Working and Learning from Home in the Time of COVID-19: The Convergence of Private and Public Spaces Under a Re-emergent Digital Divide
The rapid shift to online work, education, services, commerce, entertainment, and social life during the COVID-19 pandemic has re-exposed the digital divide in Canada, where some are unable to effectively engage in digital spaces due to a range of factors. Governments have been working with private sector and civic partners for many years to bridge the digital divide, and efforts have been re-doubled in light of the movement of many in-person activities to virtual ones. However, the pandemic and the limiting of many real-space interactions that has produced a consequent transition of much of Canadians’ work, education, and civic activities away from public institutional settings and into private home life should change our ideas about how digital tools, connectivity, services, and literacy should be provided and accessed.
Justin Longo, Associate Professor, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy
Cheryl A. Camillo, Assistant Professor, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy
August 21, 2020
Introduction
During the spring of 2020, in response to the global coronavirus pandemic, emergency public health measures adopted to slow the spread of COVID-19 forced most previously in-person activities and communications to cease or be conducted at a distance. Given the magnitude of this change, the transition has gone remarkably well for some. Many rapidly transitioned to working-from-home, largely using digital information and communication tools. Students at all levels (from kindergarten to university) moved to quickly reconfigured online learning environments. Vital health services such as consultations, diagnoses, and prescriptions switched to being offered over the Internet. Jurisdictions where governments had invested in the delivery of public services by digital means saw those systems successfully weather sometimes-dramatic increases in traffic. Private sector retailers either took advantage of a pre-pandemic online presence to ramp up ordering and delivery, or quickly reconfigured their in-person shopping experience to an online one. Dining out quickly transformed into take-out and home delivery, often facilitated by a new experience for many: app-based restaurant ordering and delivery. The closing of theatres and concert halls was met with the continued embrace of home viewing of digitally streamed entertainment. Even social events moved online, from family gatherings to dating and beer pong tournaments.
All of these shifts were facilitated by the Internet and the ubiquitous presence of personal computing devices throughout society. While disruptive, some of these changes have been welcomed by those with the resources required to connect to the online world — specifically a broadband Internet connection and appropriate computer devices. For many Canadians, there has been little in the way of equipment or infrastructure barriers to navigating this shift to online activity, with many expressing satisfaction with no longer having to commute to the office. Canadians have been gradually, almost imperceptibly preparing for this transition for years through the adoption of workplace collaboration technology (e.g., email and electronic document sharing within organizations), the accessing of textual, visual, and audio information via the web to support remote learning, incremental experiments in using telehealth, the expansion and refinement of digital public services, online shopping, app-based service ordering and delivery logistics, and the proliferation of digital equipment and connectivity throughout our homes. Seventy-five years after the dawn of the computer age, and nearing the half-century mark of the Internet, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic has stood on the foundations constructed over preceding decades, allowing us to achieve a remarkable amount in a very short period.
Because so many have the equipment and infrastructure needed to function in the digital realm from the comfort of our homes, it is easy to minimize the digital divide that continues to separate those of us who comfortably work with those digital tools and infrastructure from those on the other side of that chasm. Canada’s approach to mitigating the digital divide has been rooted in the country’s liberal approach to addressing most social welfare problems (except for health insurance) — voluntary, market-driven, individual-by-individual, case-by-case adoption with a central strategic vision, in which the private realm and the public realm exist in separate worlds. While there is much that governments and other partners have done and can still do to help bridge this divide and ultimately close it, more fundamental questions about the changing relationship between public and private life in the digital era remain to be addressed.
The Pre-Pandemic Digital Divide in Canada
While Canadians have been steadily increasing their online presence over the past few decades — for example, 91% of Canadians aged 15 and older in 2018 used the Internet (up from 83% in 2012) — a not-insignificant proportion of society still lacks in-home access to devices such as desktop or laptop computers capable of effectively participating in the online world, as well as poor or no home-based broadband access to the Internet. The pandemic and the shift from the real to the virtual across a range of activities has revealed how the digital divide is still very much still with.
