Page 134 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Political economy of the Internet 113

40 million users in 1995 to 1.4 billion in 2008 and over 2.7 billion in 2013 (ITU
2013). In 2000 one-third (154 million) of the estimated total 406 million users
were American (Norris 2001: 47). Now Asia currently outstrips all other regions,
with 44.8 per cent of total users in June 2012, yet only 27.5 per cent of the
population had access, compared to penetration rates of 78.6 per cent in North
America and 63.2 per cent in Europe (Internet World Stats 2013). According to the
ITU (2013) 31 per cent of the developing world is online, compared to 77 per cent
in the developed world.
For advocates of participative culture, barriers to access tend to be acknowledged
but discounted. Benkler (2006) regards the digital divide as a transitional problem.
By contrast, others highlight both absolute and relative digital divides. In absolute
terms, although diffusion has continued to expand there are signs of take-up
plateauing. In the UK, household Internet take-up (78 per cent) exceeded PC
ownership (77 per cent) for the first time in 2010 as a small proportion of
households went online using mobile phones only (Ofcom 2011). Those without
access included some elderly households and others who expressed lack of
interest, but Ofcom acknowledged that cost was a key barrier for many. Norris
(2001) argues that Internet penetration serves to exacerbate rather than reduce
inequalities. The costs and investment (including time) in leading edge technologies
sustain socio-economic disparities. A richer account of ‘access’ not only questions
the destinations invoked but also seeks to differentiate and examine access to
technologies, time, influence and decision-making, which are influenced by
gender relations, education, socio-economic and cultural relations. Hindman’s
(2009) study of US blogging and Internet search shows that the Internet does not
just remove old forms of exclusivity, it generates new forms, and he stresses that
we should assess not just the capacity to speak but the opportunity to be heard.
Mansell (2004: 97) finds ‘a very substantial tendency in studies of new media
to emphasize the abundance and variety of new media products and services,
and to concentrate on promoting access with little regard for the associated
structures and processes of power that are embedded within them’. Instead, she
finds ‘continuing evidence of scarcity in relation to new media production and
consumption [that is … ] contributing to the maintenance of deeply-rooted
inequalities in today’s so-called “information” or “knowledge” societies’. She
advocates a rights-based approach that focuses on the gaps between what people
should be able to achieve in exercising their freedom to construct meaningful
lives and what they can achieve in practice. This draws on the development
economist Amartya Sen’s (2001) work on capabilities to ask how do such
resources as those of the Internet and ICTs variously enable or constrain how
people can realise their capabilities.
Digital inequality forms part of broader critical agendas embracing the social
relations of capitalism and the politics of transformation. Based on the insight
that resources are highly unequally divided in contemporary society, Fuchs
(2008, 2009) calls for a critical theory of Internet and society addressing issues of
ownership, private property, resource distribution, social struggles, power,