As our team of three Philadelphia fellows met with city officials and local organizations across the city, we heard the number 42 over and over. No, we weren’t hitchiking across the galaxy. Forty-two is the percentage of Philadelphians without home internet access according to a 2010 poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Knight Foundation. (New analysis of 2010 census data further suggests that 54.8 percent lack broadband access.)
In Philadelphia, 10 percent of homes in the Kensington neighborhood have Internet access while in Society Hill, the number is more than 90 percent, said Mayor Michael Nutter in a September 2011 speech. Even once a family owns a computer and subscribes to home internet access, there are still differences in how they use the internet. Lower-middle-income families spend less time researching products online, accessing fewer savings despite more limited budgets [1].
Even without home internet access, people are gaining technical savvy and internet access in different ways. During the February residency, our team spent a day helping more than 115 first-time computer owners set up their new netbooks. Through the Freedom Rings Partnership, Philadelphia Housing Authority residents had earned these netbooks by completing an eight-hour computer literacy course. Amidst cellophane crackles and installation chimes, an unexpected stumbling block emerged: the courses had been taught at bulky desktop computers, where lessons included the basics of scroll-wheel mice. The new netbooks had trackpads instead, and several people tried to scroll by swiping a finger down the screen. They tried to apply the behaviors from the smartphones they’d already purchased and mastered — devices that are arguably more advanced and complex than desktop computers.
A look at the CDC’s National Health Statistics Report Vol. 39, the most detailed public dataset I could find about household phone usage, confirms the pervasiveness of mobile phones. Eighty-eight percent of Philadelphia adults live in households with mobile access (termed wireless in this study) — a significant margin over those with desktop internet, even with its modest ranking of 20 out of 50 states.
Beyond its ubiquity across demographics, mobile is far from a watered-down, off-brand internet experience. Mobile’s convenience and location awareness have led successful startups from Twitter to Foursquare to Instagram to embrace the philosophy of mobile first, desktop second. Of the 42 companies in the latest cohort of leading seed-stage startup fund Y Combinator, a full third of them are mobile-first or mobile-only.
All this points to mobile as a first-class channel for connecting citizens to their local governments and to each other. The digital divide isn’t merely a binary chasm. It’s a divide of convenience, attention span, and logistics. Seen this way, the digital divide is, yes, an ongoing problem — but also an opportunity. By building mobile tools for civic participation, we can not only make government more accessible to those who don’t have internet access at home, we can lower barriers to civic participation for all.
These visualizations were inspired by Jake Porway’s Data Without Borders seminar at Code for America and guided by Nathan Yau’s most handy book, Visualize This. I used R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, to generate the basic graphs and Adobe Illustrator to fine-tune visual design.
I wonder if states with high wireless and mobile access in households also have mobile friendly information coming out of government? i.e. Iowa, do you have especially awesome state gov apps and compatibility?
Interesting to see Iowa so high up there. I have such a notion of Iowa being extraordinarily rural it’s very unexpected to me.
What is going on in South Dakota? I look forward to the day when my mobile device just acts as a WiFi / MiFi, satisfying my high bandwidth requirements.
Corey, don’t be surprised about Iowa. They have a strong infrastructure and highly educated citizens. Population density is also a factor, and that probably accounts for the big difference between Iowa and, say South Dakota.
My state, Missouri, is ranked 36th, and it doesn’t surprise me. I wonder if, because we have two major population centers (St. Louis and Kansas City), communications companies don’t focus most of their attention there instead of outstate. I know I can travel on any interstate and almost always have a mobile connection, but go a few miles off the highway and the lack of population centers and terrain makes getting any signal difficult. Add the cost of using your phone as your wifi hotspot and restrictions on bandwidth, and many people just don’t see the need to spend the money.