The Digital Divide: Who’s Minding the Gap?
By Amy Dubose
The three fastest-growing careers in America are all in computer-related fields, offering far more than average pay. Happily, the digital divide has begun to narrow, but it will not disappear of its own accord. History teaches us that even as new technologies create growth and new opportunity, they can heighten economic inequalities and sharpen social divisions.
President Bill Clinton
June 5, 1998
When I was growing up, homework required nothing more than your siblings leaving you alone, a clear workspace, and a Number 2 pencil. Those days are gone. They are gone because today as many as seven in ten teachers assign homework that requires access to broadband. But data from this Commission suggests one in three households do not subscribe to broadband service.
Jessica Rosenworcel, FCC Commissioner
June 19, 2015
If you know RALLY, you know that we care about and work on racial equity and education issues. As a result, we’re hyper-aware of the fluctuating media narratives that weave together education, equity, and technology. Nothing represents this confluence better than the “digital divide.” In every RALLY engagement, we spend time reading, processing, and analyzing the media coverage that often drives public conversation. In recent projects with clients who work at the intersection of technology and education, we noticed that we hadn’t surfaced as much coverage around the digital divide as we expected. We wondered how much of this observation was perception and how much was reality — and if the conversation really was fading, why?
If education equity is discussed more now than in any recent decade, what happened to the prominent headlines about the digital divide? While broadband internet access at home is a given for some, there are still millions in the U.S. who don’t have it. As FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel’s quote demonstrates, internet access, especially at home, is critical for any student to succeed and should be critical to education equity narratives. Using Quid, a software platform that helps us surface media narratives using Natural Language Processing technology, we set out to understand if and how the media is covering the digital divide and how advocates looking to shape or push the conversation might be able to drive new narratives.
1. The digital divide still exists.
Before looking at media coverage, we wanted to get the facts on the digital divide. Has it narrowed? Closed? According to a Pew Fact Sheet, internet usage among American adults reached 90% in 2018. Compared to 86% in 2015 and 52% in 2000, it’s undeniable that access has increased considerably.
But internet penetration doesn’t imply equitable distribution. As the same Pew Fact Sheet points out, factors like race, income, and education level can critically impact internet usage, especially at home. In 2018, 79% of white adults had home broadband service. Comparatively, 66% of Black adults and 61% of Hispanic adults had access.
An 18% gap constitutes a divide by any standard. Even with internet penetration at 90% overall, it’s clear that a digital divide still exists.
2. The digital divide is not as newsworthy (nationally) as it used to be.
With the digital divide confirmed, we turned to Quid to take a deeper look at the media narratives surrounding the digital divide between January 2015 and December 2018. To focus our search on education narratives only, we looked at stories that explicitly mentioned “students,” “homework,” or “education.”
Quid offers a range of analytical tools to filter through the thousands of stories that surface, including the ability to distinguish between top tier outlets and local or niche outlets. The graph below shows the decrease in coverage from top tier outlets between 2015 and 2018. Hunch confirmed: the digital divide has become less and less newsworthy over time to the top tier outlets that typically drive national news narratives.
We wanted to confirm this trend using another analytical view. From spikes in the timeline, we noticed that some of the coverage in 2015 and 2016 was tied to corporate news — announcements, initiatives, or specific mentions in broader stories. We adjusted our timeline to look at stories from top tier outlets that specifically mentioned some of the top corporate players in this space: Comcast, Google, Facebook, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, Cox Communications, and Time Warner. The graph below shows how coverage mentioning these companies decreased as well.
To say nothing of the actual work these companies are doing, we can say with certainty that there are fewer national news-making PR opportunities focused on bridging the digital divide than there were in 2015 and 2016.
3. Local media is picking up the mantle.
Even though top tier, national coverage decreased, we noticed something curious. The overall timeline of relevant stories (see below) shows that coverage of the digital divide has remained fairly consistent. So where are the more recent stories coming from?
There’s a clear answer. Over the four-year period examined, around 19% of stories came from top tier national outlets. About 81% stories came from local and mid-tier news outlets. Even though top tier outlets helped raise this issue to a level of national prominence, local media has taken up the mantle of documenting how the digital divide plays out in real communities across the country.
If you’re curious how this has played out so far in 2019, so were we. A cursory Google search of “digital divide” just in the past month surfaces a bevy of local and industry-specific coverage:
- “San Antonio To Document Its Digital Divide” | KSTX | June 28, 2019
- “Digital Divide: Lack of internet access may affect homework and student performance” | The Oakland Press | June 30, 2019
- “Connecticut needs to close the digital divide among its students in order to prepare them for the future” | Hartford Courant | July 6, 2019
- “The FCC Just Made It Tougher for Schools to Address the ‘Homework Gap’, Ed-Tech Leaders Say” | Education Week | July 12, 2019
It turns out the digital divide coverage didn’t disappear. It just became more specific to the communities where impact matters most.
Takeaways:
There’s no doubt that the digital divide landscape has changed in recent years. Ubiquitous internet access has increased. Home broadband access has increased. We’re hearing less about this issue on a national level, because progress (and pressure) is required at the local level.
For organizations involved in equity issues at the intersection of education and technology, the digital divide should still be top of mind — but prioritizing front-page coverage in national outlets may not be a winning strategy. In this case, we’re past the point of educating about the inequity on a national stage. Instead, a more effective strategy would be to engage directly with impacted communities and find opportunities to work with local media on the ground.
The lack of national coverage isn’t a cause for worry. In fact, our analysis suggests that efforts to monitor and eventually close the digital divide are still alive and well in communities across the United States. Real efforts towards change don’t always need a national narrative to cover them. It’s advice we can take to heart as we work alongside organizations like Reboot Representation, which is tackling gender and racial inequity in tech and academia. Even though coverage has become more local and less visible nationally, it’s clear that advocacy efforts to support students and communities are still fighting for change on this front. And we’ll keep fighting right by their side.
RALLY is an issue-driven communications firm | Certified force for good by B Corporation
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