partners provided extremely helpful support and information for this aspect of my research.

From 1998 to 2001, I worked for the America-Mideast Educational and Training Services, Inc. (AMIDEAST) on a project in Egypt called IELP-II, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). My work and research in Egypt was central to many of the ideas expressed in this book, and I would like to thank AMIDEAST, USAID, and IELP-II for the opportunity to carry out that work. I would especially like to thank Doug Duncan of AMIDEAST Washington, Jennifer Notkin of USAID Egypt, and Randa Effat of IELP-II. Ghada Refaat and Ayman Zohry of IELP-II assisted me in carrying out a research study of online language use in Egypt, and Russanne Hozayin of IELP-II also was generous with her information and assistance. I would also like to thank a number of other Egyptian and American colleagues in Egypt who collaborated with me and otherwise provided information and support, including Richard Boyum of the U.S. Embassy; Inas Barsoum of Ain Shams University; Kamal Fouly of Minia University; Maha El Said and Mounira Soliman of Cairo University; and Paul Stevens, Gini Stevens, and Kate Coffield of the American University in Cairo.

From 1994 to 1998, I taught and conducted research at the University of Hawai’i for the Department of Second Language Studies, the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC), and the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature. Again, much of that research has influenced, and found its way into, this book, and I would like to thank Roderick Jacobs, dean of the College; Richard Schmidt, director of the NFLRC; and Gabrielle Kasper, Graham Crookes, and Kathryn Davis of the Department of Second Language Studies for their support. Lois Yamauchi of the University of Hawai’i Educational Psychology Department and Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto also provided valuable support for my research in Hawai’i. I received a great deal of assistance from colleagues in the Hawaiian educational community for my research, especially from Keola Donaghy of Hale Kuamo’o at the University of Hawai’i, Hilo, and Makalapua Ka’awa of the University of Hawai’i, Manoa.

A number of colleagues provided assistance, support, and ideas by coauthoring pieces that formed the basis of this book, critiquing this or related manuscripts, or otherwise sharing ideas. Rick Kern, Hank Becker, Phil Agre, Dafney Dabach, Eszter Hargittai, Fang Xu, and Martha Forero offered extremely helpful comments on the manuscript. Their contribution has been enormous, and I cannot thank them enough. I would also like to recognize and thank Dorothy Chun of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Mike Cole, Olga Vasquez, Bud Mehan, and Leigh Starr of the University of California, San Diego; Irene Thompson and Pam DaGrossa of Language Learning and Technology journal; Peiya Gu of Suzhou University in China; and Heidi Helfand of Expert City for their collaboration and support in a variety of projects and discussions that helped give intellectual birth to this book. And I am indebted to Cathy Appel for her invaluable assistance with the manuscript preparation.

The editors and reviewers at MIT Press have been extremely helpful, and I would especially like to thank acquisition editor Katherine Innis. MIT Press has shown great leadership in areas related to the social, economic, political, and cultural ramifications of new technology use, and the editors and associates at the Press have been remarkably helpful in ushering this book from original proposal to publication.

My deepest thanks are to my wife, Keiko Hirata. Keiko has read and provided extremely helpful comments on almost everything I have written, and her own research on civil society in East Asia and the Middle East has played a formative role in my work. I could not have written this book without her, nor would such an endeavor have been worthwhile without her love and support.

Technology and Social Inclusion

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to examine the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and social inclusion. A starting point for my research has been the concept of a digital divide, used by the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration under the Clinton administration to refer to the gap between those who do and do not have access to computers and the Internet. However, during the process of my research, the notion of a digital divide and its logical implication—that social problems can be addressed through providing computers and Internet accounts—have seemed increasingly problematic. Three vignettes will help illustrate this point.

A Slum Hole-in-the-Wall

In 2000 the government of New Delhi, in collaboration with an information technology corporation, established a project, known as the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment, to provide computer access to the city’s street children.¹ An outdoor five-station computer kiosk was set up in one of the poorest slums of New Delhi. Though the computers themselves were inside a booth, the monitors protruded through holes in the walls, as did specially designed joysticks and buttons that substituted for the computer mouse. Keyboards were not provided. The computers were connected to the Internet through dial-up access. A volunteer inside the booth helped keep the computers and Internet connections running.

