PassW0rd – 12 May 2021 (Digital Divide)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you hear, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.

Speaker B: Hello, I’m Peter Warren and this is Password on Resonance FM. Perhaps you’re listening to this in a car, the digital radio in the kitchen, or using the radio player app on your smartphone or tablet. Perhaps you’re on your way to an important meeting in your private jet. If you’re in any one of these situations, it’s safe to say you’re on the right side of the digital divide. You’re with the haves. The have-nots live in places without adequate broadband, or they don’t have enough money to afford even a basic tech device. In the COVID-19 pandemic, their children struggled to keep up with homeschooling. It’s a picture that many of those who live in inner cities can relate to. Here are some talking a month ago about trying to live in the internet age without technology in a YouTube clip made for the Excel Project, which aims to empower young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to complete their education.

Speaker C: Growing up, we did have technology, but not enough. And on top of that, it was shared between siblings, and the parents rule over everything. So it was always hard being the last one getting my hands on anything. The access was still very limited. And it stunts your creativity, it stunts how you feel and how you move, simply because the things that you see available for other people aren’t quite available for you.

Speaker B: It’s hard for them to fill in online forms, to apply for jobs or benefits, to challenge decisions made by algorithms. Their access to music, films, and all forms of entertainment is limited. Only a few homeless people, for example, can accept donations by credit cards. Most can only beg or busk for small change. But Tap London has created a series of wall panels, each with a card reader embedded in it, so generous passers-by can give money to help young homeless people by just tapping their card on the contactless reader. More than £500,000 has already been raised in this way. That’ll do nicely, as they used to say on the American Express adverts. Yet of course it’s not as simple as that. There are many thousands of other homeless people who just hope you’ll toss a few coins into their hat. And there are other highly educated people who are quite well off who are still Somehow locked out of our online world.

Speaker D: The wife would work away, learn to use a laptop, and motivation was to communicate with family via Skype or whatever. Husband just kind of sat there having a cup of tea. And a couple of times I kept saying to him, “Well, do you not want to go?” And he said, “No, there’s no point, nothing.” And I finally said, “Well, why don’t you want to go? What are you interested in?” He said, “Well, I do fishing. I don’t need a computer for fishing.” So then we put him on a fishing website. And then the next week he was beating everybody away from the laptops, I joke, to get them there. And, you know, that is the point, isn’t it? It’s not filling in your Universal Credit form, it’s not all those practical things that will engage people enough to put the effort in to learn. It has to be those personal things or the community things.

Speaker E: If you don’t have connection, if you aren’t able to participate, you lose out on so many opportunities, so much broader knowledge, and so much skills development. We absolutely assume that it’s a given these days, and yet for young people on low incomes, it’s really not a guarantee.

Speaker F: What happens to an old person when he or she is alone with a computer? He’s lost, he doesn’t know what to do, he wishes he had some help, he loses confidence in himself, his hands start shaking, etc. What happens to a child left alone with a computer. The internet does terrible things to him. He doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know where to go. He doesn’t know what’s true, what’s false. We end up blaming the computers and the internet. We don’t blame ourselves for leaving them alone. That’s the crime.

Speaker B: Take my mother, for instance. She’s a highly qualified mathematician with 3 university degrees, but she still struggles to communicate via email or Skype.

Speaker G: Yes, but that’s entirely my own fault.

Speaker H: Why?

Speaker G: Because I tended to ignore it to begin with when I should have got— and now the, um, The attitude of the companies is that, is to describe things in terms which I don’t understand, but which they assume and which I’m sure youngsters do understand.

Speaker H: So what does that mean to you? In practical terms, what does it mean that you’re digitally excluded?

Speaker G: Well, they— the tendency is to draw back from it because they don’t give enough explanation, because they assume that I already know it.

Speaker H: Yeah, but does it mean that you can’t use Skype? Does it mean that you lose applications? What does it mean?

Speaker G: I can use Skype, but it’s, um, for instance, Auntie Pat could use Skype, I think, quite easily because I just don’t apply it. I don’t apply it often enough.

Speaker H: Oh, what? So what you’re saying is that if you used it more, you’d have more experience, you’d know what you were doing?

Speaker G: Yes.

Speaker H: Okay, because I mean, during the pandemic, has that been a— had a real impact on you then? I mean, presumably if you’d have been using something like Skype, you’d have been able to do Skype calls to people.

Speaker G: It hasn’t had any, uh, restriction on me simply because I’ve got plenty of other things that I can do.

Speaker H: Yeah. I’m not talking about technology, you, um, reading books and things like that. What I’m talking about is that because you don’t know how to use particular technologies, that it’s restrained you from being able to communicate with people, because obviously people haven’t been able to come and see you.

Speaker G: True. On the other hand, I’m not necessarily a communicative person.

Speaker H: Right. What do you think that technology means for old people? Do you think that they’re not really bothered with it? Do you think that they would— do they sit there and think, well, why do you need all of these things? What was wrong with life before?