The term ‘digital divide’ refers to inequalities in access to digital technology — including the tools, connectivity, and ability to use those effectively — with the metaphor of the divide meant to distinguish those with physical access to personal computers and the Internet from those without. Inequalities in access can be due to a range of factors including geographic location (e.g., northern versus southern Canada, including special challenges related to high-latitude communications), geographic setting (e.g., rural versus urban), age, level of education, and income. While the concept of the digital divide initially centred on gaps in material access (i.e., devices and connections), additional factors have been identified including the usability of digital services and the digital literacy of users. Focussing just on access to appropriate computing devices and stable connection to the Internet, for the 6% of Canadians without home Internet access in 2018, cost of service (28%), cost of equipment (19%), and no availability of Internet services (8%) were the primary contributing factors.
The Last Mile Problem: Accessible Home Broadband
Broadband connections — defined as Internet access that is always on (as opposed to ‘dial-up’) and is offered at a service standard of at least 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 10 Mbps upload — are increasingly available in Canada. The 50/10 Mbps standard is set out in the federal government’s Connectivity Strategy and a 2016 CRTC policy statement that declared broadband Internet access to be a basic service — paralleling landline telephone service. The CRTC expects the 50/10 Mbps target to be met “in 90% of Canadian premises by the end of 2021, and in the remaining 10% of Canadian premises within 10 to 15 years” (i.e., between 2026 and 2031). For a large and sparsely populated country like Canada, this can be seen as a remarkable accomplishment, due in large part to the significant efforts made over the past three decades by Canadian governments, private corporations, and civic actors to make high-speed, home-based Internet as widely available as possible. The challenge of connecting the remaining locations that do not have broadband Internet connections is typically referred to as “the last-mile problem”.
Of the 6% of Canadians without home Internet service, just 8% cite a lack of availability as a primary reason. Yet disparities in the ability to access home broadband remain. While 50/10 Mbps unlimited broadband was available to 84.1% of Canadian households in 2017, only 37.2% of rural communities and 27.7% of First Nations reserve areas had 50/10 Mbps unlimited broadband service. In the northern territories, 50/10 Mbps unlimited broadband is not available at all (CRTC Communications Monitoring Report 2019; see figure 1, below). And the pandemic has made the current arrangement worse: a recent report (see comparable U.S. study) shows that median speeds have continued to fall for rural users in Canada since the start of the pandemic, while speeds have actually increased in urban areas.
Connectivity That Stops at the Outside Wall: Affordable Home Broadband
Clearly, not being able to connect to the Internet from home using broadband represents a fundamental barrier regardless of other circumstances. But for most of the 6% of Canadians without home-based broadband, the cost of a connection subscription is a more pressing factor. In 2017, 69% of the lowest-income households had home-based broadband, compared to 98.5% of the highest-income households (CRTC Communications Monitoring Report 2019). And households with school-aged children have some of the lowest access rates — at least 4.4 % of young people from low income households do not have home-based broadband access — raising a significant challenge in the shift to learning-from-home. Modern communication services can easily exceed hundreds of dollars per month for a household. Up to 8% of total annual expenditures can go towards communication services, the fourth-largest expenditure after shelter, transportation, and food for those in the lowest income quintile.
Before the pandemic, a common alternative to household-based broadband was publicly-available wifi in either institutional or commercial settings. However, these options are not accessible or appropriate in a time of widespread shelter-in-place orders. Some governments have promoted the creation of drive-in wifi hotspots, and anecdotes of fast-food parking lots being populated by people searching for free wifi have multiplied in the COVID-19 era, an understandable strategy for a student or their family that has few other options for broadband Internet access.
