First Monday

The Essential Internet: Results from a study into household Internet use at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation by Michel Mersereau



Abstract
This paper presents highlights of research conducted into the Internet supported household activities of residents at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). The routines of residents in five distinct basic needs activity areas were examined in an effort to identify the role of the Internet in supporting these undertakings. The results indicate that the Internet can be characterized as an essential technical resource that supports the stability of TCHC households by helping to multiply and interconnect the activities that constitute household routines. By providing an explanatory model of the Internet’s role in supporting the stability of TCHC households, this research advances an argument for public intercession in the provisioning of household Internet services to help redress the digital divide in Canada’s most populous city.

Contents

Introduction
Framing the digital divide
Framing the Essential Internet
Policy approaches to remediating Internet exclusion in Canada
TCHC residential facility overview
Resident interviews
Basic needs activity areas
Barriers to obtaining & maintaining Internet access
Discussion
Summary

 


 

Introduction

This discussion presents the results of doctoral research performed between December 2018 and February 2019 at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC), the second largest social housing undertaking in North America (Toronto Community Housing Corporation, 2018). The objective of the study was to examine the ways in which household Internet services may be characterized as essential to the basic needs activities of low-income TCHC residents. The research conducted in this study situates Internet services as technical resources utilized by TCHC residents to mobilize and coordinate their household activities. The routines of TCHC residents in five interrelated basic needs activity areas were investigated in an effort to identify and localize the role of Internet services in facilitating and supporting these undertakings.

The results of this study complements and advances a long-standing research agenda concerned with the contours of the digital divide by illustrating how the Internet plays a key role in supporting and enabling the basic needs activities of TCHC residents, and is subsequently informative of the stability of their households. Although Internet services were integrated into the household routines of all the TCHC residents who participated in the study, prominent levels of interdependency between household stability and household Internet use were observed in elderly and family residences. In the former, Internet services are frequently leveraged in an effort to mitigate mobility constraints that can compromise a residents’ ability to perform healthcare, nutrition, and banking activities, and were subsequently observed to yield a net increase in social and self-care activities localized within the residential facility. In family households, practitioner labour associated with direct and indirect caregiving responsibilities (household maintenance, schoolwork, public transit passes, etc.) is highly contingent on household Internet services. In these cases, household Internet need is conflated by the online delivery of services in key basic needs areas, and by pressures placed on caregivers to multiply task efficiencies while constrained by income sources that are liminal to the poverty threshold.

These results support calls for public policy mechanisms aimed at redressing connectivity divides through the provisioning of universal and non-excludable Internet services to low-income households. At this juncture, the data collected over the course of the study has already gained the interest of municipal policy-makers in the City of Toronto. The findings presented in this paper have been taken up in policy discussions at the City of Toronto’s Digital Access Steering Committee, the Office of the Deputy Mayor, and by sitting officials of Toronto’s Economic Development Committee. The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded issues of Internet exclusion, and municipal policy-makers appear motivated to actively pursue countermeasures to diffuse Internet access within socially housed and low-income communities. In April of 2020, the City of Toronto announced the deployment of WiFi architecture in ten low-income communities across the city in partnership telecommunications services providers (Toronto Media Relations Department, 2020). The initiative, intended as a bridging mechanism to support vulnerable households through the COVID-19 shutdown, is targeted at shelter facilities and long-term care homes, and aims to provide free public WiFi access for residents within the service range for up to six months. Among other long-term proposals currently being reviewed by municipal staff is an analysis of the suitability of Toronto’s extensive fibre infrastructure to support wireless mesh networking. Although a fledgling public mesh undertaking, provisioned and supported by Toronto Mesh (2020), deployed its first supernode in July 2020, the extent to which municipal officials intend to support, or integrate with, this initiative is unclear.

 

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Framing the digital divide

The research presented in this paper inherits its rationale and purpose from a diverse body of Canadian scholarship which has traced the contours of the ‘digital divide’ from the early 1990s onwards, and intervened in policy and community level undertakings intended to ameliorate the technical and cultural barriers to essential digital technologies which can foreclose on the most liminal levels of active citizenry. Although ranging in disciplinary scope and interest, scholarship intersecting with issues surrounding equitable access to digital technologies, and more broadly the Internet itself, has advanced a conceptualization of the digital divide from one primarily concerned with access to the material infrastructure of the Internet (broadband connections and computer technology), to a framework that situates barriers to access as lenses through which historically intransigent social, economic, and cultural inequities are seen to persist.