Speaker G: Yeah, I’m sure they do. And I’m sure there’s people who understand it less than I do.

Speaker H: And that theoretically means then that, you know, if you’re not messaging, if you’re not text messaging, if you’re not using email, etc., etc., that you must feel quite lonely.

Speaker G: No, I don’t think so, because I’m not necessarily an outgoing sort of person. The, uh, it depends on your own inner resources, right?

Speaker H: But you’re— I mean, you know, you’re not— I suppose it could be said that you’re highly literate, you’re highly numerate, and you’ve always occupied yourself. So somebody who perhaps is much more dependent on communication than you would probably have issues.

Speaker G: Yes, definitely. It depends on, it depends on the person.

Speaker B: My mum’s not alone in this. She lives with my father, a scientist and inventor, and with help from our family, she can manage to stay in touch. But being alone has been identified as a strong factor in what politicians call digital exclusion. I’ve been talking to Professor Sugata Mitra of Newcastle University on a Skype call from India, where he’s been stuck since the lockdowns began. His research started over two decades ago with an innovative experiment.

Speaker F: It’s famous, but it’s also very old. It happened at now I guess about 20-something years ago, almost 22 years ago. So those were the days when digital exclusion had a very special meaning that, you know, particularly for children, that there was a generation growing up who did not have access to computers, and that therefore as they grew up, a divide will appear in society. And my experiment was simply to see, you know, what happens if that generation were to be confronted with a computer and not a teacher. The assumption in those days was that this digital divide or digital exclusion was happening because there was nobody to teach them things, whereas I was able to show that actually the problem was that they didn’t have access to the technology, and if you were to give them access, which I did by simply, you know, burying a computer into a wall, and was able to show that groups of children unsupervised can learn to use the internet even in languages that they barely understand.

Speaker J: Well, that’s an interesting point though, isn’t it? Because a lot of research has been going on at the moment here in the UK into old people. And whereas your experiment proved that young people were very capable of teaching themselves to use technology, one of the issues with old people seems to be that they don’t know how to use it and they don’t seem to be able to learn how to use it.

Speaker F: Well, you know, I, I’m not very sure of both the issues that you raise, that they don’t know how to use it and they’re not sure if they can learn. Let me, let me try to illustrate what I mean. Firstly, I, a few years ago, I did a, actually, a set of little experiments in Manchester in a care home. And, and I observed once again, almost like déjà vu, that groups of people can actually do things that individuals cannot. So you might find a lady in a care home who says, I simply don’t know how to look up email. And then you put about 3 or 4 of them together and say, well, can you, you know, kind of look up the email? And then they invariably can, obviously. And then at the end of it all, the same lady then says, well, it wasn’t all that difficult. She still doesn’t want to try it on her own. Okay, because of lack of confidence or whatever it is, but she doesn’t think it was as difficult as, as she had started out with. That’s one example. The other, the most stark example, is of what happened when the COVID pandemic struck last year and it closed all the schools down. So when all the schools closed down, then all the school principals said to the teachers, Now you’re at home, the children are at home, you’ve got to teach over the internet. And the teachers realized that they really don’t have a choice because, you know, they couldn’t say that, sorry, I’m not going to be able to teach on the internet, so I’m going to sit at home and you are going to pay my salary. I mean, that was obviously not possible. So they had to make you know, make an effort. What happened was, as all of us have seen, very rapidly all around the world— I’m not talking only of the UK— all around the world, teachers who had earlier said we are not tech savvy were suddenly setting up Zoom calls. Okay, so what happened? Once again, I was reminded of the hole in the wall. If you really want to figure it out, you do. It doesn’t really matter who you are or where you are or whatever. So, so coming back to this idea of will old people get left behind, my answer is no, they won’t, if there is a sufficient reason for them not to get left behind.

Speaker J: What you’re suggesting then is that there is the need for some sort of supporting infrastructure among the old people, and that if you are isolated, if you’re alone, then you will probably be digitally excluded if you are old because you won’t be able to be in that cooperative structure.

Speaker F: Well, you know, Peter, what I’m going to say is probably may not sound very nice, but may I say the problem is not with people or their ages or with technology. The problem is of being alone. That is a relatively new human problem. If you look at human history, this whole idea of being alone It still doesn’t exist in very large parts of the world. It’s almost impossible to be alone in certain places. All my work shows, as I say repeatedly, groups can do things that single individuals cannot. Groups can repair themselves. Groups can look through falsehood and find what is true. Groups could do all of those. But we are now confronted with this problem: what happens when they are alone? Well, what happens to an old person when he or she is alone with a computer? He’s lost, doesn’t know what to do, he wishes he had some help, he loses confidence in himself, his hands start shaking, etc. What happens to a child left alone with a computer? The internet does terrible things to him. He doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know where to go. He doesn’t know what’s true, what’s false. We end up blaming the computers and the internet. We don’t blame ourselves for leaving them alone. That’s the crime.

