We know that Wikipedia is important to the construction of geographical imaginations of place, and that it has immense power to augment our spatial understandings and interactions (Graham et al. 2013). In other words, the presences and absences in Wikipedia matter. If a person’s primary free source of information about the world is the Persian or Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, then the world will look fundamentally different from the world presented through the lens of the English Wikipedia. The capacity to represent oneself to outsiders is especially important in those parts of the world that are characterized by highly uneven power relationships: Brunn and Wilson (2013) and Graham and Zook (2013) have already demonstrated the power of geospatial content to reinforce power in a South African township and Jerusalem, respectively.

Until now, there has been no large-scale empirical analysis of the factors that explain information geographies at the global scale; this is something we have aimed to address in this research project on Mapping and measuring local knowledge production and representation in the Middle East and North Africa. Using regression models of geolocated Wikipedia data we have identified what are likely to be the necessary conditions for representation at the country level, and have also identified the outliers, i.e. those countries that fare considerably better or worse than expected. We found that a large part of the variation could be explained by just three factors: namely, (1) country population, (2) availability of broadband Internet, and (3) the number of edits originating in that country. [See the full paper for an explanation of the data and the regression models.]

But how do we explain the significant inequalities in the geography of user-generated information that remain after adjusting for differing conditions using our regression model? While these three variables help to explain the sparse amount of content written about much of Sub-Saharan Africa, most of the Middle East and North Africa have quantities of geographic information below their expected values. For example, despite high levels of wealth and connectivity, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have far fewer articles than we might expect from the model.

These three factors independently matter, but they will also be subject to a number of constraints. A country’s population will probably affect the number of human sites, activities, and practices of interest; ie the number of things one might want to write about. The size of the potential audience might also be influential, encouraging editors in denser-populated regions and those writing in major languages. However, societal attitudes towards learning and information sharing will probably also affect the propensity of people in some places to contribute content. Factors discouraging the number of edits to local content might include a lack of local Wikimedia chapters, the attractiveness of writing content about other (better-represented) places, or contentious disputes in local editing communities that divert time into edit wars and away from content generation.

We might also be seeing a principle of increasing informational poverty. Not only is a broader base of traditional source material (such as books, maps, and images) needed for the generation of any Wikipedia article, but it is likely that the very presence of content itself is a generative factor behind the production of further content. This makes information produced about information-sparse regions most useful for people in informational cores — who are used to integrating digital information into their everyday practices — rather than those in informational peripheries.

Various practices and procedures of Wikipedia editing likely amplify this effect. There are strict guidelines on how knowledge can be created and represented in Wikipedia, including a ban on original research, and the need to source key assertions. Editing incentives and constraints probably also encourage work around existing content (which is relatively straightforward to edit) rather than creation of entirely new material. In other words, the very policies and norms that govern the encyclopedia’s structure make it difficult to populate the white space with new geographic content. In addressing these patterns of increasing informational poverty, we need to recognize that no one of these three conditions can ever be sufficient for the generation of geographic knowledge. As well as highlighting the presences and absences in user-generated content, we also need to ask what factors encourage or limit production of that content.

In interpreting our model, we have come to a stark conclusion: increasing representation doesn’t occur in a linear fashion, but it accelerates in a virtuous cycle, benefitting those with strong editing cultures in local languages. For example, Britain, Sweden, Japan and Germany are extensively georeferenced on Wikipedia, whereas much of the MENA region has not kept pace, even accounting for their levels of connectivity, population, and editors. Thus, while some countries are experiencing the virtuous cycle of more edits and broadband begetting more georeferenced content, those on the periphery of these information geographies might fail to reach a critical mass of editors, or even dismiss Wikipedia as a legitimate site for user-generated geographic content: a problem that will need to be addressed if Wikipedia is indeed to be considered as the “sum of all human knowledge”.

Read the full paper: Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R.K., and Medhat, A. (2014) Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

References

Brunn S. D., and M. W. Wilson. 2013. Cape Town’s million plus black township of Khayelitsha: Terrae incognitae and the geographies and cartographies of silence, Habitat International. 39 284-294.

Graham M., and M. Zook. (2013) Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geolinguistic Contours of the Web. Environment and Planning A 45(1): 77–99.

Graham M, M. Zook, and A. Boulton. 2013. Augmented Reality in the Urban Environment: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 38(3) 464-479.

Mark Graham is a Senior Research Fellow at the OII. His research focuses on Internet and information geographies, and the overlaps between ICTs and economic development.

