There has been a lot written about how the Covid-19 pandemic gave digital adoption and transformation a considerable boost. And it’s totally true.
Companies and institutions around the world had to scramble to connect their staff, and close gaps with clients and customers, so that business could carry on during lockdowns. Schools that had been fighting e-learning had no choice but to embrace online classes. Corner shops that had resisted e-commerce pivoted to survive. Suddenly click-and-collect went mainstream, and — thank all the middle-class gods — Woolies finally pulled the trigger on their same day delivery app and service. Those who were ahead on their “digital transformation journey” before Covid struck were suddenly seeing the dividends of early investment into connectivity and cloud.
But, as we know all too well in SA, progress is patchy, inequality is stubbornly sticky, and — paraphrasing William Gibson — the future is unevenly distributed. The have-nots got hammered by Covid, directly and indirectly: They are not only at the mercy of public health provision, living and working in spaces that complicate (if not prohibit) social distancing; they’ve also disproportionally faced the worst of the economic effects including firing, retrenchment, and shrinking spend in sectors like tourism and eventing.
Simple deduction (Dear Watson) and emerging research both suggest that people in this situation everywhere are having their digital journey reversed, their gains eroded. If an internet connection is needed to work, to order food, to pay bills, to access services including doctors, then those without reliable internet are making choices between their health and their hunger. The digital divide may be widening again, and the chatter about embracing the paid-for model for the web will only exacerbate this.
Katie Collins, writing for Cnet (UK) in March 2021, opened her story on the digital divide with an anecdote of a Scot who had fallen behind on their internet bills. “At the moment my daughter is doing schoolwork with mobile data and on her phone … At times, their daughter’s friends take pictures of schoolwork and send them along …” so she can keep up with the assignments.
I don’t want to play the comparison game (because this family is struggling and I will never make light of that), but the reality is that their life might seem positively luxurious to the average South African. Collins quotes research that “2% of UK households with children have no access to the internet, 4% have only mobile access, and 9% have no home access to a laptop, desktop, or tablet”. She continues: “Almost one-fifth of households, 4.7-million in total, struggle[d] to pay their broadband or mobile data bills” in 2020.
And here at home? Just over half of South Africans are online, and an estimated 95% of our internet users are reliant on mobile data. There may be more phones than people in the country, but only a third of the population use a smartphone. So we were already struggling before Covid came along and kneecapped us.
Let’s add another layer to this cluster-duck: With the growing focus on the value of personal data, privacy, and criticism of services (like Facebook and Google) which are offered to users for free because you are the product, we’re starting to see the very model of the web being questioned and critiqued.
Tim Berners-Lee advocated to ensure that the tech underpinning the web was not proprietary, but increasingly we are seeing two levels of access emerging — paid and free. Those who can afford to pay for their services can get the full news stories from behind the paywall, the ad-free email providers and social networks, and so on. Those that can’t are left offering up their very identity for meagre access.
There’s a pretty well-known quote from Richard Matthew Stallman (a free software advocate) about freeware and open source tools, that free in this case if a matter of liberty (libre) rather than “without cost” (gratis); free as in free speech, not free beer. Well the ad-based model gave us beer in exchange for our attention and presence, seemingly free but at great cost. Critics like Prof Ethan Zuckerman (in The Atlantic) argue that the advertising model is centralising the web (again, in opposition to founding principles), and I completely agree with all the issues he posits, but a paid-services model arguably leaves the developing world even further behind.
If we don’t find meaningful ways to close digital divides in the country and between countries, the distinction between free and free is moot.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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