While a comprehensive historiography of scholarship surrounding the digital divide is beyond the scope of this paper, a brief overview of significant milestones illustrates the coupling of scholarly interventions to trends in regulatory oversight and public policy mechanisms. Amendments to Canada’s Telecommunications Act in 1993 (Canada Parliament, 1993), deregulating first long-distance telephony followed soon after by regulatory forbearance in the digital media domain, effectively set the stage for contestations over the subordination of public interests to commercial interests in the curation of Canada’s digital landscape. While ostensibly intended to promote the diffusion of affordable Internet services through the competitive market, the oligopolistic characteristics of Canada’s telecommunications service market all but ensured that newly deregulated TSPs would have free hand in differentiating service markets based on capital prerogatives. Scholars such as Dwayne Winseck (1997, 1995) and Robert E. Babe (1990) questioned the motivations and intent underpinning deregulation in Canada’s telecommunications market, drawing attention to parallels with American telecommunications policy, and highlighting apparent risks to the communications rights of Canadians in a loosely regulated service market.

The 1990s also saw the emergence of Canada’s most notable, and long running public undertaking in the provisioning of Internet service delivery through Industry Canada’s Community Access Program (CAP) (Industry Canada, 2009). The CAP provided Internet access through a range of intermediaries, such as public libraries and public schools, to communities identified as most at risk of digital exclusion (Indigenous communities, rural communities, recent immigrant communities, etc.). Moll and Shade (2008) describe how the political rhetoric surrounding successive iterations of the CAP is illustrative of shifts in the conceptualization of Canada’s digital divide; from one primarily concerned with the economic exclusion associated with Internet disenfranchisement, to a framework for identifying how differentiated access and literacies were contributing to fractures in the cultural fabric of local communities. Although the CAP was nominally regarded as successful in achieving its connectivity objectives, many scholars were critical of the reductionism embodied in the assessment mechanisms employed by federal policy-makers. Community Informatics scholarship, spearheaded by research collectives such as the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN) (Clement, et al., 2004), instead suggested that assessments of broadband undertakings should consider the autonomy of local communities, both in oversight and in the design of community networks, as the primary indicators of the long-term sustainability of these initiatives.

Scholarship through the late 2000s and early 2010s evidences a greater emphasis on framing the digital divide through the capabilities and constructive outcomes associated with Internet use, employing the concept as a signpost for systemic barriers delimiting the democratizing potential of the technology for distinct users, and suggesting that these barriers are most prominent within vulnerable communities (Raboy and Shtern, 2010). Community level undertakings, partly informed by the vacuum left in the wake of the withdrawal of CAP funding, are seen as a response to widening gaps in broadband availability and affordability (Clement, et al., 2012). Notable public undertakings include municipally provisioned WiFi networks in Fredericton New Brunswick (eZone), Montréal Quebec (Île Sans Fil), and in Lac Seul Ontario (Lac Seul Network) (Middleton and Crow, 2008). The persistence of inequitable access to the Internet within Indigenous communities, in particular, intersects with historical patterns of economic, political and cultural marginalization of First Nations peoples in Canada. Mobilization around the issue of broadband exclusion in First Nations communities, highlighted through the community network undertakings of the First Nations Technology Council of British Columbia (Smith, 2008) and the First Mile Connectivity Consortium in New Brunswick (McMahon, et al., 2014), reflected a practical need for stable Internet services within Indigenous communities (to support healthcare, education, and employment needs), as well as a desire to mobilize and concentrate self-generative capital resources within them.

