Digital communications technologies are currently expanding into more and more areas of everyday life outside work. The Government is committed to bringing Internet access to everyone who wants it. Internet use is being transformed by the growth of broadband and wi-fi connections. Mobile telephones are becoming multi-media devices. Interactive digital television is expanding rapidly. This project, based at the Loughborough University and conducted by a team drawn from the Department of Social Sciences and the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP), looks behind the headlines to examine how people are responding to this emerging digital environment and the E-Society it is constructing. The research commenced in 2003 and completed in 2005.
It is based on a sample of ninety-three households, purposively selected to represent a range of income groups and social and life circumstances. It includes parents with children at home, people living with partners or alone, older people, minority ethnic families, and rural, suburban and city centre households. A detailed picture of people's activities, experiences, views and concerns has been built up using a combination of research techniques with each member of the household over the age of six. These included: a household inventory of what digital media they owned and where they were located within the home; week-long personal diaries of digital technology use; and depth interviews. The children in the study were also encouraged to express their ideas and feelings by responding to photographs of digital technologies in use and to draw their ideal machine.To assess change over time all participants in the study were interviewed again, a year after the first wave of interviews, and asked to complete an up-dated technology use diary.
This material is now being used to develop answers to four key questions
- How are digital communications technologies being integrated into everyday life?
- How are patterns of access and use changing as new innovations come on line and people's circumstances alter?
- Who is excluded from the E-Society, why, and what the implications for such exclusion might be?
- Why do people 'drop out' of the E-Society or decide they don't wish to join?
A full report of the project, based on an analysis of the findings from both waves of research, will be available in the late Spring of 2005 but two key themes have already emerged.
- The 'digital divide' is not a single barrier that is breached when people gain access to home computers, mobile phones or digital television. There are multiple obstacles to people becoming more competent, confident and creative users and to sustaining their involvement over time. These are rooted in social and power relations within households, in unequal access to the resources that support active use, and in people's sense of the relevance of particular technologies to them.
- Material resources - money, time, and space - remain major determinants of access and use but access to social and cultural resources also plays a crucial role. Our findings suggest that having friends, neighbours or family members who can offer encouragement and practical support is a particularly important factor in sustaining and developing computer use. Similarly, the connections between the possibilities offered by a technology and social identities has emerged as more important than anticipated.
For the children in the study for example, owning and/or using a mobile phone enabled them to construct an identity that was independent (allowing privacy while addressing parent concerns about safety), socially valued (cementing in-group membership) and displaying personal and social standing (by having a stylish and state-of-the art hand set and demonstrating how wide their circle of contacts was). Conversely, many older participants could not see any advantages in having a home computer or mobile phone and found it difficult to imagine themselves as valued figures in the new digital landscape.
These findings suggest that public policies need approach to digital access and use in a more multi-dimensional way and raise a number of questions, such as:
- Would neighbourhood mentoring schemes be an effective way of boosting and extending home computer use?
- Should advertising and promotional materials for home computers and mobile phones offer more images of elderly users?
Further information on the project, up-dates on the findings, and contact points for the research team - Graham Murdock, Ruth Lister, Karen Kellard, Liz Sutton and Antonia Ivaldi – can be found on the project website http://www.newtechnologyandyou.net
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