Ladies and gentlemen, goodmorning. As part of this year's pan-disability Techshare conference, I thought it would be valuable to take stock of where we are in terms of the digital divide, the way we perceive it, measure it, campaign for removing it and indeed create projects and activities to combat it.
As a scientist and engineer, I firmly believe in an evidence based approach, so before I go into more detail about our current strategies and what is perhaps not entirely right about them, I think it is useful to remind ourselves of what the problem really is and what the numbers actually tell us.
I'm not focusing on a specific user group, disabled people or otherwise, because the underlying problems and strategies are remarkable similar once you go beneath the superficial layer of individual abilities and preferences.
So, what then is the digital divide that I am talking about, and why does it matter? Simply put, the digital divide is the combined set of barriers that divides our modern Information Society in two categories: those who are able to be fully enabled citizens in a technology dominated world, and those who are not. There is not a single cause for the digital divide, and indeed different users' profiles can have different reasons for digital exclusion. These can be accessibility barriers, socio-economic ones, educational and cultural ones or indeed, as is mostly the case, a combination of factors. For campaigning purposes, I quite like the term digital inclusion, or e-inclusion, because it directs our thoughts on a the positive goal of a more inclusive society.
There is, however, still a lot of misunderstanding amongst the general public about why digital inclusion really matters. It's common to read on fora messages like:
"I think the gizmo's are wasted really, they all become obsolete as soon as they hit the street"
"who absolutely NEEDS to be in contact 24 hours a day apart from the PM?"
"I don't care about broadband access at home, I don't need the Internet"
That might very well be true for that individual at that point in time, and some people voluntarily exclude themselves from aspects of our Information Society - and that is fine - but it ignores a broader reality, namely the fact that for many people access to technology is essential in their job, or education or in some other aspect of daily life, and that taking away that access will result in direct disenfranchisement in terms of people's life chances.
Let me illustrate this with some facts. Firstly, let's look at some statistics that illustrate the pervasiveness and all-encompassing nature of information and communication technology in our daily lives:
According to Ofcom data, by March 2006, about 13.3 million, or around 53%, of UK households had a broadband Internet connection. Again according to Ofcom, an analysis of people's Internet usage shows that the average Internet user spends one hour online each day, with the majority of users in the 18-59 age category. It shows also that Britain is a nation of shoppers and social networkers. eBay takes the lead in terms of total time spent on its web site. Elsewhere in the top ten by time spent, we find social networking sites dominating the list with names such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.
The research also shows that a majority of users value the Internet for its practical purposes. Over half of all Web users consider online banking sites to be the most valued type of web page, followed by shopping (50%) and holidays (47%). At the leisure side, music downloads are another very popular Internet destination, with an estimated 11.5 million tracks downloaded legally in the first quarter of 2006.
Looking at a different type of statistic, google.co.uk is among the most popular websites in the UK with over 19 million unique visitors measured in April 2006.
Let's also consider mobile phones. At the end of 2006, there were 69.7 million active mobile connections, compared to a UK population of around 60 million, and the average outbound call volume per connection rose to over 100 minutes.
There are vast amounts of data like this, illustrating how much the Internet and the World Wide Web, mobile phones and television have become part of our lives. For anyone to suggest that other than for those who make a deliberate and personal choice to exclude themselves, information and communication technology is irrelevant to citizenship and life chances is simply delusional and factually untrue.
But on the other side of the medal, we find equally clear data. Despite there now being more mobile phone connections than UK citizens, 11% of the UK population does not have a mobile phone. 33% of UK households have not got a home computer and 29%, almost one in three, of adults in the UK do not use the Internet at all.
What is worse, is that many of the uptake numbers are flattening out. For example, PC ownership has almost not changed in the last 3-4 years, remaining at somewhere between 65%-67%. Similarly, mobile phone penetration has remained at the 89% mark for some time. Internet usage, growing so fast for many years, also seems to have flattened. The only exception to the rule for now has been digital television, which continues to experience strong growth. Nevertheless, even in early 2007, almost a fifth of UK households did not have digital television.
