I am thrilled to announce that our 2019 paper, titled “The Ability to Pay for Broadband” (Rhinesmith, Reisdorf, & Bishop) is now open open access in Communication Research and Practice. As I described in a previous post after the article was published,
“In our recent paper, published in a special issue of Communications Research and Practice, we present findings from two separate studies on digital inclusion in the United States that sought to gain a deeper understanding of the ability of low-income individuals to spend their money on wired broadband internet connections at home. We believe the findings from the studies can be useful to policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders interested in developing effective digital inclusion and broadband adoption policies.”
In the paper, we also introduced the idea of “broadband workarounds,” building on the work of Gasser (1986) to describe the ways in which people who cannot afford to pay for broadband engage in other ways to access the internet, such as through friends and family members and public libraries. As we learned immediately after our paper was published, in 2016 Monica Anderson and John Horrigan introduced the concept of a “workaround ecosystem” which was the same as what we learned through our research two years later. As they wrote in an article for the Pew Research Center,
“Instead, those with smartphones but not home broadband rely on a kind of ‘workaround ecosystem’ that is a combination of using their mobile devices along with other resources such as computers and Wi-Fi available at public libraries.”
Hopefully, these two studies can be looked at together in order to develop additional strategies to address individuals and families who cannot afford access to a high-speed, wired internet connection at home.