Speaker B: What Professor Maitre says about the ladies in the care home is heartening, and there’s no shortage of initiatives aiming to improve computer skills amongst older people. Abigail Woods is a chief executive of the charity Age UK.

Speaker A: We’ve got a whole range of really different situations and people in having different experiences. I think there’s the full range from people for whom the pandemic’s been an incredibly difficult time. They have no digital access at all, and it could be that they have none at all and they don’t want it. They just want the world— and I think this is a completely reasonable position— they want to be able to do their banking in person, they want to be able to, you know, do their shopping in person, all of those things like that. Then there are also people who don’t have any access at all and perhaps would like it, maybe. And then you’ve got— you run the full scale through all of that to those who do have a lot more access, and some of those I think are people who have gained those sort of skills over the past year, and some were doing it quite competently beforehand anyway. So I think that the biggest message I want to get across is the real variety of different situations and how it’s quite difficult to generalise in this area.

Speaker J: I mean, it’s interesting you saying that, isn’t it? I used to have a next-door neighbour living on a farm. She used to say, “Why can’t I pay my electricity bill in the shop like I used to? Why do I have to have this internet?” I don’t want it. Why does the world have to change? I mean, there are some people who are saying that in a way they’re rejecting technology.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there are some people who are saying that, and I think that’s a point that has some validity. I think you should not necessarily be forced into using the internet in order to have the same experience as an active citizen as someone who doesn’t. On the other hand, I think there are some people who perhaps might want to use it a little bit, or I think quite often this situation of not knowing how, not knowing what’s available, not feeling very comfortable perhaps trying out something new. There’s lots of shades of grey here in terms of people’s positions, their kind of propensity to look at doing things more online. Certainly, I imagine there’s a great deal of nervousness, and I think we’ve all seen— I think anyone who has a mobile phone has probably had one of those text messages over the last couple of months where where they say it’s a parcel that’s being delivered or this is an emergency message, and they’re scams. So at a time when lots of services and lots of ways in which you can interact with the world rely on going online, there’s also a lot more scams and a lot more risk floating around, therefore an awful lot more nervousness of this. Is this something that necessarily people want to do? So it’s a difficult situation.

Speaker J: Is another issue that they don’t know how to use the technology, that they feel very, very unconfident about using the technology. I mean, my mother, for example, she certainly will ring me up and say, emails have gone missing, I don’t know where they are, they’ve just gone missing.

Speaker A: I think absolutely there is quite a strong desire for training in digital skills, and it’s something that a lot of the local age UKs across London run really good services, running courses, offering information, perhaps offering sort of befrienders who also can help with use of technology, and those can be really, really effective, especially in terms of services that work out exactly what people want and exactly what their needs are, rather than, “Oh my goodness, how do you use a laptop in its entirety?” It’s, “Well, what things would make your life easier?” And then they’re able to identify that perhaps someone just would like to know how to use Zoom to perhaps join a group that is now operating online rather than in person, that that will make a difference to their quality of life. Or they’d just like to know how to do their shopping online. It was interesting, I was told by the Chief Executive of one of the Age UKs in South London, she told me over the summer when things have relaxed a little bit but we were all expecting that potentially there might be another lockdown, she told me that she’d received really a great number of phone calls from older people saying, “It looks like there might be another lockdown. I’m trying to get myself into the best position I possibly can.” ‘I can use the computer a little bit, I can use email a little bit, but I’d like to know how to do my shopping online,’ because that was the big, the big distinction. People getting in touch saying, ‘Please, can you help me to learn these skills now, and then if I can do that, then I can sort myself out.’ And I think that kind of demand, and then local services being able to meet that need, really, really helped. And then those people were able to be much more self-sufficient, which is much nicer for them and much better all round, really. I think that social isolation is a massive fact here, both in terms of learning new skills like that. It’s very hard to learn skills remotely. I think it’s particularly hard if you’re not comfortable using things like Zoom where you can see someone’s face, you can see them pointing at what— where you click or what you do with a particular device. Doing that remotely is incredibly difficult. I think over the past year there’s also been the added strain of it has simply been a difficult, pressured time with people feeling that so suddenly their lives have changed a lot. Perhaps they need to change on top of that. It’s a huge amount of pressure, and not being able to have that sort of face-to-face support— again, lots of the local age UKs have been doing really, really good socially distanced IT training, working out that actually if both people are holding a laptop or holding a device, then someone can demonstrate on theirs and you can follow along on yours. It doesn’t involve touching the same thing, and there’s some quite clever techniques around that that that we know have been used. But absolutely, isolation is a huge— I mean, that’s a whole separate topic that I think we could talk about a huge amount anyway, that the increase in isolation for a lot of people, and equally quite heartbreaking for the fact that it has highlighted that for some old people living in London, the pandemic did not increase their loneliness, because what is lockdown and new and unusually difficult for so many people in the population was what their life was like already anyway. I think that’s really brought home for a lot of people the scale that there was an enormous problem in this city with, with social isolation and with loneliness even before the pandemic hit.