No teachers or instructors were provided, in line with a concept called minimally invasive education. The idea was to allow the children unfettered 24-hour access to learn at their own pace and speed rather than tie them to the directives of adult organizers or instructors.

According to reports, children who flocked to the site taught themselves basic computer operations. They worked out how to click and drag objects; select different menus; cut, copy, and paste; launch and use programs such as Microsoft Word and Paint; get on the Internet; and change the background wallpaper. The program was hailed by researchers (e.g., Mitra 1999) and government officials² as a ground-breaking project that offered a model for how to bring India’s and the world’s urban poor into the computer age.

However, visits to the computer kiosk indicated a somewhat different reality. The Internet access was of little use because it seldom functioned. No special educational programs had been made available, and no special content was provided in Hindi, the only language the children knew. Children did learn to manipulate the joysticks and buttons, but almost all their time was spent drawing with paint programs or playing computer games.

There was no organized involvement of any community organization in helping to run the kiosk because such involvement was neither solicited nor welcomed (see chapter 6). Indeed, the very architecture of the kiosk—based on a wall rather than in a room—made supervision, instruction, and collaboration difficult.

Parents in the neighborhood had ambivalent feelings about the kiosk. Some saw it as a welcome initiative, but most expressed concern that the lack of organized instruction took away from its value. Some parents even complained that the kiosk was harmful to their children. As one parent stated, My son used to be doing very well in school, he used to concentrate on his homework, but now he spends all his free time playing computer games at the kiosk and his schoolwork is suffering. In short, parents and the community came to realize that minimally invasive education was, in practice, minimally effective education.

An Information Age Town

In 1997, Ireland’s national telecommunications company held a national competition to select and fund an Information Age Town.³ A major rationale behind the effort was to help overcome the gap between Ireland’s emerging status as a multinational business center of ICT production and the rather limited use of ICT among Ireland’s own people and indigenous small businesses.

Towns of 5,000 people and more across Ireland were invited to compete by submitting proposals detailing their vision of what an Information Age Town should be and how they could become one. The winning town was to receive 15 million Irish pounds (at that time roughly $22 million U.S. dollars—USD) to implement its vision.

The sponsor of the competition, Telecom Eirann (later renamed Eircom), was getting ready to be privatized. The company naturally had an interest in selecting the boldest, most ambitious proposal so as to showcase the winning town as an innovative example of what advanced telecommunications could accomplish for the country under the company’s leadership. Four towns were chosen as finalists, and then Ennis, a small, remote town of 15,000 people in western Ireland, was selected among them as the winner. The prize money that Ennis received represented over $1,200 USD per resident, a huge sum for a struggling Irish town.

At the heart of Ennis’s winning proposal was a plan to give an Internet-ready personal computer to every family in the town. Other initiatives included an ISDN line to every business, a Web site for every business that wanted one, smart-card readers for every business (for a cashless society), and smart cards for every family. Ennis was strongly encouraged by Telecom Eivann to implement these plans as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, the three runners-up—the towns of Castlebar, Kilkenny, and Killarney—each received consolation prizes of 1 million Irish pounds (about $1.5 million USD). These towns were given as much time as they needed to make use of the money.

How did the project turn out? A visit to Ennis three years later by a university researcher indicated that the town had little to show for its money. Advanced technology had been thrust into people’s hands with little preparation. Training programs had been run, but they were not sufficiently accompanied by awareness programs as to why people should use the new technology in the first place. And, in some instances, well-functioning social systems were disrupted in order to make way for the showcase technology.

For example, as is the case in the rest of Ireland, the unemployed of Ennis had been reporting to the social welfare office three times a week to sign in and receive payments. Following their visits, the people usually stayed around the office to chat with other unemployed workers. The sign-in system thus facilitated an important social function to overcome the isolation of the unemployed.

As part of the Information Age Town plan, though, the unemployed received computers and Internet connections at home. They were instructed to sign in and receive electronic payments via the Internet rather than come to the office to sign in. But many of the unemployed couldn’t figure out how to operate the equipment, and most others saw no reason to do so when it deprived them of an important opportunity for socializing. A good number of those computers were reportedly sold on the black market, and the unemployed simply returned of their own accord to coming to the social welfare office to sign in.

