With poor internet, 'digital dignity' is lacking, researchers say: 'Waiting is a way of experiencing the effects of power'

The Federal Communications Commission estimates that 16 million people in rural America lack high-speed internet, but that number may be far higher – some estimates go as high as more than 150 million Americans lacking adequate broadband, according to new research in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, reports Kristi Eaton of The Daily Yonder. 

Researchers Nick Mathews of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Christopher Ali of Penn State conducted 19 interviews with families in an unnamed rural county on the East Coast who lacked adequate broadband connections. They came up with a new concept: "digital dignity," the idea that someone should have the same access to a digital life as anyone else.

“These people in this county and these people without broadband access . . . don’t have this sense of digital dignity because they do not live in the same way that we do, and it’s a fact that is underappreciated, and, frankly, is taken for granted,” Mathews told Eaton. “The idea that I can be talking to you on Zoom right now, or I can be looking up anything I want to right now, is . . . taken for granted by society in general. And there are millions of people who do not have this access, and they’re being left behind.”

The researchers found that waiting for an internet connection "is a common, stressful and vexing part of living," the lay summary of the report says. The authors' abstract says, "Waiting is a way of experiencing the effects of power. This article finds those waiting for fixed broadband connection are powerless to end the waiting and increasingly frustrated with the powerful—the governmental officials, policy makers, and broadband providers—who control their waiting."

Poor connection can lead to fundamental lifestyle changes. "In one case study, a family became a 'second-shift family,' meaning they often slept at unconventional hours," Eaton reports. "One teenager would get home from school, do her homework, eat dinner and go to bed at 7 p.m., so she could awake at 3 a.m. to be able to use the Internet. During the summer, she would sleep all day so she could use the Internet at night. Eventually, the parents started following the teenager’s lead."

This research also found that some rural workers are excluded from Zoom calls because they do not have broadband. “When you cannot participate in a meeting, or in a conversation with colleagues or with supervisors, that limits your potential for a promotion, and anything along those lines," Mathews told Eaton. "So it is a really dire situation for some of these people."