Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

The Internet’s economic impact is already substantial. Some 1.2 million people in America had jobs directly connected to the Internet in 2009, according to John Quelch, a professor at the Harvard Business School.  These are workers who “conduct advertising and commerce, build and maintain the infrastructure and facilitate its use.” And, Quelch writes, each of those web jobs support another 1.54 offline jobs, for a total of 3.05 million people working in jobs connected to the web.  The wages of these web-linked workers are about $300 billion, or “around two percent of U.S. GDP.”  

There’s little doubt that the FCC plan, if enacted, would give the economy a boost.  If nothing else, the process of creating new physical infrastructure itself will create employment.  The stimulus included $7.2 billion for broadband, and the FCC may seek as much as $25 billion more from Congress, according to news reports. That translates to a lot of cables being made and laid, which in turn translates to jobs.  It’s worth noting that the economic impact of that infrastructure spending will depend on where the cables come from, and what the workers are paid.  The Communications Workers of America, the union representing many telecom workers, has advocated that companies and municipalities getting broadband stimulus dollars be required to report “the number of jobs created and the wages/compensation of those jobs to ensure enforcement of Buy America and prevailing wage provisions.”  The fear of stimulus dollars going overseas is not unfounded; as my colleague Russ Choma has documented, 84% of the funds set aside for green energy have gone to foreign wind companies.

 

Expanded access to the Internet will also help people navigate the crisis: save money; find work; apply for public assistance. According to an April 2009 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 88% of Internet users "have used the internet to cope with the recession as they hunt for bargains, jobs, ways to upgrade their skills, better investment strategies, housing options, and government benefits." 

 

Internet access isn’t only critical for finding jobs and benefits.  It’s also increasingly essential for employment itself.  “Broadband access is increasingly a requirement of socio-economic inclusion, not an outcome of it,” write the authors of a recent Social Science Research Council study.  In one field interview, a librarian in Albuquerque told the researchers that there is “a huge disconnect with minimum-wage jobs, like for Walmart jobs, where you are required to apply online. Those people are looking for a minimum-wage job. They don’t have a computer at home.”  A woman in Minneapolis talked about the challenges of negotiating her Section 8 housing voucher via email, while others told the researchers about the frustration of setting up appointments with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement online.  A lack of access, or intermittent access, could mean an application not filed, a voucher lost, an appointment not made or not kept.  These all have serious economic consequences for the individuals involved, their households, and their communities. 

 

Unfortunately, those hardest hit by the recession – people who were already on the edge, surviving on low income – are the least likely to have access to the Internet.  Less than 30% of families earning under $15,000 a year have regular broadband access, and that rises to just over 35% of families bringing in $15,000 and $25,000, according to a February 2010 NTIA survey (pdf).  The federal minimum wage is $7.25, which means workers earn $15,080 a year – if they can find a minimum wage job. 

 

The importance of the Internet in the Great Recession also goes beyond job creation and job hunting.  Broadband allows people to share their experiences.  The Pew study found that "some 34% of online economic users – about 30% of the online population and 23% of the entire adult population -- have contributed content and commentary about the recession online." Within that group, "11% of online economic users say they have shared photo, video, or audio files about economic issues on the internet." 

 

This isn’t just about feeling good – although that’s important, and getting more so.  Depression and mental health issues are on the rise, particularly among people who have lost jobs – and those lost jobs are often accompanied by lost health insurance, and lost mental health benefits.  A survey conducted in October 2009 by three mental health advocacy groups found that unemployed workers were four times as likely to report “symptoms consistent with severe mental illness” than employed workers.  Thirteen percent of the unemployed workers surveyed reported thoughts of harming themselves.  Even workers who had jobs, but had been hit with pay cuts or reduced hours, were found to have higher rates of mental illness symptoms.  The Internet can have an impact there as well; another Pew study found that three quarters of online economic users turned to the Web to “relax and take their minds off the recession.”  

 

But the potential impact of expanded access goes beyond the individual, beyond the communities that would get faster, cheaper Internet.  Access to the Internet is a critical element of community-based journalism and story-telling, and that, in turn, is essential to shifting the narrative of the economic downturn.  A Pew study from October 2009 found that the crisis has been framed from the top down, and the stories of people affected by the crisis have gone almost entirely unheard.  News coverage has reflected “the concerns of institutions more than the lives of everyday Americans.” 

 

The needs and experiences of regular people have been essentially invisible in the media since the recession hit. Workers and citizens were the “catalysts” for just 2% of the economic stories, the Pew study found, while the actions of the White House and federal agencies drove 32% of the stories, and business activities 21%.  More than three quarters of the stories about the economy had datelines in either New York or Washington, D.C., and of the rest, a substantial number were datelined in Los Angeles or Atlanta.  Just over 2% of economic stories focused on how the crisis has affected people’s lives: food and retail prices, Social Security and Medicare, education cutbacks, health care costs. 

 

The report also found that once the political battles had eased in the spring of 2009, and the stock market began stabilizing, the print and broadcast media began to lose interest, cutting back on economic coverage.  

 

But as the almost 17% of the workforce that is unemployed, working part time for economic reasons, or too discouraged to seek work will tell you, all is not yet well in the economy.  Greater access to the Internet won’t suddenly launch the concerns and needs of working people (or aspiring workers) to the top of the political or news agenda.  It will, however, give them a vehicle to communicate with each other and to share their stories with national news organizations and local news startups.  

 

Internet access will give hidden Americans an avenue to press upon the public consciousness the disheartening experience of the long-term unemployed, the struggle of the hungry families, the shame and anxiety of the underwater homeowner.  

 

How a problem is framed has an impact on the solutions proposed to solve it.  If the problem is that the stock market is down, and credit markets are tight, the solutions will focus on stabilizing the market and increasing liquidity.  If the problem is, however, that people are hungry, that work is scarce, that foreclosures continue to mount, that unemployment benefits are running out, that COBRA is out of reach – then the solutions are quite possibly very different.