Scholarly efforts over the last decade have helped to shift conceptualization of the digital divide from the discursive to the practical domain (Stevenson, 2009), with emphasis on the routines and daily practices increasingly structured by Internet based technologies (Andrejevic, 2011; Pariser, 2011). Public interest advocates, mobilized around persistent access and affordability barriers (Bishop and Lau, 2016), contributed key data informing a landmark decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in 2016 in which broadband access was situated as a basic service in Canada (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, 2016). Digital inequity, as both subject matter and as a lens through which socio-systemic divides are exposed, constitutes a domain of enquiry for intersecting critical scholarship which includes; feminist critiques of content and labour segmentation informed by Internet technologies (Gilbert, 2010; Shepherd, 2014), analyses of political disenfranchisement conflated by deficits in technological capital (Wolfson, et al., 2017), and expositions of racial and class based injustice illuminated by the use of Internet technologies in the provisioning of government services (Gangadharan, 2017), and in the course of urban revitalization (Straubhaar, et al., 2012).

 

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Framing the Essential Internet

While trends in scholarship have moved towards explicating the ways in which digital exclusion is embodied and expressed through the capabilities of individuals and communities, to date, there has been only cursory attention directed towards concretely characterizing the Internet as an essential technology; one that is increasingly implicated in the performance of the mundane and routine activities that constitute a basic threshold of civic participation. The first step in bridging this gap in the topical scholarship is to redress a tendency to reconcile the essentiality of the Internet against the performance of discrete tasks and activities. Where the Internet is nominally framed as ‘essential’ in contemporary literature (Haight, et al., 2014; Internet Society, 2017; Public Policy Forum, 2018), discussion tends to focus on ‘how’ people use the Internet (e.g., how people use the Internet to apply for jobs) rather than on what people actually do that is mediated by the Internet, and consequently foreclosed on when disconnected. Coupling Internet need to discrete tasks not only obscures the infrastructural characteristics of the technology, but can confound policy action calling for the allocation of public assets to support its provisioning as a household service. Most problematically, reconciling Internet need to discrete tasks suggests that community intermediaries should suffice as proxies in lieu of stable household Internet services (Fontur International, Inc. and MDB Insight, Inc., 2017); a proposition whose shortcomings have been exposed during the COVID-19 shutdown.

Amy Gonzales’ (2016) comprehensive qualitative analysis of the barriers faced by low-income households in maintaining stable Internet services constitutes one of the most salient examples of scholarship which situates the Internet as a ‘patterning’ technology, one that is informative of basic needs activities. For Gonzales’ participants, frequent periods of service disruption conflate the affordability barriers that characterize their struggles to maintain household Internet services, and compromise their abilities to perform necessary tasks (obtaining prescriptions, job applications, etc.). Although a range of basic needs (education, healthcare, and housing) are situated as determinants of household Internet need, the activities of participants in these areas are discussed incidentally, and as background subject matter to the primary analysis concerning the precarious stability of household Internet connectivity. Gonzales’ primary thesis related to affordability barriers faced by low-income households is nonetheless instructive of the analysis of the basic needs activities of TCHC residents presented in this paper. Among the most salient observations emerging from the study is the extent to which family households are at risk of, and experience, periods of long-term Internet service disruption resulting from affordability constraints.

The second step in explicating the essentiality of the Internet is resolving blind-spots in quantitative and public domain metrics (Haight, et al., 2014; Rajabiun and McKelvey, 2019) with granular, qualitative data illustrative of the realities of Internet use in daily life. This trajectory complements the rationale forwarded by Melissa Gilbert (2010), who argued for a research agenda that situates the digital divide as one of many terminal expressions of systemic racial, gender, and class based inequities. Gilbert suggests that explicating these interrelationships in the domain of individual practices and activities is necessary in order to glean a more fulsome understanding of the contours of the digital divide. Gilbert’s framework contains two propositions for ongoing research reconciled by the analysis presented below. First, the role of local social networks in facilitating preliminary access to, and subsequent literacy in the use of Internet technologies within elderly households. Second, the systematic investigation of the basic needs activities of TCHC residents furthers Gilbert’s assertion that ‘technological capacity’ [1] ought to be assessed in the context of interrelated activities.

The results of this research suggest that the essential characteristics of the Internet emerge through the technology’s role in patterning and interconnecting activities across the generalizable domains of basic needs practice areas. Although adoption and use of the Internet in TCHC households must also be understood in the context of a digitalized service environment, one in which access to government services, education, transportation, and basic needs provisions is increasingly contingent on Internet access, the data collected from TCHC residents suggests both capable and literate use of the technology in maintaining their households. In other words, we must be cautious to not overlook evidence of capable and literate use of the Internet in the mundane, routine activities of day-to-day life by households who experience the reality of poverty on a daily basis.