Speaker B: So what’s stopping the older generation and the younger generations who are not online? Simeon Yates, Professor of Digital Culture at Liverpool University, is one of the UK’s leading experts on digital exclusion.

Speaker D: Of course, the issue with digital exclusion is that most people think of it as just not having access to the internet or not having a laptop, you know, and obviously if you don’t have the internet, you don’t have a laptop, you’re digitally excluded. And that now is somewhere between 11% and 6% of the population, you know, but going into the lockdown for COVID, it was about 11% of the population according to Ofcom. Their most recent survey, it’s 6%, so maybe there’s been a drive online, but they’ve had to change the methodology for their research because of COVID so the numbers are quite exactly the same, but somewhere in that region, British people simply have no access. But there’s a whole range of other issues after that, so even if you’ve got access, you know, under COVID we’ve seen families with kids where there’s one laptop at home, and they’ve got a mobile internet access via a dongle type thing or so on, and you’ve got 2 parents and 2 kids trying to share 1 or 2 devices over limited broadband to do work and education. By all the government statistics, they’re online, but we know that they’re very, very, very difficult circumstances to undertake both work and education. In our research, we kind of found this kind of 7 classes of people. At one end, there are two kinds of very extensive users who do everything online and often have families or households with multiple devices. And the thing that differentiates them is some of them do community political action online. They’ll sign a petition, they’ll write to their MPs. The others less so. And then right at the other end, we’ve got what are really, really limited users. So they’re online, they’ve got some access, but they do very, very little. And again, there’s a bit of difference between couple of those groups because some do social media and some don’t, and the social media seems to be related to being, say, rural and needing communications. So they’re really functionally digitally excluded. They do very little. They don’t get the benefits of being online. They don’t get the cheaper shopping or the other types of benefits of being online. And then in the middle, there are some sort of just general users who tend to be older, but, you know, they use most things but not a great deal, but enough to get by. They’re online. Unfortunately, there’s also a group of young people who basically only do social media and Netflix, and they tend to be the younger people who’ve not gone further on in education. And that’s quite a big chunk of younger people now. A large proportion of young people who don’t go into education essentially rely on a smartphone as their access to the internet, which, you know, if you’re trying to fill in a form for a job it’s not as doable on a smartphone as it is on a tablet or a laptop. So it’s not one thing, and I mean, we’ve just been talking today to lots of the regional authorities like Greater Manchester and London regional authorities, and they’re all very clear that the wires in the ground bit is just one problem, and it’s a very different kind of problem to the others, which are social and to do with social exclusion, social housing circumstances, whole range of other issues. So it’s not one thing, and it’s the same globally. You look in different countries, they have the same issue. So for me, it’s about can you operate as an engaged citizen in a contemporary digital society? And if essentially the answer to that is no or not properly, you’re suffering some form of digital exclusion.

Speaker J: So is this discrimination? I mean, it sounds very much like discrimination to me. And are particular groups affected?

Speaker G: Affected by it?

Speaker D: Well, poor people are most affected by it, you know, so if you use these kind of definitions, people in social grades D and E are much more likely to be digitally excluded. Certain communities, especially more recent migrants and so on, tend to be, because also they’re operating in the same kind of lack of resources, digitally excluded. Older people, and people tend to think that’s to do with the fact that there was a group of older people who didn’t do tech and therefore, you know, at some point they will be gone because all older people have done tech. But we’ve got lots of evidence of people who were doing quite technical jobs in the ’80s or the ’90s or even the early 2000s, office work and so on with computers. Then they retire, they have a bit of a break away from all of that, and then when they come back, suddenly it’s Windows 10 now. That doesn’t look like you know, Windows 95. Tablets are a completely different concept. Where am I storing my files? You know, and they get quite stressed and put off. And so that constant learning curve we have of constantly being online or constantly using technology gets broken, and then people find it hard to reconnect. So there’s lots of different groups that are kind of affected by, you’d call it, a kind of digital discrimination. If you want. But yes, and one of the big factors I’m finding in the research we do at the moment is education. That whichever group you look at, those who were fortunate enough to go to university or to get kind of post-school qualifications or professional experience are much more likely to be engaged online than those who did not, and for a whole variety of reasons. So yes, there’s lots of these different cuts, and of course, you know, to use our technical term, it’s intersectional. If you’re older with a healthcare issue living in social housing, did not, you know, go to university in terms of your education, you are far more likely to be offline than somebody who’s the same age but in their own home, who went to university, had a professional career. There is those kind of intersecting cuts across everything.

Speaker B: You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, attempting to straddle the digital divide. After this, do keep listening to Resonance as DJ Ritu brings you A World in London. The world outside London is very different, especially when it comes to the availability of technological devices. Adam Lang from NESTA, the innovation foundation, works with communities across the UK and recently carried out some research into the issue in Scotland. England and Wales. For many people there, a smartphone or laptop is not a magical wardrobe door into a wonderful world of online possibilities. It’s just another expensive bit of kit that can be turned into cash for everyday living expenses, sold or pawned for far less than it’s really worth because needs must. Adam Lang says the reasons for this are complicated.

