The UK’s leading tech charities are warning of a growing digital divide that is crippling primary school age children and locking the old out of the 21st century because of a lack of internet access.
A situation that has led Nesta, one of the charities interviewed in ‘The Digital Divide’, the ‘PassW0rd’ radio programme, produced by Future Intelligence, to warn of a lost generation as poor children struggle to keep up with classmates due to a lack of technology.
The charities paint a bleak picture for some families with children either having no internet, or no devices to connect to it or poor bandwidth with one in seven adults in the UK identified as in data poverty, and 1.4m children being recorded as without internet access.
In the programme Liverpool University’s Professor of Digital Culture, Simeon Yates, a leading experts in digital exclusion, describes an online world that is rapidly beginning to mirror the inequalities of the real world, where according to Government statistics over 11 percent of families either do not have a computer or an internet connection.
Families queue to use scarce resources
“Even if you have got access, under Covid, we’ve seen, families with kids where there is only one laptop at home and they only have mobile Internet access via a dongle type device. “You can have two parents and two children trying to share one or two devices over limited broadband to do their work and education. By the government’s statistics, they’re online but they are difficult circumstances in which to undertake both work and education,” said Professor Yates
In ‘The Digital Divide’ PassW0rd examines the growing gulf between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and find that during the COVID-19 pandemic, some children have been forced to take turns on smartphones using inadequate data plans in order to try to keep up with home-schooling. Others could not even log on at all and missed out on the online lessons or revision sessions.
Young and old lose out
The charities point out that children are not alone in this and that the elderly, ethnic minorities, migrants and the poor have all been identified as victims of the digital divide.
Meaning that often issues such as not knowing how to use technology were compounded during the pandemic by other factors according to Abigail Wood, CEO of Age UK London.
“Social isolation is a massive factor, it’s very hard to learn skills remotely like knowing what you do with a particular device. Over the past year, there’s also been the added strain of being in a pressured situation with people feeling that suddenly their lives have changed a lot,” said Wood adding that those pressures were compounded by fear of the internet due to stories of online scammers and hackers.
“It’s a huge amount of pressure to deal with without face to face to support.”
Group computer use aids education
Wood’s point about social isolation was underlined by educational technologist Professor Sugata Mitra in an interview for ‘The Digital Divide’ Professor Mitra stresses the need for support to learn how to use computers and the internet.
“I did a set of experiments in Manchester in a care home and found that groups of people can do things individuals cannot. One lady said: ‘I simply don’t know how to look up email. When you put about three or four together and say “now try”.’ They invariably can. At the end of it, the same lady said, ‘well, it wasn’t that difficult’, but she still did not want to try it on her own because of lack of confidence. But she now knew it was not as difficult as she had once thought.”
A lack of confidence that has led to another more dangerous form of data poverty during the Covid crisis, either missing out on information or going missing from information. A point highlighted in a recent study by the doctor’s publication ‘The Lancet’. It found that many of the elderly and those from ethnic minority and migrant populations were unaware of Government initiatives on the disease or whose susceptibility to the coronavirus or its impact on them had gone unnoticed because they had not been involved in online polls.
Slipping out of the data picture
As Reema Patel, Associate Director of research at the Ada Lovelace Institute says not only does not having access to the internet damage your prospects it can also mean you do not count.
“When we looked at evaluation studies of digital contact tracing apps, we saw people in more deprived areas were less likely to get a notification to self-isolate than people in more affluent areas. When we looked at studies of who had, downloaded the symptom tracking ap it was a very small minority. Of the people who responded to our poll 60 percent told us they did not know what a symptom tracker was. That meant they were not in the data being used to understand what’s happening in the pandemic. That means that we end up with technologies that work for only a small group of people in society, and that then reinforces social inequalities.”
There are though some positive signs that people are taking notice to address these glaring inequalities. TAP London’s found a way that you can give to homeless people on the street, using your contactless credit card. The Department for Opportunities is asking for donations of un-used technology to help hard-up families get online. To find out more and how you can get help – or give something that helps – listen to PassW0rd on Resonance FM.
The digital divide is affecting more and more people worldwide.
Digital divide deepens millions left behind
While trust among ethnic minorities and the elderly is being under-mined by Government and company data use.