So, what we see emerging from the data is a clear picture of persistent, ongoing and not substantially decreasing digital exclusion. If we take into account that the digital divide has been a consistent topic of debate and policy initiatives for years, then this must be a worrying observation. It raises the question around why we haven't been able to move further ahead with all the efforts and investments made so far and why indeed the trends seem to be flattening out, as if the digital divide is there to stay, despite all these efforts. I will come back to that question in a moment.
But for now, let's talk a bit more about why this state of affairs should be a concern to us. The previous numbers demonstrate that there are still digitally excluded people in the UK. And I have now repeatedly stated that this is relevant by referring to life chances and people's ability as individuals to be fully enabled citizens when making an argument about why this should bother us. So, where is the data that connects digital exclusion with life chances and citizenship?
Based on Ofcom's data from 2006 around the demographics of ICT usage, we can see the following: technology use increases with wealth. People on the highest incomes are more than 3 times as likely to use the Internet as those on the lowest incomes. Similarly, people on the highest incomes are over twice as likely to use a PC and also much more likely to have a mobile phone. So far, this shows a potential correlation, but there would be other possible explanations, including the obvious one that people with a lot of money will be more likely to buy various gadgets.
But, looking a bit further, we can use data such as the 2005 ONS Omnibus Internet survey to investigate the correlation between socio-economic and digital exclusion. And amongst the findings was the observation that 15% of the adult population, over 6m people, can be categorised as being both socially deprived as well as digitally excluded or hampered. And socially excluded individuals are, according to the same data, three times as likely to be digitally excluded as they are to be included. I need to move on with my expose, but there is a lot of this type of data out there that indicates a strong correlation between socio-economic exclusion and digital exclusion. So, yes, it does matter.
Now, most of us will agree that morally and ethically we should offer equal life chances to individual citizens, that we should all be equal in our right to fulfilment and opportunity. And so, that ethical and moral imperative is by itself reason enough to pursue vigorously a strategy of inclusion.
But as we have seen, there is more to it. The economic and social cost of exclusion to the whole of society is quite staggering. I'm not just talking about the costs of benefits and support for people who are forced into unemployment because the technology needed to make them function in the workplace is not being deployed or who indeed are never able to develop their career properly because education wasn't fully accessible to them and they therefore had to settle for lower qualification than what they could have achieved given proper technology support. I'm also talking about the fact that businesses and other organisations are being deprived from the expertise and knowledge of digitally excluded potential employees, and in a wider context of the impoverished social fabric that results from sidelining specific segments of our fellow citizens.
So, the definition of what e-inclusion is all about should be, in the words of the Digital Inclusion Team: "The use of technology, either directly or indirectly, to improve the lives and life chances of people and the places in which they live". Too often, the debate loses focus on this fundamental objective. It has to be about people's lives and chances to full participation, but in practice it often gets confused with the ways in which we want to achieve this: the end is lost and the means to achieve that end becomes an end objective in itself, as opposed to a means to achieve the vision.
And that brings me to the first characteristic of digital inclusion activities and policies today, which will also lead me to my first suggestion for a different strategy. This point is a simple one: it is my belief that too much of the debate around the digital divide focuses on the technology, and not enough considers the underlying need to achieve equal citizenship and life chances.