 

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Policy approaches to remediating Internet exclusion in Canada

Policy mechanisms employed by all three levels of government in Canada since the mid-1990s evidence three typical approaches to redressing Internet connectivity divides: incentivizing the retail Internet market (Rajabiun and McKelvey, 2019), investment in public WiFi networks (Hudson, 2010; Middleton, 2009), and investment in community intermediaries such as public libraries and schools (Clement, et al., 2012; Gangadharan, 2017; McNally, et al., 2017). The Community Access Program deployed by Industry Canada between 1994 and 2012 subsidized satellite and ground based infrastructure to community ‘anchor institutions’ such as schools and community centers, the Broadband Canada program undertaken by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) most recent Broadband Fund both focus on incentivizing private and public-private partnerships in an effort to increase competitiveness in the retail service market rather than directly subsidizing broadband infrastructure projects (Rajabiun and McKelvey, 2019). Provincially, the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 has prompted the Government of Ontario to allocate funding in support of the retail market for fixed and mobile Internet with its recently announced Up to Speed fund (Ontario Office of the Premier, 2020b), an initiative that intends to incentivize mobile and fixed Internet deployment in rural communities by allocating Can$150 million dollars for public-private-partnerships (PPP) projects, and by facilitating access to provincial infrastructural assets (provincial railways, hydro-electrical towers, etc.) for program entrants.

As with the approach taken by federal and provincial governments, a 2017 study commissioned by the City of Toronto entitled Toronto Broadband Study (Fontur International, Inc. and MDB Insight, Inc., 2017) recommended that the city also incentivize competition in the retail service market by leveraging public right-of-ways for infrastructural undertakings. The report additionally recommends the city broaden its support for community intermediary initiatives such as the Toronto Public Library’s (TPL) WiFi Hotspot Lending Program: a public-private partnership between the TPL, Rogers Communications, and the Google Corporation where mobile Internet devices are provisioned to low-income households on temporary loan (Toronto Public Library, 2018). By providing devices and connectivity to applicants, the TPL’s lending program differentiates itself as an example of direct government intercession in broadband provisioning. Although notable, the TPL’s lending program suffers the same limitations associated with policy that situates community intermediaries as connectivity proxies; it is temporary and excludable.

The broadband penetration data presented in the Toronto Broadband Study parrots claims made by the CRTC in its 2016 Basic Service ruling regarding the availability of 50Mbps+ services in 82 percent of Canadian households (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, 2016; Economic Development Committee, 2017). Recent public domain metrics cast doubt on these claims by indicating that on-the-ground broadband services in urban households are well below the thresholds claimed by the CRTC and telecommunications service providers (TSP) (Rajabiun and McKelvey, 2019). This discrepancy is suggested to be a result of major TSPs failing to update legacy infrastructure. More troubling is the indication that these discrepancies are most prevalent in low-income communities. The report frames low-cost service plans, such as Rogers Connected for Success program, as suitable connectivity mechanisms that the city should actively promote throughout its social housing portfolio. While nominally cost effective, these plans are provisioned exclusively to households pending verification of their subsidized housing status by Rogers Communications. In this way, these programs may constitute a form of ‘digital redlining’, whereby a community’s ability to access necessary provisions is made contingent on the categorization and commodification of the economic disenfranchisement of entire communities (U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 2016; Noble, 2018).

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated gaps in household Internet service provisioning across Ontario, and illustrates the shortcomings of traditional policy approaches to remediating digital exclusion in low-income communities. The Ontario provincial state of emergency declaration in March 2020, ordering all non-essential businesses and service providers to cease public facing operations, effectively shuttered public schools, public libraries, community centers and businesses that provided critical access for households experiencing limited or disrupted Internet access (Ontario Office of the Premier, 2020a). Unprecedented as the shutdown was, the closure also exposes the limitations of community intermediaries as connectivity bridges for underserved and Internet excluded households. With communities and households confined to a de facto state of ‘lock down’, and with essential services, information and resources provisioned almost entirely online, the assumption of broadly diffused Internet connectivity constitutes a dangerous overstatement. Under these circumstances, it is incumbent upon regulators and policy-makers to question whether or not the Internet is more suitably framed as a public, rather than a consumer good in their social housing portfolios, and to consider alternatives to its provisioning by the commercial sector.