Smartphones Don’t Cut It: Affordable and Appropriate Home Computing Devices
The combination of ubiquitous smartphones (ostensibly available for free as part of a monthly service connection subscription fee), free wifi in public spaces and private establishments, and free-access Internet-connected computers in places like public libraries has made the concept of the digital divide less pronounced in recent years. However, smartphones should not be considered appropriate devices for truly bridging the digital divide. Indeed, for many uses — including accessing digital government and commercial services, tele-health, and personal communications — smartphones provide a remarkable array of functions at a relatively low cost. Yet for work-from-home and learn-from-home tasks, smartphones are often not suitable, serving as a poor substitute for full screen devices with separate keyboards.
Home computers have become more commonplace as their prices have fallen and their utility has increased. The cost of desktop computer technology has rapidly fallen over the 35-year history of the personal computer. Today, a notebook computer can be purchased for less than $500. Nonetheless, more than one in three Canadian homes do not have a computer, with home computer ownership highly income dependent: in 2017, 63.4% of the lowest-income households had a home computer compared to 95.1% of the highest-income households (CRTC Communications Monitoring Report 2019). Low income households in Canada are more smartphone-dependent for accessing the Internet than higher-income households.
Reachable, But Usable? The Need for Better Online Services
For those seeking public services, the digital divide presents a barrier despite the efforts by governments in recent years to ensure user-centric access. However, challenges still remain. There are certainly high-profile examples of public service smartphone apps that have failed (and some government social assistance sites have failed to accommodate demand during the pandemic). But the general challenge of usable digital government services centres on designing those services with the typical user in mind. For example, in July 2020 the federal government rolled out the COVID-19 Alert exposure notification app, which notifies users if their phones have come close to a phone registered to someone who has volunteered that they’ve tested positive for COVID-19. However, the app only works on recent model smartphones, and critics argue that that will exclude some Canadians who are at heightened risk from the virus such as the elderly and lower-income Canadians.
A Robust Digital Citizenry: Building Digital Literacy
The concept of digital literacy refers to the ability to understand and use information from a variety of digital sources, to successfully perform tasks and solve problems in digital environments, and to operate intuitively in digital interactions, distinguishing it from more specific technical skills. Skills that can demonstrate digital literacy include critical thinking, problem solving, information technology, communication, and management skills. These skills are both useful for building a 21st-century workforce, but also as a foundation for a robust democracy in the digital era. One challenge in providing easy access to the tools of Internet connectivity, and making information easily accessible on the Internet, is that these achievements can be undermined if those accessing that information do not have the digital literacy to manage the multi-directional flow of information that those tools and infrastructure provide. Digital literacy is also not static, as advances in technology can leave those previously literate unable to navigate the new advances. As one of the harder digital divide problems to solve, without an obvious technical or financial solution, digital literacy typically receives very little attention.
Bridging the Digital Divide
Even before the advent of the COVID-19 crisis, governments, private sector technology companies, and civil society organizations had made great strides in making Internet access and computer devices accessible, affordable, usable, and useful. These initiatives and proposals are numerous, so just a cursory scan across four digital era categories — connectivity, devices, services, and literacy — is noted here.
Building Bridges: Addressing Connectivity Gaps
Despite the challenges of providing Internet accessibility in a country as large and sparsely populated in Canada, multiple efforts to address the last-mile problems in ensuring universal access to the Internet over either wired or wireless service continue. In Canada, the federal government announced in December 2016 that it would be investing up to $500 million to bring high-speed, broadband Internet access to 300 rural and remote communities by 2021. That funding was separate from the creation in December 2016 of the industry-funded $750 million CRTC Broadband Fund to provide broadband Internet and mobile wireless services in underserved areas. The federal government’s 2019 Connectivity Strategy included up to $6 billion in investments in rural broadband over the next 10 years. The Universal Broadband Fund will provide up to $1 billion over 10 years to support broadband projects across Canada, focusing on the unique needs of rural and remote communities. The First Nation Infrastructure Fund, designed to address long-standing infrastructure gaps on First Nations reserves across eight project categories also includes funding for Internet connectivity.