A good illustration of this is for example the debate around Internet access in people's homes and use of personal computers. Clearly, at the core of this is the observation that I made earlier about access to, and use of, ICT as a vital aspect of modern life in the Information Society. So, the real objective here is one of socio-economic inclusion, and equal opportunity and fulfilment for each individual citizen. Internet access and use of computers are a means to achieve that, by giving access to the services and products that shape opportunities and fulfilment in the modern world. But in pursuing better access, the technical availability of Internet connectivity becomes the objective, as opposed to a means to and, and policy makers and others start to measure availability of Internet connectivity as an indicator of digital inclusion. But that is just not right. For example, in the UK, it is claimed, depending on whose numbers you choose to believe, that 96%-99% of households can now get broadband in their homes. That number becomes a stake in the ground type of milestone to illustrate progress in combating the digital divide. However, what it fails to show is that despite massive technical improvement of Internet access services, despite the fall in cost of such services, and despite massive investment in programmes and activities to get those online who weren't before, the use of Internet at home has more or less flattened out and in fact about 4 in 10 households do not use the Internet.
The second characteristic of current digital inclusion strategies is that legislation and regulation are used in a silo-like manner: it is largely vertical legislation, and often it is very specific and narrow with regard to the technology, and thereby to the services and products, to which it applies. And I believe this is a failing strategy and I will try to explain why that is the case.
As we have now established that the digital divide is a societal problem, and not a marginal one, it is easy to understand why lobby groups and policy makers have looked at, and used, the instruments of legislation and regulation in an attempt to address some of the inclusion challenges of the digital divide.
And in principle, using legislation is both appropriate and potentially useful, but only if we do it in a way that is practically sound. Legislation is often very reactive in its nature, especially in this field, and it is also a slow instrument to use. Both those characteristics make it quite problematic to use legislation in a fast moving field such as information and communication technology, unless the legislation is sufficiently high-level and abstract. That in turn requires broad, horizontal legislation, but today a lot of the legislative and regulatory provisions are vertical, sector-specific and often technology-specific.
This is not a lecture in law, and so I am going to abstract out some of the detail. But at its most simplistic view, one could say that the three primary sources for legislation in the UK are Primary Legislation, Acts of Parliament; then Secondary or delegated legislation, Statutory Instruments, and thirdly Precedent based case law. All three of them have potential value as tools to combat digital exclusion. But in my view so far they haven't been used very wel.
Primary legislation really reflects our views as a society on what we think this society should look and feel like. It forms a framework in which we as citizens operate and behave and which to a very large extent defines the societal order in which we live, our rights and duties. Primary legislation is therefore a great tool to set out these kind of overarching, strategic views on society and define the wider objectives we have for that society. However, it involves lengthy societal debate, often years of discussion and scrutiny, before a Bill becomes an Act of Parliament. And once it is in place, it will remain there for 5, 10 or even more years. Information and Communication Technology evolves much faster than that. That is why for example the Communications Act 2003, only 4 years old, is now in many aspects of telecommunications completely outdated.
The Act is the UK implementation of the 2002 European framework for electronic communications, which took years to agree. The Communications Bill also took a long time to draft, debate and agree. But the Act and the European Framework it is based upon are in terms of telecoms almost completely restricted to analogue, PSTN telephone networks. So, Internet based services and products, including telephony products such as Voice over IP are not covered by it at all. In turn, because a lot of the protection of disabled people and other specific user groups, is provided through this legal framework, it means that for example deaf people only have guaranteed provision for traditional textphones and landline based text relay services. But the world has moved on! Mobile phones are now the supreme telephone product, people are starting to use Internet based VoIP telephony more and more. In broadcasting, where the Act is similarly restricted to traditional broadcasting, it means that there are no legal obligations upon providers of IPTV to offer audio description or subtitling - in effect a step back compared to the situation in more traditional television services.
For several years now, the review of this European framework has been going on, it will take many more years of debate to complete it, and then at least another year for this to become UK law. So, it will be sometime 2012, around the London Olympics, before a change to this nonsensical situation will be addressed at the very earliest, and very likely technology will have once again moved on by then!
