Live Wires: Negotiating Internet Participation and Exclusion

1. Live Wires:Negotiating Internet Participation and Exclusion Liz Sutton, Dr. Antonia Ivaldi, Karen Kellard, Professor Ruth Lister, and Graham Murdock: Centre for Research in Social Policy and the Department of Social Sciences Loughborough University

2. Project overview Research aims • Exclusion • Careers • Household dynamics • Change Methodology • Focused on the household – 93 purposively selected households • Longitudinal study • Combines quantitative and qualitative methods

3. Aims This paper draws on recruitment questionnaires, interviews, and time use diary data. It explores who is connected by: • Type of household • Type of tenure • Ethnicity It discusses: • The barriers to accessing and using the Internet • How families use the Internet • The impact of the Internet on everyday life • The implications of non-participation

4. Household type and Internet access at home via PC

5. Home tenure and Internet access

6. Ethnicity and home Internet access

7. What do families use the Internet for?

8. Barriers to take-up and use of the Internet • Financial constraints • Lack of social networks • Lack of competence/knowledge/self-belief • Problems reading/writing English • Lack of need/purpose • Household circumstances - prioritising others use

9. The impact of the Internet on everyday life The good • Makes the world smaller – the immediacy of communication • A source of new relationships/ reconfirms existing relationships • Makes it easier and more convenient to discover new information • Makes learning fun The bad • Encourages solo activities • People get too reliant on it • Encourages impersonal communication The ugly • Danger for children • Viruses/spam • Security/fraud

10. The impact of the Internet (2) ‘If somebody, a teacher has given you a job to look up piranhas or something, you can look them up easily, you don’t have to go to the library and get a local book, you don’t have to see if there are any shows on about piranhas, you just go to Google, type in piranha and that is it, you can get to a load of websites’ (Boy aged eleven). ‘I’ve got relatives in Pakistan and I can drop them a quick e-mail and they can reply like within ten minutes, whereas in my parents’ time you’d write a letter and they’d get it eight days later and then they’d reply to it and you’d get it eight days after that. So it’s a total of 16 days to receive a letter but now it is within minutes, and it’s not expensive it’s cheap. To send an e-mail you’re talking about a few pence if that, but to ring someone up it’s very expensive, 80 pence a minute’ (26 year-old male).

11. What does it mean not to be participating in the Internet society? • Educational disadvantage • Inconvenience • Isolation • Increased cost of shopping for some items • Other activities take priority – e.g. socialising, reading books, watching television • It depends on whether there is a perceived need for it – e.g. job, hobby, a lifeline • A non-user identity – a dinosaur?

12. Non-participation ‘I think when they [work colleagues] talk about the computers particularly I think I thought things that such, you almost feel like you’re eliminated from the real world, you know because that’s technology moving so fast you almost feel you don’t belong, you don’t know these things, and you know, that’s… I felt isolated’ (42 year-old female) ‘Not having a computer is a bit like being cut-off’ (53 year-old female, who was made redundant and was without Internet access for a short while)