The Geography of Digital Inequality

The Internet is an increasingly important part of British society and economy. Britain has the largest Internet economy in the industrial world, measured as a percent of GDP. Social life is increasingly mediated and influenced by online interactions that take place through email or social media. Contemporary economic growth and social change are driven increasingly by the Internet.

Despite major research efforts there remains a major area about which little is known: the geography of Internet use and online participation. This is true both for both policy-makers and scholars. Although the Office of National Statistics produces regular reports on the British population and economy, it produces nothing about the Internet that is more detailed than reports on the 10 official regions. Even Ofcom produces little beyond broadband penetration reports. Similarly, scholarly work is mostly at the level of the UK as a whole.

Geographical data is crucially important because there is evidence of major geographic inequalities in access and use (e.g. Internet use in Scotland is 20 percentage points below the East Midlands). Government support for organisations like Race Online 2012 signals that it understands the importance of mitigating digital inequalities in order to promote growth and employment. But policy currently can do little about local-scale geographic inequality because there are almost no data on the geography of the Internet. Currently no one knows how Internet use differs between Edinburgh, Manchester, London, or Cardiff. Outside of Ofcom reports about broadband penetration (an important, but limited topic), no government, private or scholarly entity has local-level geographic data on the Internet.

We will combine data from existing datasets to produce the first dataset with detailed estimates of Internet use. Specifically we will combine the Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) with the census and several special-purpose datasets on important metrics of Internet use and participation (e.g. tweets, Wikipedia articles, photo uploads). This will give us a rich dataset with hundreds of measures of Internet use that we can analyze at any desired geographic level, including wards, counties (or Welsh and Scottish Councils, or Unitary Authorities) or cities.

More specifically we intend to investigate the geography of several types of use. First is simple use or non-use of the Internet. However, we recognise that there are many ways of interacting with, using, and communicating through the Internet. We will also examine online buying and selling, social networking, banking and finance, information and entertainment seeking, politics and communication. Multiple uses suggest greater intensity of use, which we can investigate by looking at the amount of time spend online. The Internet is a unique medium in that it allows ordinary users to create and distribute content. We will thus explore online content production in the form of blogs, personal websites, uploading music or videos, and others.

Our research will begin with descriptive statistics and maps of the geographic distribution of uses. We will take advantage of the skills developed by the OII's visualisation project (www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/) to make these results accessible. We will move beyond descriptive work to multivariate, inferential studies that predict the geographic inequalities in digital Britain. Using spatial statistical analyses we can show the relative importance of issues like broadband use, technology attitudes, trust in e-commerce, or Internet experience as predictors of geographic stratification.

The Oxford Internet Institute, an interdisciplinary department of the University of Oxford, is the largest organization of Internet researchers in the world. Datasets collected will be placed in public repositories. The research carried out by this project will help us understand social trends and ensure that the UK stays in the forefront of Internet research.

The proposed research will have extensive benefits outside the academic community:

-- Government policy-makers who often need more detailed knowledge about the geography of online inequality because this is fundamental to understanding issues such as social inequalities, political participation or future economic growth. The specific benefits of the proposed project will develop new understandings the geographic distribution of inequality which researchers and practitioners alike can apply and implement as techniques for data collection and models for analysis.

-- The Internet has been a disruptive innovation. It has changed the way that information flows and created dynamic new growth areas. Growth in the British economy is increasingly dependent on the ability effectively to exploit the opportunities offered by the Internet. To the extent that the Internet is crucial for economic development, then mapping inequalities in Internet access will reveal communities and regions which will participate in the new digital economy and those which will lag behind. The project will show which areas benefit and where digital divides are being created. This is important for future economic growth and for jobs.

-- The project's results will be disseminated to researchers from government, business and other sectors. The workshops and the project website will provide new information to help understand the full impact of the Internet on the geography of British economic, social and political life.

--The project website will be maintained by OII IT staff beyond the end of the project so that interested researchers and officials can view webcasts, download presentation slides, working papers and data, read blog entries and otherwise benefit from the project. Through the website the impact of the project will continue for years after the end of the funding.

-- The Internet has produced completely new business models for the music and newspaper industries, but these are only two examples of the much larger picture of the disruption caused by the Internet. For politicians, it offers new ways to reach voters and new ways to campaign and for government agencies it establishes new models for reaching their constituencies. The proposed project will help businesses as well as local and national government to identify who benefits and where digital divides are being created. Maps supply tools and data to analyze relationships between local areas and they improve our understanding of how information and knowledge are obtained and shared - all these will benefit a wider public and knowledge professionals alike.