So, the answer is to move away from this type of technology-specific and vertical legislation, towards more horizontal, cross-sector, legislation such as the DDA, to encapsulate the wider principles of how every citizen has the basic right to full and equal access to technology based services and products, and where that right is framed in terms of life chances and opportunities to fulfilment and participation. The DDA is by no means perfect, and its scope is clearly too restrictive at the moment, but even within those restrictions, it has already demonstrated the potential for such non technology-specific, horizontal, strategic legislation to drive specific operational measures and to put responsibility on manufacturers and providers to be inclusive and meet different people's needs. What that approach would mean, is that we embed people's rights to have access to information and communication technology as such, and put a clear obligation on service providers and product manufacturers and retailers to achieve this.
The third characteristic I wanted to highlight concerns the way in which we set up and fund various projects and activities aimed at reducing digital exclusion. And there certainly has been no shortage of such projects, the sheer amount of activities all over the country, in schools, community centres, libraries, UK online centres, etc, etc, is overwhelming. And it's quite easy to grab some nice headlines and media attention, but the real question I have is: why haven't we made more fundamental, stable and persistent progress in reducing the digital divide, despite all these activities? To me, there are two major components in the answer to that question: the first component could be called fragmentation, the second one is related to the funding principles of a lot of these projects.
Fragmentation means that instead of a consistent, integrated, global approach to running these projects, they are often conceived, designed and implemented in an almost haphazard way. Thousands of smaller and bigger groups and organisations run a variety of activities under a range of banners, all from different angles and often with different implementation models and objectives. By itself, this is not necessarily bad and indeed it could be argued that this just reflects the same versatility and diversity of society itself, as well as the complex nature of the digital divide and the interaction between its various components. But on the other hand, it also means that there is a lack of knowledge transfer, not enough learning from others' experiences, and often a lack of sustainability and scalability of all these activities. So, there is a strong need for some leadership and direction in this area. The diversity must remain, if only because the digital divide is by itself a complex and varied phenomenon.
But we do need to create more best practice knowledge transfer, improve scalability, reduce overlap and in general approach the problem in a more systematic, less fragmented way. No army will win a battle if all the different divisions all just go in different directions without coordination and an overall leading strategy. Similarly, we need to stop running around in all directions at once and start to communicate better, exchange knowledge and expertise and do this under a unified, informed and well considered strategy for what we want to ultimately achieve.
The funding of all these projects is a key aspect of this. And apart from showing the same fragmentation as the operational activities themselves, funding often constitutes another specific problem: it is relatively easy to get some money as a one-off or capital investment or to get a grant for running a specific set of activities for a limited period of time. But what next? It is just not enough to give some one off money to run a few PC classes, how do you make sure that the money keeps coming afterwards, so that you can sustain the effort? The reality is that unless we have a project plan that addresses the more long term funding needs of these types of projects, we will not achieve sustainability and any short term gains will be undone again on the longer terms. So, the funding aspects of digital inclusion activities need to be revised and reworked. And those bidding for money as well as those handing it out, should put longer-term sustainability and monetary realism very high on their list of priorities.
I am running out of time and there are two other key points I want to make, so I want to move on now and talk about perhaps one of the most fundamental aspects of addressing the digital divide, the technology itself.
As the Information Society developed, it became gradually more and more obvious that certain people were excluded from using certain technologies. As technology became more and more intertwined with socio-economic opportunity and fulfilment, people started to look at ways to use technology to overcome not just some of these newly created barriers, but indeed even to overcome what previously had been considered almost absolute problems. An example of the former is how when voice telephony became a staple of daily live, text telephony was created, sending tones over the audio network representing text characters, and rather than playing the tones, showing them as characters on a small screen. An illustration of the latter is for example how online shopping makes it possible for some physically disabled people to do their shopping themselves, as opposed to having to rely on others or having to make a difficult journey. And I know that there is an argument to be made about the importance of social contact and so on in this scenario, but that is not the point I am making now. I'm just trying to illustrate how technology can open up new opportunities where this was not possible before.