A problem with national sample surveys (the usual source of data about Internet use and non-use), is that the sample sizes become too small to allow accurate generalization at smaller, sub-national areas. No one knows, for example, the proportion of Internet users in Glasgow, because national surveys simply won’t have enough respondents to make reliable city-level estimates. We know that Internet use is not evenly distributed at the regional level; Ofcom reports on broadband speeds and penetration at the county level (Ofcom 2011), and we know that London and the southeast are the most wired part of the country (Dean et al. 2012). But given the importance of the Internet, the lack of knowledge about local patterns of access and use in Britain is surprising. This is a problem because without detailed information about small areas we can’t identify where would benefit most from policy intervention to encourage Internet use and improve access.

We have begun to address this lack of information by combining two important but separate datasets — the 2011 national census, and the 2013 OxIS surveys — using the technique of small area estimation. By definition, census data are available for very small areas, and because it reaches (basically) everyone, there will be no sampling issues. Unfortunately, it is extremely expensive to collect this data, so it doesn’t collect many variables (it has no data on Internet use, for example). The second dataset, the OII’s Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), is a very rich dataset of all kinds of Internet activity, measured with a random sample of more than 2,000 individuals across Britain. Because OxIS is unable to survey everyone in Britain, it is based on a random sample of people living in geographical ‘Output Areas’ (OAs). These areas (generally of 40-250 households) represent the fundamental building block of the national census, being the smallest geographical area for which it reports data.

Because OxIS and the census (happily) use the same OAs, we can combine national-level data on Internet use (from OxIS) with local-level demographic information (from the census) to map estimated Internet use across Britain for the first time. We can do this because we can estimate from OxIS the likelihood of an individual using the Internet just from basic demographic data (age, income, education etc.). And because the census records these demographics for everyone in each OA, we can go on to estimate the likely proportion of Internet users in each of these areas. By combining the richness of OxIS survey data with the comprehensive small area coverage of the census we can use the strengths of one to offset the gaps in the other.

Of course, this procedure assumes that people in small areas will generally match national patterns of Internet use; ie that those who are better educated, employed, and young, are more likely to use the Internet. We assume that this pattern isn’t affected by cultural or social factors (e.g. ‘Northerners just like the Internet more’), or by anything unusual about a particular group of households that makes it buck national trends (eg ‘the young people of Wytham Street, Oxford just prefer not to use the Internet’).

So what do we see when we combine the two datasets? What are the local-level patterns of Internet use across Britain? We can see from the figure that the highest estimated Internet use (88-89%) is concentrated in the south east, with London dominating. Bristol, Southampton, and Nottingham also have high levels of use, as well as the rest of the south (interestingly, including rural Cornwall) with estimated usage levels of 78-83%. Leeds, York and Manchester are also in this category. In the lowest category (59-70% use) we find the entire North East region. Cities show much the same pattern, with southern cities having the highest estimated Internet use, and Newcastle and Middlesbrough having the lowest.

There isn’t room in this post to explore and discuss all the patterns (or to speculate on the underlying reasons), but there are clear policy implications from this work. The Internet has made an enormous difference in our social life, culture, and economy; this is why it is important to bring people online, to encourage them all to participate and benefit. However, despite the importance of the Internet in Britain today, we still know very little about who is, and isn’t connected. We hope this approach (and this data) can help pinpoint the areas of greatest need. For example, the North East is striking — even the cities don’t seem to stand out from the surrounding rural areas. Allocating resources to improve use in the North East would probably be valuable, with rural areas as a secondary priority. Interestingly, Cornwall (despite being very rural) is actually above average in terms of likely Internet users, and is also the recipient of a major European Regional Development Fund effort to extend their broadband.

Actually getting access via fibre-optic cable is just one part of the story of Internet use (and one we don’t cover in this post); but this is the first time we have been estimate the likely use at a local level, based on the known characteristics of the people who live there. Using these small area estimation techniques opens a whole new area for social media research and policy-making around local patterns of digital participation. Going forward, we intend to expand the model to include urban-rural differences, the index of multiple deprivation, occupation, and socio-economic status. But there’s already much more we can do with these data.

References

Dean, D., DiGrande, S., Field, D., Lundmark, A., O’Day, J., Pineda, J., Zwillenberg, P. (2012) The connected world: The Internet economy in the G-20. Boston: Boston Consulting Group.

Malecki, E.J. & Moriset, B. (2008) The digital economy: Business organization, production processes and regional developments. London: Routledge.