Reducing the Tolls: More Affordable Home Connectivity
Regulators in Canada have generally shied away from directly intervening to make communications services more affordable, arguing that market competition will ensure that services are competitively priced. Efforts to improve competitiveness — through, for example, requiring large telecom providers to offer broadband access to smaller competitors at low rates — are viewed through the lens of network investments and innovation, generating a cautious balancing approach. The federal government’s 2017 Connecting Families Program helps Canadian families who currently receive the maximum Canada Child Benefit to access high-speed Internet service packages for $10 per month from participating Internet service providers (ISPs), although the private sector ISPs voluntarily offer these low-cost Internet services to eligible families without direct funding from the federal government. In the U.S., alternatively, telecom user fees support programs like the Lifeline Program that provide a discount on phone service for qualifying low-income Americans ($0 per month as of December 2021). In 2016, the program was extended to include broadband as an eligible service ($9.25 per month as of December 2021).
More Than Smartphones: Making Home Devices More Affordable
Public and private sector actors continue to address the device disparity that exists despite the proliferation of smartphones in recent years. However, addressing the challenges that some households face in being able to purchase an appropriate computer device has received less attention than that of Internet availability and affordability. As one example, the Government of Canada’s Connecting Families Program provided $13.2 million over five years (2017–2022) to pay for the refurbishment and delivery of up to 50,000 computers to families receiving the maximum Canada Child Benefit (meaning annual household income of less than $31,120). The program is facilitated by the non-profit organization Computers for Success Canada. Other civil society actors such as One Laptop per Child Canada (which provides accessible technology to Indigenous students) continue to work to make computer equipment more widely available. The response of the education sector over the past few months of the coronavirus pandemic has been equally notable: as one example, the Toronto District School Board loaned out 60,000 computer devices to families with students in the first months of the pandemic.
Focusing on Usability: Designing Better Online Services
If the challenges of broadband access at an affordable rate and using an appropriate computer device have been addressed, this will have all been for nought if the services being accessed are impenetrable to the user. Nonetheless, while shortcomings can be identified and improvements always made, the past twenty years have seen impressive gains in the delivery of public services over the Internet as governments at all levels now offer digital citizen services even on devices like smartphones. As one example, the speed with which programs like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) were successfully rolled has been impressive, and the seamless application process has spanned device interfaces from desktop computers to smartphones (see Figure 2, below).
Digital Literacy
The transition to the second generation Internet, with the ability for each new consumer of information to also be an information contributor, raises the importance of digital literacy as a core component of civic life in the digital era. As the volume of information available increases, and newly-connected Canadians are able to add information to that flow through a variety of channels, improving digital literacy becomes an important part of bridging the digital divide as affordable access, appropriate devices, and usability. In the CRTC’s regulatory statement of December 2016, the Commission noted that stakeholder submissions acknowledged that “Canadians require not only access to broadband Internet access services, but also the knowledge of how to participate in the digital landscape so that they can benefit as much as possible from what it offers.” The question remains, however, as to how digital literacy should be supported and the mechanism by which that support can be delivered.
The federal government’s Digital Literacy Exchange program invests $29.5 million to support initiatives that teach fundamental digital literacy skills to Canadians who would benefit from participating in the digital economy, focussing on the skills needed to engage with computers, mobile devices, and the Internet safely. A number of provincial government digital literacy programs have been introduced, many with an emphasis on learning in the k-12 education system. While some submissions to the 2016 CRTC policy review encouraged the Commission to take the lead on digital literacy initiatives, the Commission argued this responsibility was outside its mandate.
Conclusion
The digital divide has been recognized as a public policy challenge since the early web era. Disparities — in the ability to access the Internet, at an affordable cost, using an appropriate computer device, that links to usable online services, and having the capacity to effectively engage in online life — have existed for more than a generation. The current crisis, marked by a rapid shift from real space to virtual space, has revealed how the digital divide is still very much with us.