However, a major problem of a lot of assistive technologies is that they are, by definition, non-mainstream, niche market solutions. As such, they do not benefit from mainstream investments in their design, implementation, marketing, etc. They can also be very stigmatising in that they highlight the fact that the user is disabled for example. To a certain extent, this was unavoidable in the past, where many services and products, for example in telecommunication or broadcasting, were delivered through service and medium specific, narrow-focused, specialised networks and terminals. But today, we are gradually moving towards more general purpose, digital, converged networks and open, programmable terminals or user agents.
What this means is that we now start to have the opportunity to repurpose mainstream technologies for non-mainstream user demographics. So, we can write software to turn a mobile phone into a mobile textphone, or put a screen reader on it, or use the Internet to stream audio description or signed content alongside mainstream linear broadcasts. Obviously, this is a gradual process and in practice there are still a lot of hurdles before we reach this point where almost every specific individual profile of abilities and preferences can be met through mainstream services and products. But the promise is there and in fact a lot can already be done. In terms of digital divide strategies, we therefore need to move away wherever possible from specialised, niche market technologies to using mainstream ones.
Obviously, we should only do this where possible and without cutting of legacy technology users. What is missing so far, though, is a proper strategy to achieve this. My view is that active support in terms of funding, legislation and so on, of inclusive design principles is the best way to achieve this. My talk today is not about inclusive design, so I can't go into more detail, but a more mainstream technology based approach like this will improve availability and interoperability, reduce costs to both designers, implementers and users, and reduce stigma associated with specialised, niche technologies.
And then finally, as I am really running out of time now, my last point is about the way in which we prioritise digital inclusion. This is essentially one of getting your views represented and understood at the highest levels of strategic and operational decision making. A lot of the debate is steered in a certain direction by those groups in society who are most vocal or most able to articulate their specific needs, abilities and preferences. And more often than not, decision makers are driven by quantitative considerations about larger groups in society, but ignore the level of impact an issue can have on some often small, but very deeply disenfranchised group of people. For example, when making decisions on where to spend money and other resources in terms of digital inclusion, the bigger groups like "elderly people" in general, or people with diminished eye sight or hearing loss are often considered more important because they represent a fairly large slice of the population, so their numbers are fairly big. And this often means that the cake has been divided up well before much smaller, more specific user groups, like for example sign language users or, even more so, deaf-blind people have come into the picture. So, these smaller user groups are very much overlooked, even though qualitatively speaking they might be much, much more disenfranchised: their exclusion is often very deep, but it's seen as a very narrow aspect of inclusion because they are small in numbers. That is clearly not right, and so any proposals for a different approach to this should take account of these user groups and make sure their needs are covered as generically and as widely as those of other user groups.
With this last point, I have come to the end of my brief overview of the digital divide landscape and my own assessment of how past strategies need to change in order to take us forward. In summary, these are the 6 assertions I have made regarding the current state of play and where we ought to go:
Firstly, I spoke about how a lot of the debate is around the technology itself, losing perspective of the fact that we should be talking about citizenship and life chances.
Secondly, I said that we need to move away from vertical, sector specific legislation towards a more horizontal, rights based approach.
Thirdly, I spoke about the current fragmentation and overlap and lack of knowledge transfer in the way digital inclusion projects are run, and I advocated a more integrated, joined-up approach.
With regard to funding, I highlighted the need for a more long term vision.
Fifthly, I indicated that we need to move away from specialised, niche technologies towards mainstream services and products, through an inclusive design methodology.
And finally, I stressed the need to consider both qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of the digital divide.
This brings me to the end of my talk, and I would just like to end by reminding all of us of the importance of digital inclusion: it affects us all in one way or another. And tackling the digital divide will result in fairer, better society, not just an Information Society, but an Inclusive Society. Thank you very much indeed for your attention.
I am happy to take your questions.
Speech by Guido Gybels, given at TechShare 2007, Novotel West-London, Hammersmith, UK, on 4 October 2007.