Ofcom (2011) Communications infrastructure report: Fixed broadband data. [accessed on 23/9/2013 from http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/broadband-research/Fixed_Broadband_June_2011.pdf ]

Read the full paper: Blank, G., Graham, M., and Calvino, C. (2014) Mapping the Local Geographies of Digital Inequality. [contact the authors for the paper and citation details]

Grant Blank is a Survey Research Fellow at the OII. He is a sociologist who studies the social and cultural impact of the Internet and other new communication media. He is principal investigator on the OII’s Geography of Digital Inequality project, which combines OxIS and census data to produce the first detailed geographic estimates of Internet use across the UK.

While the study reflects a high level of parental anxiety about the potential of social networking sites to distract their offspring, and shows that some parents despair at their children’s tendency to multitask on mobile devices, the research by Oxford University’s Department of Education and Oxford Internet Institute concludes that there are substantial educational advantages in teenagers being able to access the internet at home.

Teenagers who do not have access to the internet in their home have a strong sense of being ‘educationally disadvantaged’, warns the study. At the time of the study, the researchers estimated that around 10 per cent of the teenagers were without online connectivity at home, with most of this group living in poorer households. While recent figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest this dropped to five per cent in 2012, the researchers say that still leaves around 300,000 children without internet access in their homes.

The researchers’ interviews with teenagers reveal that they felt shut out of their peer group socially and also disadvantaged in their studies as so much of the college or school work set for them to do at home required online research or preparation. One teenager, whose parents had separated, explained that he would ring his father who had internet access and any requested materials were then mailed to him through the post.

Researcher Dr Rebecca Eynon commented: ‘While it’s difficult to state a precise figure for teenagers without access to the internet at home, the fact remains that in the UK, there is something like 300,000 young people who do not – and that’s a significant number. Behind the statistics, our qualitative research shows that these disconnected young people are clearly missing out both educationally and socially.’

In an interview with a researcher, one 14-year old boy said: ‘We get coursework now in Year 9 to see what groups we’re going to go in Year 10. And people with internet, they can get higher marks because they can like research on the internet … my friends are probably on it [MSN] all the day every day. And like they talk about it in school, what happened on MSN.’

Another teenager, aged 15, commented: ‘It was bell gone and I have a lot of things that I could write and I was angry that I haven’t got a computer because I might finish it at home when I’ve got lots of time to do it. But because when I’m at school I need to do it very fast.’

Strikingly, this study contradicts claims that others have made about the potential risks of such technologies adversely affecting the ability of teenagers to concentrate on serious study. The researchers, Dr Chris Davies and Dr Rebecca Eynon, found no evidence to support this claim. Furthermore, their study concludes that the internet has opened up far more opportunities for young people to do their learning at home.

Dr Davies said: ‘Parental anxiety about how teenagers might use the very technologies that they have bought their own children at considerable expense is leading some to discourage their children from becoming confident users. The evidence, based on the survey and hundreds of interviews, shows that parents have tended to focus on the negative side – especially the distracting effects of social networking sites – without always seeing the positive use that their children often make of being online.’

Teenagers’ experiences of the social networking site Facebook appear to be mixed, says the study. Although some regarded Facebook as an integral part of their social life, others were concerned about the number of arguments that had escalated due to others wading in as a result of comments and photographs being posted.

The age of teenagers using Facebook for the first time was found to go down over the three year period from around 16 years old in 2008 to 12 or 13 years old by 2011. Interviews reveal that even the very youngest teenagers who were not particularly interested felt under some peer pressure to join. But the study also suggests that the popularity of Facebook is waning, with teenagers now exploring other forms of social networking.

Dr Davies commented: ‘There is no steady state of teenage technology use – fashions and trends are constantly shifting, and things change very rapidly when they do change.’

The research was part funded by Becta, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, a non-departmental public body formed under the last Labour government. The study findings are contained in a new book entitled, Teenagers and Technology, published by Routledge in November 2012.

However, the reality is far more nuanced and complex than this — when we empirically explore how young people really engage with the Internet and related technology we see a significant amount of diversity in how and why they use it, and the influences it has on their lives. We know from nationally representative survey data that around 10% of young people in the UK (aged 17–23) define themselves as people who no longer use the Internet, that is as ‘lapsed users’. This group is fascinating. Why do these people stop using the Internet given its prevalence and value in the lives of the majority of their peers? What difficulties do they face in being unable to connect properly with the online world?