Governments, private sector actors, and civil society have worked over the past quarter century to understand the digital divide and find ways to bridge it or eliminate it:
- A mix of subsidies and regulatory instruments have been deployed to encourage the private sector to offer broadband coverage to the last mile. Much has been done to ensure all Canadians can access broadband Internet from their home, though significant challenges remain especially in rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities.
- Affordability has generally been addressed through regulatory tools such as promoting competitiveness. Telecom service costs are comparatively low in Canada, though for lower-income Canadians represent their fourth-largest expenditure after shelter, transportation, and food.
- The device issue has been addressed for some users through inexpensive smartphones and notebooks, paid for through a subscription model. For others, direct public sector support has helped to make home computing devices more affordable. Nonetheless, the issue of whether a device is appropriate for the task remains a concern.
- Governments have moved past old notions of e-government, with its emphasis on highly technical approaches to automating government services, to an embrace of digital governance with its focus on the needs of the user as a first condition. Usability has greatly improved over the past quarter century, and is now a core element of digital governance efforts in leading countries, though the private sector’s propensity to design for the most advanced user still finds its way into public service digital offerings.
- On the issue of digital literacy, however, governments seem most constrained, limiting themselves to emphasizing digital skills and job-readiness over the democratic foundations of a well-informed citizenry. The social need for digital literacy is compounded by the feature of the modern Internet where each new consumer of information is simultaneously a potential new producer. Lowering the barriers to Internet access without attending to digital literacy is akin to building a highway system without requiring driver licensing.
Efforts made to date in addressing the digital divide have treated telecom services as a normal consumer good, provided by the private sector and regulated by the government with minimal interventions to address market failures. But what the entire history of the digital divide has shown, and the past several months of the pandemic have laid bare, is that the Internet and the ability to use it effectively are not like other consumer goods.
The Blurring of Public and Private Spaces
Being able to effectively participate in the online world is considered by some to be a core principle of citizenship in the digital era. Indeed, one ongoing discussion centres on whether access to the Internet is a basic human right. The steady progress of the Internet era, and especially these first few months of the pandemic, have shown that the ability to use the Internet is essential to both individual success and our collective functioning.
But a larger question about the nature of effective Internet access in the digital era, made all the more tangible in the current pandemic, lies in the changing relationship between private life and public life. The convergence and transformation of these spaces have always been subject to change over time, as each era redefines what is appropriate and expected. Prior to the Internet, private life would enter public spaces through things like transportation networks, the workplace, and democratic / civic discourse. In the digital era, the public and private realms are again being renegotiated. Internet and related technologies have had profound impacts on public space, the private activities carried out there, and interactions among private individuals in those public spaces. The consequence has been the normalization of private actions in public spaces.
Everyday technologies like smartphones let us do things like listen to recorded sounds, photograph ourselves and our surroundings, and communicate with the wider world, as private individuals acting in public spaces. Smartphones let us interact through a computer screen to the exclusion of those physically nearby. We can engage in a conversation with a friend many miles away while navigating a crowded sidewalk. We engage in public social media spaces, sharing our private observations. Smartphones have allowed us to privatize public spaces, and the boundary of the public and the private is increasingly in flux.
Until recently, the Internet has mostly been about the movement of private life into the public realm — taking selfies, walking around with earbuds in, working on a laptop in a cafe, amplifying personal protests using social media. What the pandemic has revealed, however, is that the opposite also possible: the public realm now intrudes into private life. The shifts to working-from-home and learning-from-home — growing trends over the past quarter-century, though accelerating rapidly in the past few months — are the most pronounced aspects of this changing relationship, made more intrusive by Internet technologies. While television (and other pre-Internet media) represented the intrusion of public life into private spaces, this was unidirectional communication: your television was not watching you while you were watching it. In a world of working- and learning-from-home, communication between the public and private realms has become multi-directional. The consequence is the public appropriation of private spaces.