Speaker C: It’s not just about can you access social media or whatever. This is particularly in the context of the pandemic. This is about can you access your local communities online? Can you access essential services? Can you stay connected to your friends and family? Can you do homeschooling online for your children during the lockdown periods in the pandemic? Can you do digital or video conversations with your GP or your, your whatever it might be, local representatives in your democracy. So we live in an ever increasingly digital and online world. That’s where our services, that’s where our connections are. So we felt it was really important to better understand the nature of this concept of data poverty in Scotland, Wales, and indeed across the UK.

Speaker J: All right, so One in seven adults are suffering from data poverty. That must have a knock-on effect because presumably those one in seven adults, a lot of them will have children.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And truthfully, we’ve— in this, in this bit of work, we found it difficult to quantify the number of children, but absolutely, this is a tip of the iceberg situation. You know, we know from a whole range of wider work and research in recent months and years that there is growing concern about the impact of lockdowns, but also more widely than that, beyond just the pandemic, the growing digital divide between the haves and the have-nots in terms of those early years in a person’s life and making sure they feel connected, included, and can access the same opportunities as their peers. So from this particular bit of work, it was obviously difficult to quantify the exact number of children, but there is absolutely a recognition that 1 in 7 is the tip of the iceberg because it does just relate to the adult population that we were able to survey. And I think it’s important to just one thing to stress in that is that this concept of data poverty is not actually solely about connection. Connection is part of it in terms of do you have a device, do you have access to either a data package on your phone or your broadband at home, but it’s more multifaceted than that. It’s issues around can you access services online securely, Are they affordable? And do you have the digital and data literacy and knowledge to engage with those services online? So actually, one of the most interesting findings of this work is that this concept of either data poverty or digital connection is multifaceted, and there isn’t a single silver bullet as a result. It’s going to take a lot of sustained engagement on a number of fronts to make sure that we bring everyone up to an engaged and sort of common level of ability and access online.

Speaker J: What does data poverty look like? Give me a snapshot.

Speaker C: So I think it can look like different things for sure because it is multifaceted, but it essentially boils down to, do you— can you afford to access the data you need to thrive online? And by that we mean, you know, getting access to those essential services, staying connected, doing the things you choose and want to do online. Do you have a safe, secure, and affordable access to the online world via data to do that, to enable you to do that? And what we found is that for far too high a number of people in Scotland and Wales, that, that’s not the case. They don’t have that access. And it’s a complicated issue because it has real-world impacts. I think sometimes the discussions around digital can feel like they don’t have a real-world bearing sometimes, and that is not the case. I mean, we heard of people having to make hard household choices about choosing to stay connected because it’s so critical, it’s so important to working remotely, to learning, to accessing services, or staying connected to your friends and family. They were choosing to do that and juggling that with things like keeping the heating on or paying for food bills, and it’s a real struggle for people to manage those costs because of because of how complex it is to stay connected.

Speaker J: Right. So, and when you say no access to services, no access, you know, you can’t do things like shopping online, you can’t get discounts, all of those things. You’re actually— life is becoming more expensive for you because you’re not online. You can’t do a supermarket shop, for example, if you live in a remote area, which means that you have to use the local shops available. Presumably, it’s in every part of your life that this is beginning to have an impact.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Whether it’s things like, as you say, shopping online for essentials, your food, whether it’s accessing deals for wider service provision, things like energy tariffs or just shopping around online, you need access to do that, to say nothing of, particularly in the context of the pandemic, where things like schooling, learning, education, or even adult training and lifelong learning through higher education or further education or courses at work, all of that was restricted or moved online. And so this access to services online becomes essential. And again, particularly if you think about accessing things like Social Security or accessing your local GP, or even just finding out information about what’s going on in your community. I mean, I think that was, something that was really highlighted in the pandemic is the information flow. It’s all very well to say, go and check this out online, but there’s a data cost to doing these things for people. Understanding more about what data poverty is and the drivers of data poverty is incredibly important.

Speaker J: Of course, this is only something that started to pick up in the last 25 years or so. The internet was 1995, 1996, so it’s a relatively new phenomenon. In administrative terms. So this has got to be an increasing problem.

Speaker C: Yeah, we think so. I mean, certainly you’re right to say it’s been around for a long time, or a relatively, you know, long time, some of these issues. But we definitely feel that the public level awareness and in turn the kind of the policy-making awareness has certainly been heightened during the last 12 to 18 months of the pandemic that we’ve all been living through, but it does go back much further than that. It does, of course, connect and is connected to wider issues of social inequality, of poverty, wider economic poverty and social exclusion. And I think the real concern is that this can become another form of social exclusion that just becomes accepted in our society, where it mustn’t become that. You know, we’re starting to understand the scale and the nature of it., but we can’t allow it to just become something we accept in terms of the disconnect between the haves and the have-nots, those who can afford to live and thrive online and those who struggle to do so. So we really need to understand how this issue more so that we can sort of take smarter actions to try and counter it or alleviate it.