The widely held and very powerful assumption by government, commercial organizations and the wider public that all young people are frequent and confident users of the Internet is clearly inaccurate. Worryingly, however, this public assumption that the current generation of youth is ‘born digital’ is so powerful that it has informed numerous policies and initiatives that determine young people’s lives. Furthermore, the majority of academic research investigating how young people access, use and experience the Internet actually focuses on those we might consider as belonging to the digital mainstream, with a relatively limited focus on those who do not use the Internet, or who use it in very limited ways. This is primarily because most of the work in this area is based on large scale surveys (which fail to pick up detail on minority groups) and because existing qualitative studies tend to focus on moderate to high-end Internet users, who are more willing to participate in academic studies; and who are also far easier to find and recruit.

A recent study undertaken by myself and Anne Geniets for the Nominet Trust examined why these young people are disconnected, how they think and feel about this disconnection, and the extent to which this is due to reasons of exclusion or choice. We also examined the implications for their daily lives and considered how the experiences of these young people could inform the UK’s digital inclusion strategy. Thirty-six in–depth interviews were undertaken with young people (aged 17-23) who considered themselves to be infrequent or lapsed Internet users.

We uncovered a complex set of reasons why these people are not online, including fear of bullying, literacy issues, poverty, lack of skills to use the Internet, and lack of access. However, we also found that the respondents generally recognised the huge importance of the Internet and the tangible benefits it brought to their (online) peers. Some were frustrated that they couldn’t join in; others were resigned about it. Only a few didn’t see the point of the Internet. When so much of today’s world is premised on effective use of the Internet to (for example) drive the economy and employment, this is worrying; particularly given the gap for these young people is only going to widen in the future. As more and more services both in and outside the public sector go ‘digital by default’, for example, when supermarkets only accept online applications, the relative disadvantage for this group increases.

It is therefore important to recognise that while the UK Government’s ‘digital by default’ strategy may be successful at encouraging the unwilling (but capable) online – such as many older users – it may not be appropriate for this group, who tend to be high users of government services but who for various reasons – cognitive, psychological, socio-cultural, physical and material – are still offline, despite recognising the Internet’s importance in the world around them. Perhaps most worrying (and something that was mentioned by many of our respondents) was that being young and therefore supposedly ‘digital’ – according to today’s societal norms – actually made it much harder for them to seek help. Simply recognising the fact that not all young people are digitally literate or active is important for the people who interact with them: for example teachers, potential employers, social workers, government employees, and job centre staff. We need to allow for the possibility that young people may need support in using the Internet, enable them to identify problems with their skill sets, and move forward with educational initiatives to ensure that all young people have an opportunity to fully explore the online world and develop the skills needed to support that process while they are still in education.

There were many surprises in this chronically under-researched group, particularly in what they understood by ‘Internet use’. Some defined themselves as non-users but still occasionally used email; others gave their email passwords to a friend to handle their accounts (which including writing emails) for them. This ambiguity surrounding user definitions of ‘use’ and ‘non-use’ should be recognised in future research on this topic; the concept of ‘meaningful use’ of the Internet should also be explored. In some ways this ambiguity offers something of a positive message: while these young people are well aware of their difference in relation to their peers, and do not consider themselves to be ‘proper’ Internet users, they are still sometimes able to access and use the Internet — if to a very limited extent. As this group is often willing to try to use the Internet, seeing it as a normal and necessary part of life, we believe that successful intervention is possible.

However, it was clear from the interviews that many of these young people where experiencing difficult situations — including homelessness, unemployment, bullying and increasing isolation. Being excluded from the Internet’s benefits means that these young people are probably even more likely to belong to a social ‘out–group’; and as social psychological research has shown, this can have a significant negative effect on identity development and the perception of self. For young people who are already disadvantaged this is obviously less than ideal. We need to encourage initiatives that develop and extend social capital for these young people, perhaps by facilitating connections between those who used to be outside the digital mainstream and those who are still outside it.

A good start might be to simply acknowledge that this group actually exists, and to adopt a more nuanced understanding of what it means to actually use the Internet in a meaningful way.

Is this aim of achieving user empowerment realistic? In their examination of health queries submitted to the NHS Direct online enquiry service, John Powell and Sharon Boden find that while patient empowerment does occur in the use of online health services, it is constrained and context dependent. Policymakers wishing to promote greater choice and control among health system users should therefore take account of the limits to empowerment as well as barriers to participation. The Dutch government’s online public national health and care portal similarly aims to facilitate consumer decision-making behavior and increasing transparency and accountability to improve quality of care and functioning of health markets. Interestingly, Hans Ossebaard, Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen and Erwin Seydel find the influence of the Dutch portal on choice behavior, awareness, and empowerment of users to actually be small.