Meanwhile, what happened in the other three towns? With far fewer resources, they were forced to carefully plan how to make use of their funds rather than splurging for massive amounts of equipment. Community groups, small businesses, and labor unions were involved in the planning process. Much greater effort and money were spent on developing awareness, planning and implementing effective training, and setting up processes for sustainable change rather than merely on purchase of equipment. The towns built on already existing networks among workers, educators, and businesspeople to support grassroots uses of technology for social and economic development. Information about social services and job opportunities was put online. Small businesses and craft workers learned how to pool their resources to promote their products through e-commerce. Technology coordinators were appointed at schools and worked with other teachers to develop plans for better integration of ICT in classrooms. In the end, according to a researcher from University College Dublin,⁴ the three runners-up, which each received only one-fifteenth of the money that Ennis received, actually had more to show for their efforts to promote social inclusion through technology than did the winner.

A Model Computer Lab

An international donor project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) decided to donate a computer laboratory to the college of education at a major Egyptian university. The purpose of the donation was to establish a model teacher training program in computer-assisted learning in one of the departments of the college. State-of-the-art equipment was selected, including more than forty Pentium III computers, an expensive video projection system, several printers and scanners, and tens of thousands of U.S. dollars worth of educational software. This was to be a model project that both the U.S. and Egyptian governments would view with pride. To guarantee that the project would be sustainable, the Egyptian university would be required to manage all the ongoing expenses and operations, including paying for Internet access, maintaining the local area network (LAN), and operating the computer laboratory.

Under a paid contract from USAID, a committee from the college of education put together a detailed proposal on how the laboratory would be used, run, and maintained. Based on this proposal, USAID purchased all the hardware and software. However, well before the equipment was installed, it became clear that the college would have difficulty absorbing such a huge and expensive donation. Other departments within the college, which together had access to only a handful of computers, became envious that a single department would have such modern and expensive equipment, and they attempted to block the university’s support for the lab. The college of education and the university could not easily justify spending the money to house and maintain such an expensive laboratory for a single program when other programs were poorly funded. No money was available to hire an outside LAN manager or provide Internet access at the level agreed upon in the proposal. Faculty relations problems also arose, as a key department chair resented the involvement and initiative of less senior faculty members who were taking computer training and working together to plan new curricula. Because of all these difficulties, the expensive state-of-the-art computers sat in boxes in a locked room for more than a year before they were even installed, thus losing about one-third of their economic value.

Rethinking the Digital Divide

Each of the programs described in the preceding vignettes was motivated by a sincere attempt to improve people’s lives through ICT. But each program ran into unexpected difficulties that hindered the results. Of course, any ICT project is complicated, and none can be expected to run smoothly. But the problems with these projects were neither isolated nor random. Rather, these same types of problems occur again and again in technology projects around the world, which too often focus on providing hardware and software and pay insufficient attention to the human and social systems that must also change for technology to make a difference. As seen in these three vignettes, meaningful access to ICT comprises far more than merely providing computers and Internet connections. Rather, access to ICT is embedded in a complex array of factors encompassing physical, digital, human, and social resources and relationships. Content and language, literacy and education, and community and institutional structures must all be taken into account if meaningful access to new technologies is to be provided.

Some would try, as I have tried in the past, to stretch the notion of a digital divide to encompass this broad array of factors and resources. In this sense, a digital divide is marked not only by physical access to computers and connectivity but also by access to the additional resources that allow people to use technology well. However, the original sense of digital divide, which attached overriding importance to the physical availability of computers and connectivity rather than to issues of content, language, education, literacy, or community and social resources, is difficult to overcome in people’s minds.

A second problem with the digital divide concept is its implication of a bipolar societal split. As Cisler (2000) argues, there is not a binary division between information haves and have-nots, but rather a gradation based on different degrees of access to information technology. Compare, for example, a professor at UCLA with a high-speed connection in her office, a student in Seoul who occasionally uses a cyber café, and a rural activist in Indonesia who has no computer or phone line but whose colleagues in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) with whom she is working download and print out information for her. This example illustrates just three degrees of possible access a person can have to online material.