Speaker J: What you’re essentially saying is that a section of the population is being locked out of the 21st century. That because technology is so important to our lives now, that if you can’t participate in the internet, you’re not there?

Speaker C: It certainly makes it harder for sure, but because, you know, not to be a broken record, but because it is multifaceted, because we are looking at issues about connection, you know, do you have the devices, do you have the data you need, can you afford that, do you have the digital literacy or the knowledge to to access things online, and is it safe and secure for you to do that? So yeah, it’s really increasingly important as more and more of our world goes online and more services and more opportunities for people are online that we consider carefully how we ensure that everybody has access to that. And in turn, when we’re thinking about service delivery for things, there’s been a lot of conversation, a lot of emphasis in recent years about digital by default or digital first and things like that. And there’s a lot of valid reasons for that, but we’ve got to make sure we’re considering: are these services able to reach everyone that they should? Whether that’s public services or whether it’s, you know, products or wider than just services, whether it’s things that people are being encouraged to sort of partake in, are we designing them in a way that ensures equality and ensures inclusion?

Speaker B: Yet of course, the digital divide is not simply a question of rich people in South East England and less well-off people in the North, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. You can have pots of money and own acres of land here in Suffolk where I live and still not get a decent speed on your broadband connection. That’s why successive governments keep on promising to roll out superfast broadband to remote rural areas. In the meantime, it’s a sort of digital discrimination by postcode. These layers of different reasons that prevent people from playing a full part in our digital society can be summed up in a word: intersectionality. It’s a bit of jargon, a euphemism really. It means if you are poor or live in a rural district with poor broadband or a city postcode with a high crime rate and low creditworthiness or you come from a migratory or ethnic minority background or you are impacted by gender discrimination, or any combination of these, your problems will be compounded. Not only will you struggle in your own life, but your characteristics—your data points, as they’re called—will be logged by artificial intelligence systems that predict, based on who you are and where you live, what your chances are of getting a good education, A well-paid job, a home of your own, or a life of struggle on the margins of society. Reema Patel is the head of research for the Ada Lovelace Foundation. She’s an expert on digital discrimination. She believes this issue of digital exclusion has bred a distrust of the authorities.

Speaker I: I think that trust is really fundamental to making sure this works really well. So we’ve done a lot of work on the importance of public confidence and trust in the system as a whole, and not just thinking about this as being just about the technology or even the data. So, you know, these questions of how the system is working, what checks and balances are in place, accountability, whether the right safeguards are in place to make sure that data isn’t commodified or exploited, but is being used to engender public benefit. These are the types of questions that people have asked in a lot of the public deliberation work that we’ve done on very controversial and contentious areas such as health data sharing or NHS partnership with commercial body, or in the field of biometrics data. So absolutely, I think trust and public confidence that the right safeguards are in place. Really matters, and the sort of ethos of data stewardship, that we have a responsibility to ensure the data works for people and isn’t exploited and isn’t commodified. These are really key themes to the work that we do. And if, you know, people feel confident in that aspect of it, then they’re much more likely to feel confident sharing their data, wanting to benefit from the system that we implement and have in play. And yeah, so it’s difficult, but it’s also really essential to enabling that effective use that we all want to see.

Speaker J: In Belgium, they say that giving data should be like giving blood. That’s what we need to get to. We need to get away from this surveillance society that everybody’s worried about.

Speaker I: Yeah, so there’s a really interesting ethos, particularly in the health data landscape, that talks about the concept of data donation, which I think taps into really similar notions. And University of Bristol study recently found that people have really altruistic motives for sharing data, and that actually they’re much more likely to share their data when it is, you know, positioned as a social contractual obligation, something that they do for other people’s benefits. And it’s an ethos that I think we could make much more use of. It’s very, very different to the sort of pervasive tracking and tracing and not quite clearly obtaining the permission of people to share that data. So, that kind of practice is much more pervasive. And so, it does really raise questions, which is, have we overlooked or neglected to appreciate that people can be incredibly altruistic when it comes to the use of their data, in the same way that they can be incredibly be altruistic when it comes to the sharing of their blood. And there’s a really interesting parallel because, of course, people will do that, but only within a clearly tightly regulated and safeguarded environment. And so that raises another set of questions for data donation, which is how do we create that kind of environment of trust and and safeguards that allow that to be the default practice rather than the exception to the norm.

Speaker J: And of course you’ve got to be able to explain that, you’ve got to be able to communicate that to people, and you can’t communicate it to people if they don’t have the digital devices in their houses. As you were saying earlier, there’s people saying that they weren’t aware that the symptom tracing app was, was, uh, or the symptom defining app was available. So this— what do we do about all of this? What is the solution? Do we say to people, here you go, have a mobile phone on the NHS, have a laptop on the NHS because you need it? What do we do?