Consider how remote education delivery may require students to join a synchronous Zoom class, and to have their camera and microphone enabled the whole time. For the student whose only available workspace is their bedroom, no wonder virtual backgrounds are so popular. School dress codes are being enforced when a student logs into remote learning, another example of how the public intrudes into the private. In work-from-home situations where employees are expected to be on camera for frequent video meetings, employees may have to join work meetings from their dining room, while their attendance and attention is tracked. While organizations have been forced to rapidly shift to remote working arrangements, concerns about employee productivity have spawned efforts to monitor performance remotely. Employees, on the other hand, are working more hours from their home offices, as the boundary between their home life and work life blurs.
While the pandemic will surely end one day, the changes to work, learning, and other aspects of our lives may signal enduring shifts, causing a permanent reconfiguration of the relationship between public and private life. These changes will then require us to reconsider how we think about the devices and connectivity needed to bridge the digital divide as no longer normal consumer goods. As such, we need to think differently about digital connectivity, devices, service delivery, and literacy. We need to start the conversation about what the blending of the private and the public means for our understanding of the digital divide and how we close it entirely.
Internet Service as a Public Good
Since the emergence of the digital divide, governments have sought to bridge it. But the transformation of the boundary between the public and the private, and the clear importance of stable, affordable, usable Internet connectivity for a functioning digital era society requires a response that no longer tinkers around the edges of the Internet, treating it as a normal consumer good. Instead, we need a response that reflects the magnitude of the changes we are experiencing.
A more robust approach to digital availability, affordability, useability, and literacy that has emerged in recent years has centred on treating communications services as a public good. In February 2013, the United States Federal Communications Commission proposed the creation of a freely-accessible wifi Internet service that would be available throughout the United States. Briefly in 2019, the Trump Administration contemplated nationalizing the emerging U.S. 5G Network (with the added possibility that 5G could be used as part of the solution to providing home-based broadband and last-mile rural connectivity). “A national 5G network would be a kind of 21st-century Tennessee Valley Authority. The government would build or lease towers across the country, prioritizing underserved areas, and set up a public utility that sold bandwidth at cost”, suggested Columbia University law professor Tim Wu. Also in 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a new public option for broadband Internet and Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled his High-Speed Internet for All proposal for publicly owned broadband networks.
Nationalized industries often imply taking over existing private industries instead of building new ones. A 2019 manifesto proposal by the UK Labour Party called for free full-fibre Internet access through Britain achieved largely through re-nationalizing the ISP parts of British Telecom. Alternatively, public institutions can be repurposed to serve new digital functions: Carleton University professor Dwayne Winseck has proposed merging Canada Post with the CBC to create the Canadian Communication Corporation with a mandate to become, amongst other functions, a national mobile and broadband Internet service provider. But the best analogy for Internet service provided as a public good lies in utility companies like power and water supply. Already, hundreds of U.S. cities have built their own broadband networks or made local networks available to the public (with a few similar efforts in Canada) though these initiatives have often been met with resistance from lawmakers, regulators, and corporate interests.
There are many things that Canada can do to solve the digital divide problem, with many proposals focused on accelerating ongoing work or instituting specific short-term policies in light of the pandemic.
But the COVID-19 pandemic challenges us to think differently about the kind of Canada we want to create to face the digital future. We need to stop thinking about the Internet as a normal consumer good. Instead, Internet service should be thought of in parallel to water and power, delivered by publicly-owned and operated utilities.
Justin Longo is an Associate Professor at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Regina where he directs the Digital Governance Lab. His research focuses on the socio-political implications of advanced technology, and the public sector applications of information and communications technologies. Prior to joining the JSGS, he served as a post-doctoral fellow in Open Governance at the Centre for Policy Informatics at Arizona State University, and a visiting research fellow in The Governance Lab at New York University.
Cheryl Camillo has worked in many capacities, including as senior federal policymaker, state program executive, community organizer, and applied researcher, to reduce economic and social disparities in the United States and Canada. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Yale University, a master of public administration degree from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a PhD in public policy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A former Fulbright Fellow, Camillo teaches Social Policy and Health Policy at JSGS.
