Access and Exclusion

On the website of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), the internet is described as an unevenly implemented and governed global communication system. Talking to Sneha from CIS, I am curious how she is researching questions of access and exclusion in relation to the internet(s).

"[...] the singular question that has been of interest for me is the way in which – because I come from a space of humanities, from the field of humanities, I studied English literature – so I think just trying to understand how different kinds of artifacts, texts, concepts, spaces, how they evolve with the transition to the digital. I think that for me has always been my primary guiding question. And for me that transcends also to different spaces on the internet.

How does our understanding of culture change with the coming in of social media? How does the understanding of concepts like privacy or networking change when you have the internet? How does the lack of connectivity impact access to a lot of important things like we've seen, say, during the pandemic or during times of natural disasters? The internet has come in very often to actually facilitate a lot of rescue efforts. Social media and the internet [are] being widely used to help with these things.

But at the same time, if you look at increased digitisation and access to welfare measures and things like that, not being online can very often be a point of disadvantage. Being constantly asked to fill out forms online or verify IDs online and things like that. Someone who is not online stands to be at a certain kind of disadvantage. Or if you can't use the internet in the language of your choice, how does that impact your everyday life? So I think just the fact that, and this is not something new that I'm saying, but you know, just the fact that there is both a sort of democratizing potential, but at the same time, the internet as a space can be in many ways quite exclusionary.