Speaker I: I don’t think it’s a quick fix. So I think that there’s even— so what the report illustrates is that even if you even if you gave everyone a mobile phone and a laptop, there would still be differential outcomes. But from the standpoint of design and development, I think there’s something really crucial that the NHS and tech developers can do, which is not to just assume that everyone that’s using their app is everyone out there that could potentially benefit from it. So I think there’s something really upstream about getting ahead of that and thinking about, well, who is being excluded excluded by this app or this system? And then how do we build in systems that don’t require digital by default? So contact tracing, for instance, doesn’t entirely have to happen through an app, but can happen in an ecosystem where we are contact tracing more broadly. So that’s something to think about. Or again, with symptom tracking, are there ways of being able to share data that don’t demand that you’re on, on, on a smartphone or with a hyperfast forbanned? Those sorts of questions. And I think there’s just some really fundamental points around bias and discrimination and testing systems and trying to identify whether they are informed by biased datasets, for instance, or they’re missing crucial datasets that might engender an equal outcome. So taking a much more anticipatory approach to the rollout of tech rather than just the, the move fast and break things ethos that seems to define a lot of tech practice and development. So, you know, I’m waiting for the harm to happen before you then make the adjustments and changes. That approach will not get us particularly far when it comes to addressing inequality. The other point I mentioned was about confidence and trust and really granular co-design or community engagement when it comes to user research. Technology. So again, recognizing that not everyone comes to this with equal opportunities and equal assets and awareness of what’s out there and what’s not. So there is certainly something to be said for government-mandated and commissioned technology, having a proper comms strategy and approach to them rather than just pushing an app or a technology out there and hoping for the best and hoping that it will be equally adopted and used.

Speaker B: An example of how different communities use smartphones and for different reasons. When a group of Syrian refugees arrived in a small village in Brandenburg, the locals were puzzled to find them all congregating every Sunday around the outside of the library, which was closed on Sundays. But these people fleeing war and terrorism in their home country were desperate to keep in touch with the families they’d left behind. They had smartphones, but in their hostel there was only one small Wi-Fi router, so they clung to the walls of the library, sucking up the Wi-Fi to phone home on Skype or on Telegram. It’s a picture that many of those who live in inner cities can relate to, stories that are not unique according to Sarah Atkinson, CEO of the Social Mobility Foundation, which launched a campaign on digital poverty via its Department for Opportunity cities earlier this year. Atkinson, a former Director of Strategy, Policy and Communications at the Charity Commission, says that the issue of digital poverty must be dealt with.

Speaker E: First of all, when you talk about social mobility, you’re talking often about people who don’t have a lot of money in the house. So the young people that we work with, a lot of them are on free school meals, so we’re talking about less than £16,000 a year family income. So there’s really not much money around, which means kind of obviously and straightforwardly there’s not much money for tech. So the young people that we work with, they don’t have their own laptop, they’re sharing a device often across the family, they haven’t got the most up-to-date devices. They also— there isn’t much money around for good connection, so there may not be a good broadband connection, there may not be a broadband connection at all. We may be talking a a smartphone and limited data. So that’s the most straightforward and obvious way that digital exclusion crosses into social mobility. You just don’t have the devices. We also find with young people we’re working with, because there isn’t much money around in the house, there’s not just a lack of connectivity and a lack of devices, there’s a lack of privacy, there’s a lack of a good space to work in. So when our young people were trying to do schooling from home or access our programs and our work experience from home, they’re doing it in a crowded space, or they may be doing it in, in the middle of the kitchen with other stuff going on in the family. So it’s really hard to focus, to concentrate, to get the kind of connection that you need when you’re trying to engage with people digitally. So that’s the second way it plays out. And then the third way it plays out is around confidence. So one of the classic things around social mobility and young people who don’t come from a professional background, they don’t have the kind of family networks or support in their schools to do lots of enrichment activities or to operate in professional environments, it means that their confidence is often quite low. And if you’re trying to engage with people or build relationships over a Skype connection, as you and I are right now, or you’re trying to apply for opportunities or present yourself online, if you don’t have confidence and if you’re not familiar and comfortable in that kind of environment, it can present as a lack of— it’s a lack of polish, but it can present as a lack of capability, a lack of willingness. Sometimes our students come across to people either as not having much to say for themselves, or that lack of confidence can present ironically in a sort of cockiness and overconfidence, getting involved, speaking up at the wrong time or engaging in the wrong way. And that can really hamper people’s opportunities to participate, get chosen, get put forward for the next opportunity. So these are the key ways that it plays out for our young people.

Speaker J: And so what’s been the impact of that on the pandemic? I mean, that must be awful because everybody’s been having to be homeschooled?