 

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TCHC residential facility overview

Characteristics for each of the three residential facilities sampled in the study are presented below. Locality and accessibility to transportation, retail, commercial and food services, in particular, emerged as mediators of the Internet supported basic needs activities of residents over the course of data collection.

55 Rankin Cres.

The TCHC facility at 55 Rankin Cres. is comprised of a 16-story residential building containing 110 units that range in size from bachelor to one and two bedroom capacities. Acquired by the TCHC in 2005, this facility is one of 83 TCHC buildings that provides housing exclusively for elderly residents (55 years and older), 98 percent of whom qualify as Rent Geared to Income (RGI) tenants. Housing provisions for elderly residents, in particular, is contingent on the provisioning of physical and mobility assistive devices as well as the medical equipment required to allow these residents to remain in their homes as they age. In addition to subsidized housing, since 2012 the facility has functioned as the central operating unit of the Loyola Arrupe Centre for Active Living (LA), an outreach agency that is jointly funded by the municipal and provincial government to facilitate educational, healthcare, nutrition, social and spiritual programming and services for senior populations. The specialized support services provisioned at 55 Rankin Cres. were described by participants as being critical to their personal well-being and self-care abilities. The services provisioned by the LA Centre emerged in response to the TCHC’s decision in 2010 to officially designate 55 Rankin Cres. as a senior’s residential facility within its portfolio. Programming and services facilitated by the LA Centre are individually provisioned by a range of volunteer and not-for-profit organizations including the Davenport Perth Neighbourhood and Community Health Centre, the Toronto District School Board, West Toronto Services for Seniors, Toronto Public Health, and Second Harvest Nutrition Services.

Data collected in interviews with 16 residents from 55 Rankin Cres. reveal the following characteristics of this participant segment:

While sharing similar subsidized housing and fixed income characteristics as households from the two other facilities included in this study, the basic needs activities of the residents of 55 Rankin Cres. are uniquely informed by their status as elderly persons with distinct health and mobility needs.

50 Regent Park Blvd.

The residential facility at 50 Regent Park Blvd. is the second of a five-phase, 20-year housing development project situated at the south-east juncture of Parliament and Dundas Streets in downtown Toronto. The development project itself constitutes the TCHC’s efforts in pursuing a public-private-partnership (PPP) model in order to procure assets for residential and commercial use and to alleviate the capital constraints associated with maintaining deteriorating properties. The development of 50 Regent Park Blvd. is illustrative of the City’s efforts to mobilize its planning resources in reconciling its social housing responsibilities; seeking high-value housing development with the commercial sector alongside the use of its planning authority ensures the availability of affordable units on the primary rental market. While nominally effective in ensuring that affordable housing is made available under these circumstances, demands on household incomes are not limited to rent alone, but encompass a range of intersecting basic needs expenses such as food, transportation, clothing, healthcare and utilities.

Data collected in interviews with six residents from 50 Regent Park Blvd. reveal the following characteristics of this participant segment:

The basic needs activities of the residents at 50 Regent Park Blvd. have been uniquely shaped by rapid re-development in the Regent Park neighbourhood. Still constituting one of Toronto’s most culturally diverse, yet lowest income communities, Regent Park has seen increases in its population commensurate with private housing developments provisioned at or above market rates along the Dundas and Parliament Street corridors (Economic Development, 2014; J.C. Williams Group, 2015). The diffusion of higher incomes within these facilities has not yet been enough to significantly alter the average income distribution of the area, but as increasing numbers of commercial and retail service providers focus their business models on that nascent income cohort, and occupy more ground level spaces, the potential for constraints and disruptions to local service affordability persist.

