Special Issue: Information Access Practices

Access to information is riding a turbulent sea of costs, technology shifts, and ever-rising requirements for digital connectivity. Although the notion of information as a foundation of democracy seems commonplace in the United States, it took the COVID-19 pandemic to drive home the disarray of access around the country and across the globe. This collection of articles begins to grapple with some of the fine-grained issues around access. The broader subject of the "digital divide" has received a lot of attention as a proxy for ideas around digital access. Understanding of the divide has evolved alongside the internet itself. The concept of a digital divide drove a great deal of scholarly and policy work examining capacities to engage in mediated work and educational opportunities, and worries about equity undergirded those inquiries. We date that history to the late twentieth century when statistics about the distribution of computers prompted questions about how this potentially powerful resource might reshape peoples' capabilities unevenly. 1 As waves of innovation shifted the location of the newest set of abilities—from using computers to using the internet to using mobile phones and apps—the idea of access has become inscribed with the broader notion of being connected and being capable of interacting online practically as easily as one interacts offline. Documenting the extent and quality of access around the globe, often called the "first level" of the digital divide, comprises many research efforts. 2 Indeed, the latest federal funding targeting broadband in 2023–2024 depends on accurate broadband infrastructure maps and locating unserved populations. 3 The "second level" of the divide refers to the disparities in computer and internet uses and skills, whereas the "third level" is identified more closely with understanding meaningful use of digital resources, referring to specific subpopulations' needs. 4 The latter may require, for example, skills in completing online forms for employment as opposed to the ability to use word processing or spreadsheet programs. However, we know less about the success of institutions such as schools and libraries or other community programs intervening in these realms. On the subject of physical access to a network, deficiencies in providing connectivity to rural regions in the United States are well known in terms of populations lacking the ability or financial resources to subscribe to a provider network. 5 Measuring digital literacies in order to understand how different populations acquire or use skills to operate online has illuminated the importance of teaching and learning environments that can address gaps. 6 A raft of studies has examined certain populations, including the elderly, children, households with children, and households in rural regions. The same explications for a lack of broadband infrastructure—lack of population density and perceived lack of financial incentives—also exist with respect to Tribal Nations—another severely unconnected population segment. Indigenous communities, however, suffer the added burden of the legacies of racist and colonialist policies that denied them access to the communication technologies that many non-native peoples in the United States take for granted. 7 Yet most of those investigations reflected a model of access focused on "subscribers" in the home (or sometimes the workplace), with access provided by a commercial vendor. They necessarily frame access as a consumer good and rely on notions of supply and demand. In contrast, the articles here open this model and explore access beyond the consumer model. Marketplace dynamics have had a heavy role in defining where physical access is easy to provide and cost efficient for vendors, and studies have shown how conditions of competition among access providers catalyze more affordable rates. 8 That model, however, ignores the broader community and institutional response to digital needs, as well as the policy frameworks that have sought to remedy the digital divide with plans such as E-rate. The federal E-rate program, which subsidizes connectivity and devices used in schools and libraries under language in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, acknowledged the role of these important community sites. However, its budget never kept pace with demand, and some institutions found its paperwork demands too overwhelming. 9 Now, nearly 30 years after the establishment of E-rate and against a backdrop in which access needs have intensified, there is broader acknowledgment and support for the gains that might be realized with different approaches to facilitating access. Access equates to resources and agency. It telegraphs maneuverability in an environment that has migrated toward mediated resources and action of all sorts. If a lot of the research on the digital divide has focused on individuals' correlates with having or lacking access, the investigations here go beyond that level of analysis and seek to explain some of the community-based interventions that drive new solutions and even redefine access to mean more than being able to connect to the internet. In this special issue, these articles define a second-order analysis targeting the remediation of the digital divide. Organizations including schools and libraries have emerged as important sites of access; states are mounting new programs to tackle affordability; and some governmental programs are attempting to go beyond problematic federal subsidy programs. Access can be facilitated or constrained through specific policies, practices, institutions, and social or civic norms. For example, several US states have passed legislation to restrict minors' access to social media platforms, though those laws face numerous legal challenges. 10 Access can also be constrained by an inability to purchase, maintain, and use technology such as computers, mobile devices, and the internet. Yet most nations have adopted so-called sunshine or Freedom of Information Act laws, enabling citizens to access government information. 11 In the same vein, public libraries have been called the "quintessential locus for the exercise of the right to receive information and ideas" by one US court, yet in this current decade, they are beset by new attempts to limit the types and availability of certain materials. 12Community capacity, particularly in smaller and perhaps rural communities, to address access problems by building or planning for improved connectivity, is receiving renewed attention in part because there are new sources of funding to remedy their infrastructural problems but also because organizations and towns are willing to move outside the box of the consumer internet model. After all, access is not simply an individual problem: it is a social problem. Sites of social infrastructure like schools and libraries are tackling it. All four articles in this special issue focus on a broader approach to information access. They refrain from conceptualizing access as a simple binary (one does or does not have access), and instead illustrate a contextual and complex framework through which to examine communities' ability to maneuver and thrive in the networked age. Strover et al. , for example, discuss how some Texas public libraries attempted to bridge the digital divide by offering "navigator" services through 1-year grants. The digital navigation model ideally addresses all aspects of the digital divide simultaneously (internet connectivity, devices, affordability, digital skills, community needs, and local partnerships) to help people escape the confines of the divide. Many libraries and institutions are adopting some or part of the digital navigator models, but this research urges caution with respect to some of the implementation tangles that libraries may face. Though the ten libraries they examined had the best of intentions, implementing the complex concepts of digital navigators was only partially successful. The community-based partnerships analyzed by Ventimiglia et al. were more successful. They looked at university–community efforts to bring broadband to rural, underserved communities, and based on their work, offer several suggestions for these sorts of partnerships in the future. One of the programs mentioned by Ventimiglia is the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which Galperin and coauthors focus on in their article. These authors investigate the social acceptance of that broadband program, which offers a 30 per month subsidy against the monthly cost of connectivity and hypothesize that there may be some stigma associated with receiving "welfare. " Are local attitudes toward welfare correlated with the take-up (or lack thereof) of broadband subsidies? Are other types of subsidy programs similarly affected? Using two different measurements to approximate local attitudes toward welfare, they found an inverse relationship between anti-welfare attitudes and participation in ACP and/or Lifeline, programs designed to help low-income households afford broadband and phone services. After taking a broad view of access and connectivity with Galperin et al. , we next turn to an in-depth exploration of individual users' access to diverse information online within the context of a school program. Kammer's qualitative study investigates the implementation of so-called 1: 1 programs in high schools, the programs that award devices such as laptops or tablets to each student. Although their goal is to solve the access problem by making sure each person has a working device, in fact, there are so many restrictions on the devices and their ability to be used on various networks that they constrain and frustrate students. Kammer urges more careful consideration of how institutions might balance individual access benefits, learning outcomes, and institutional benefits. As portrayed by these four studies, information access is a broad idea that must be conceptualized in specific contexts. The United Nations' Declarations of Human Rights (1948) states, "everyone has the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" (Article 19). 13 However, the interpretation and implementation of this statement are messy, uneven, and difficult to measure. The four articles in our special issue provide unique perspectives and insights into this process, and they signal a better understanding of how institutions can intervene in improved information access and where policy might achieve results.