THEORIZING DIGITAL AND URBAN INEQUALITIES

Abstract

Contemporary research on disparities in access to and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) – what is commonly referred to as the digital divide – is limited in terms of its ability to explain the interrelationships between digital and urban inequalities. Drawing upon critical geographical conceptualizations of the relationships between power, place, and scale, and a Bourdieusian conceptualization of technological and social capital, this article proposes a model of the interconnections between urban and digital inequalities from the vantage point of the everyday experiences of economically marginalized urban residents in the United States. On the basis of this model, the author suggests a future research agenda that examines the empowerment or disempowerment of people related to ICTs in relation to their own frameworks for ICT use; how technological capacity is related to technological and social capital embedded in particular places; and how technical capacity is developed across multiple spaces and multiple arenas situated in a broader analysis of inequality.

Keywords:

• digital divide
• urban
• inequalities
• information and communication technology
• technical capital
• gender
• race
• Bourdieu

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the Workshop on Gender and Technical Capital: Setting the Research Agenda sponsored by the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester in January 2009. I thank Mike Savage for inviting me to the workshop and all of the participants for their comments and questions. I thank Susan Halford for our many conversations about the concept of technical capital and the gendered nature of ICTs as well as her comments on this paper. Finally, I thank Jurgen von Mahs for his comments on this paper.

Notes

A series of reports called ‘Falling through the Net’ and ‘A Nation Online’ published by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA 1995, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002, 2004) brought national attention to differentials in household computer ownership and the use of the internet. The studies generally document that low-income households, racialized minority households, people with lower educational attainment, elderly people, women, and people living in inner-city neighborhoods have the lowest rate of computer ownership, computer use, and internet access. The results of later reports have caused some to argue that the digital divide is disappearing (e.g. Compaigne 2001), but many others have argued the opposite (e.g. Losh 2003; Robinson et al. 2003).

Social constructionist conceptualizations of place reject the notion that places are bounded entities. Place is not a container but rather a constellation of processes, open and hetereogenous (Massey 1993, 2005).

Social constructionist conceptualizations of scale reject scale as an ontologically given category. As such, ‘scale is not necessarily a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world-local, regional, national and global. It is instead a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practice of human agents’ (Marston 2000, p. 220). For a review of how scale has been conceptualized in geography, see Marston (2000). For current debates over the construction of scale, see Marston et al. (2005), Collinge (2006), Hoefle (2006), Escobar (2007), Leitner and Miller (2007), and Jones et al. (2007). My intent in conceptualizing my model in a scalar framework, albeit one that rejects scale as ontologically given, is to move digital divide research away from a focus on individual's technical capacity and/or lack of access to computers and the internet to an analysis of power and inequality.

My goal here is not to privilege the macro-scale nor to suggest that processes such as economic restructuring are not constituted at the scale of lived experiences, but rather to highlight the way in which the ‘digital divide’ research needs to be reframed within a broader theory of inequality.

There is a much broader literature on the intersection of the sexual division of labor, gender relations at work, the social construction of gender, and technological change (Webster 1996; Halford et al. 2010).