The notion of a binary divide between haves and have-nots is thus inaccurate and can even be patronizing because it fails to value the social resources that diverse groups bring to the table. For example, in the United States, African Americans are often portrayed as being on the wrong side of a digital divide (e.g., Walton 1999) when in fact Internet access among blacks and other minorities varies tremendously by income group—with divisions between blacks and whites decreasing as income increases (NTIA 2000). Some argue that the stereotype of disconnected minority groups could even serve to further social stratification by discouraging employers or content providers from reaching out to those groups. As Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues, The rhetoric of the digital divide holds open this division between civilized tool-users and uncivilized nonusers. As well meaning as it is as a policy initiative, it can be marginalizing and patronizing in its own terms (quoted in Young 2001, A51).

In addition, the notion of a digital divide—even in its broadest sense— implies a chain of causality: that lack of access (however defined) to computers and the Internet harms life chances. While this point is undoubtedly true, the reverse is equally true; those who are already marginalized will have fewer opportunities to access and use computers and the Internet. In fact, technology and society are intertwined and co-constitutive, and this complex interrelationship makes any assumption of causality problematic.

Finally, the digital divide framework provides a poor road map for using technology to promote social development because it overemphasizes the importance of the physical presence of computers and connectivity to the exclusion of other factors that allow people to use ICT for meaningful ends. Rob Kling, director of the Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University, explains this shortcoming well:⁵

[The] big problem with the digital divide framing is that it tends to connote digital solutions, i.e., computers and telecommunications, without engaging the important set of complementary resources and complex interventions to support social inclusion, of which informational technology applications may be enabling elements, but are certainly insufficient when simply added to the status quo mix of resources and relationships.

The bottom line is that there is no binary divide and no single overriding factor for determining such a divide. ICT does not exist as an external variable to be injected from the outside to bring about certain results. Rather, it is woven in a complex manner into social systems and processes. And, from a policy standpoint, the goal of using ICT with marginalized groups is not to overcome a digital divide but rather to further a process of social inclusion. To accomplish this, it is necessary to focus on the transformation, not the technology (Jarboe 2001, 31). For all these reasons, I join with others (e.g., DiMaggio and Hargittai 2001; Jarboe 2001) in recognizing the historical value of the digital divide concept (it helped focus attention on an important social issue) while preferring to embrace alternative concepts and terminology that more accurately portray the issues at stake and the social challenges ahead.

Social Inclusion

The alternative framework that I suggest in this book is the intersection of ICT and social inclusion. Social inclusion and exclusion are prominent concepts in European discourse.⁶ They refer to the extent that individuals, families, and communities are able to fully participate in society and control their own destinies, taking into account a variety of factors related to economic resources, employment, health, education, housing, recreation, culture, and civic engagement.

Social inclusion is a matter not only of an adequate share of resources but also of participation in the determination of both individual and collective life chances (Stewart 2000). It overlaps with the concept of socioeconomic equality but is not equivalent to it. There are many ways that the poor can have fuller participation and inclusion even if they lack an equal share of resources. At the same time, even the well-to-do may face problems of social exclusion because of political persecution or discrimination based on age, gender, sexual preference, or disability. The concept of social inclusion does not ignore the role of class but recognizes that a broad array of other variables help shape how class forces interact. Though a historical treatment of the term is beyond the scope of this book, one could argue that the concept of social inclusion reflects particularly well the imperatives of the current information era, in which issues of identity, language, social participation, community, and civil society have come to the fore (Castells 1997).

This book takes as a central premise that the ability to access, adapt, and create new knowledge using new information and communication technology is critical to social inclusion in today’s era (see chapter 1). I thus examine several questions related to this premise: How and why is access to ICT important for social inclusion? What does it mean to have access to ICT? How can access for social inclusion best be promoted in diverse circumstances? By focusing on technology for social inclusion, I thus hope to help reorient discussion of the digital divide from one that focuses on gaps to be overcome by provision of equipment to one that focuses on social development issues to be addressed through the effective integration of ICT into communities, institutions, and societies.

Sources of Data

This book draws largely on my own empirical research in a number of countries throughout the world. I have focused most of my research on countries such as India, Brazil, Egypt, China, and the United States that