Speaker E: Yeah, it’s got a lot worse. I mean, these sort of issues were certainly around pre-pandemic. We know that before the pandemic, children with a laptop were, you know, more than twice as likely to access, to get good GCSEs, to be successful. But it’s absolutely, it’s worse. And so we’ve got young people, you know, we’ve got 1.8 million young people in the UK don’t have access to a device. Through the year that we’ve just had, where learning, both educational learning and all the enrichment opportunities, have all been online, you know, that has meant that the gap has absolutely opened up and increased. That confidence gap, that capability gap, the gap in opportunity. So it’s been really serious. Obviously, schools are now back and we’re hoping that’s going to continue. But as I say, some of these issues were in place before the pandemic. You’re more than twice as likely to get good GCSEs if you’ve got a laptop, so that we know that connectivity and engagement still persists. And of course, we also know that workplaces are not going to go back as they were. Lots of opportunities to engage, lots of interviews and opportunities to get connected with workplaces are going to stay online. So it’s so important that we, we support children to get connected connected and stay connected if they’re to achieve their potential.

Speaker J: When you say enrichment, what do you mean? How do you define enrichment?

Speaker E: So we talk about all those things that sit around the essential education. So we’re talking about music and sport, we’re talking about opportunities to build your social skills. We so often ask young people what they’ve done to develop their leadership skills or in a team. So it can be things like scouting, religious activities, the kind of programmes that we offer our young people to to get work experience, get mentored. All of that is a massive part of being able to go beyond your academic capability and show that you’ve got good potential for the workplace or for universities. And it’s especially important for our young people because it’s that kind of stuff that they’re so likely to miss out on when the money is tight and the networks of free opportunities and things, favours that people can do, just don’t exist.

Speaker J: I mean, presumably there are people who don’t even have a mobile phone at all, who don’t have a laptop, who don’t have any broadband. That must make them feel terrible. That must make them feel very much out of things when they’re at school. I mean, everybody walking around now seems to have a mobile phone in their hands all the time.

Speaker E: Absolutely. And among young people, mobile phone usage is really high. That’s the difference I think with the older generation it tends to be there may be a tethered computer but no mobile. Among young people it’s common to have a mobile device, although you’re absolutely right, there are some young people where the money is so tight that even that’s not possible, and we’re talking about kind of sharing devices. But yeah, if you don’t have connection, if you aren’t able to participate, you lose out on so many opportunities, so much broader knowledge, and so much skills development. We absolutely assume that it’s a given these days, and yet for young people on low incomes, it’s really not a guarantee, not without support like the scheme that, that we ran and that lots of charities have got involved in supporting.

Speaker J: We were told that there was a course up in the northwest of England where the students were in an area which apparently is not particularly well off, and they were issued with laptops, and the next day when they arrived at the course, only one person still had their laptop. All of the laptops had been sold the previous day. Is that a familiar story?

Speaker E: Not for the young people that we are working with, because they are, they’re absolutely focused on the connectivity to be able to get the opportunities. You know, they’re ambitious, they want to be successful, they know what they need. But yeah, life is tough when you don’t have much money, and particularly depending on what kind of family support you’ve got, the pressure on young people to make a contribution to the family is one of the things when it comes to social mobility, when it comes to programs to help young people, you’ve got to be conscious that, you know, for a family that hasn’t benefited from an education system, that hasn’t had opportunities, there may not be much confidence in the ability of the system to serve them well. So it is, I think, understanding the family circumstances that people are in and being mindful of that is a really important part of the scheme, and also making sure you’re offering young people what they want and need, not deciding for them what they need. One of the things that we did as part of our campaign was make sure we were getting devices to young people who wanted them so that we’re not putting our young people in a difficult position them to have something that they’re not comfortable with, they’re not able to use. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you don’t have or shouldn’t want to have agency, and I think that kind of respect and understanding is critical.

Speaker B: Sarah Atkinson of the Social Mobility Forum. Of course, there will always be a very few people who want to opt out of the digital world because they’ve become addicted connected to their devices. You can book a 5-day digital detox retreat in Cornwall, for example, for only £745. But for most of us, being online makes life easier and cheaper. You can use price comparison websites to get the best deals. You can work from home or homeschool your children, access free helplines, and get the full range of music, movies, TV, and radio that the internet brings us for free—if only you can afford to get online and stay online with enough data to do all these things. In a bid to bridge the divide, some companies are helping. Virgin Media began offering an essential broadband service available to those receiving Universal Credit last summer. It comes with a speed of 15 Mbps and a fixed price of £15 per month with no fixed-term contract length and no price changes while benefit payments are being received. BT is following suit, offering a low-cost service from next month for people on Universal Credit. They’ve tried Wi-Fi vouchers, and other telecom providers are also stepping stepping up with offers. Matt Warman is hoping to become a local hero for people who live in data poverty in rural districts with low connectivity. He’s the MP for Skegness and the Minister for Digital Infrastructure. You can write to him if you’re tired of waiting for superfast broadband where you live. And you can write to me on Twitter @peterwarren or find out more about technology and society on our website futureintelligence.co.uk, where you can also listen to earlier editions of Password. This one was produced by Blue Buffery and written by Jane Wyatt, and we’ll be back with the next edition on the 9th of June here on Resonance FM. Thanks for listening.

Speaker A: Goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.