The Internet is often discussed in terms of empowering (or even endangering) patients through broadening of access to medical and health-related information, but there is evidence that concerns about serious negative effects of using the Internet for health information may be ill-founded. The cancer patients in the study by Alison Chapple, Julie Evans and Sue Ziebland gave few examples of harm from using the Internet or of damage caused to their relationships with health professionals. While policy makers have tended to focus on regulating the factual content of online information, in this study it was actually the consequences of stumbling on factually correct (but unwelcome) information that most concerned the patients and families; good practice guidelines for health information may therefore need to pay more attention to website design and user routing, as well as to the accuracy of content.

Policy makers and health professionals should also acknowledge the often highly individual strategies people use to access health information online, and understand how these practices are shaped by technology — the study by Astrid Mager found that the way people collected and evaluated online information about chronic diseases was shaped by search engines as much as by their individual medical preferences.

Many people still lack the necessary skills to navigate online content effectively. Eszter Hargittai and Heather Young examined the experiences a diverse group of young adults looking for information about emergency contraception online, finding that the majority of the study group could not identify the most efficient way of acquiring emergency contraception in a time of need. Given the increasing trend for people to turn to the Internet for health information, users must possess the necessary skills to make effective and efficient use of it; an important component of this may concern educational efforts to help people better navigate the Web. Improving general e-Health literacy is one of several recommendations by Maria De Jesus and Chenyang Xiao, who examined how Hispanic adults in the United States search for health information online. They report a striking language divide, with English proficiency of the user largely predicting online health information-seeking behavior.

Lastly, but no less importantly, is the policy challenge of addressing the issue of patient trust. The study by Ulrike Rauer on the structural and institutional factors that influence patient trust in Internet-based health records found that while patients typically considered medical operators to be more trustworthy than non-medical ones, there was no evidence of a “public–private” divide; patients perceived physicians and private health insurance providers to be more trustworthy than the government and corporations. Patient involvement in terms of access and control over their records was also found to be trust enhancing.

A lack of policy measures is a common barrier to success of eHealth initiatives; it is therefore essential that we develop measures that facilitate the adoption of initiatives and that demonstrate their success through improvement in services and the health status of the population. The articles presented in this special issue of Policy & Internet provide the sort of evidence-based insight that is urgently needed to help shape these policy measures. The empirical research and perspectives gathered here will make a valuable contribution to future efforts in this area.

Three of the articles are the first to be published from the highly successful conference ‘Internet, Politics and Policy‘ held by the journal in Oxford, 16th-17th September 2010. You may access any of the articles below at no charge.

Helen Margetts: Editorial

Vili Lehdonvirta and Perttu Virtanen: A New Frontier in Digital Content Policy: Case Studies in the Regulation of Virtual Goods and Artificial Scarcity

Joon Hyoung Lim: Digital Divides in Urban E-Government in South Korea: Exploring Differences in Municipalities’ Use of the Internet for Environmental Governance

Darren G. Lilleker and Nigel A. Jackson: Towards a More Participatory Style of Election Campaigning: The Impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 General Election

Michael J. Santorelli: Regulatory Federalism in the Age of Broadband: A U.S. Perspective

Laura DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

Helen Margetts: Editorial

Ben Sayre, Leticia Bode, Dhavan Shah, Dave Wilcox, and Chirag Shah: Agenda Setting in a Digital Age: Tracking Attention to California Proposition 8 in Social Media, Online News and Conventional News

Kathleen McNutt and Adam Wellstead: Virtual Policy Networks in Forestry and Climate Change in the U.S. and Canada: Government Nodality, Internationalization and Actor Complexity

Julien Talpin and Stéphanie Wojcik: Deliberating Environmental Policy Issues: Comparing the Learning Potential of Online and Face-To-Face Discussions on Climate Change

Andrew A. Adams, Kiyoshi Murata, and Yohko Orito: The Development of Japanese Data Protection

Scott Jordan: The Application of Net Neutrality to Wireless Networks Based on Network Architecture

Alison Powell, Amelia Bryne, and Dharma Dailey: The Essential Internet: Digital Exclusion in Low-Income American Communities