2739 Victoria Park Ave.

2739 Victoria Park Ave. is one of the older residential facilities in the TCHC’s housing portfolio, acquired in the early 1990s. The three-building complex is characteristic of the 2000+ high rise facilities that were purpose built in the city between 1950 and 1970, and that currently house approximately 1 million of the City of Toronto’s renting households (Tassony, 2017; Toronto Community Housing Corporation, 2016, 2015). Subsidized households constitute 95 percent of the occupants of the three buildings at 2739 Victoria Park, with 62 percent of those comprised of households with school age children. Pockets of retail and commercial services are concentrated in plaza and strip mall complexes dispersed around the intersection of Victoria Park Ave. and Sheppard Ave. East. The neighbourhood’s proximity to two major surface streets and two primary highways (Highway 401 and Highway 404) informs the relatively high percentage of personal vehicle ownership amongst the neighbourhood’s population (65 percent) (Economic Development, 2019). TCHC residents, in contrast, evidence a low percentage of personal vehicle ownership (10 percent), with none of the residents participating in the study reporting ownership of or access to a personal vehicle. Nearly all of the transportation needs of TCHC residents interviewed are serviced by the two major bus routes along Victoria Park Ave. and Sheppard Ave. East. Participants from this facility, especially those with younger children, describe the problem of readily accessible commercial and retail services as one of the motivations for their adoption of Internet based service delivery, citing the savings in transportation time alone as beneficial to their daily routines. Managing transportation, finance, and education needs in households with multiple family members emerged as a persistent theme over the course of data collection at 2739 Victoria Park Ave.

Data collected in interviews with seven residents from 2739 Victoria Park Ave. reveal the following characteristics of this participant segment:

Residents at 2739 Victoria Park Ave. maintain higher cost Internet service plans (50 Mbps+) that are frequently coupled with mobile plans. For households managing mobile plans for multiple family members the monthly costs can exceed Can$225. These residents describe the necessity of higher cost Internet services in support of multiple user needs, including the academic needs of their children and employment obligations, and that offsetting these costs has required residents to incur credit card debt and forgo ancillary expenses.

 

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Resident interviews

Semi-structured interviews with TCHC residents were undertaken over a three-month period at three TCHC residential facilities selected on the basis of Rent Geared to Income (RGI) occupancy ratio and the demographic characteristics of the resident population; elderly, single, and family occupancy. Primary documentation sources included annual reports (Toronto Community Housing Corporation, 2020, 2019, 2018), independent analysis of the TCHC (Crean, 2013) and the housing market in the City of Toronto (Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis, 2019), as well as staff reports to Toronto City Council and the TCHC governing committee (City Manager’s Office, 2018). Interviews of approximately 120 minutes each were undertaken with participants in an effort to expound on the routines that constitute their basic needs activities. The first hour of the interview session took the form of a semi-structured interview where participants described their routines across a range of basic needs activity areas. In the second half of the interview session participants engaged in a guided visualization exercise intended to explicate the key activity areas identified in the first half. The visualization exercises provided participants the opportunity to arrange individual tasks into activity patterns, identify associated labour and income expenditures, and to compare activities under different conditions (Internet supported versus no Internet support) (Figure 1). Interview sessions were audio recorded and typewritten notes were taken throughout.

 

Participant visualization exercises
 
Figure 1: Participant visualization exercises.

 

Experimental design methods were not employed in this study. As such, the validity of household income and expense data provided by residents was reconciled against secondary data sources from the Ontario Disability Support Program (2019), Service Canada (2019), as well as capital budget and oversight reports published by the TCHC (2020) and the City Ombudsperson (Crean, 2013). For example, the benefit schedule for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) indicates a payment of Can$2,520 per month for a single parent household with three dependent children in a three-bedroom unit. The TCHC’s subsidy schedule indicates that this rental unit would be provisioned to this family at a cost of Can$846 per month, resulting in a net discretionary household income of Can$1,674 per month. Together, these sources constituted the primary methods for assessing the generalizability of income and expense data provisionally collected from residents.

 

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Basic needs activity areas

Social theory and healthcare frameworks were drawn upon to operationalize the basic needs activities of households (Laurie, 2008; Raphael, 2002). Poverty and low-income status are framed as distinct, yet co-determinant phenomenon, with the latter situated as an outcome of inequitable wealth distribution, and the former as a conditional state which can foreclose on the capabilities of individuals to sustain their basic needs and actualize self-betterment. Health policy researchers have defined seven basic needs areas that intersect with the poverty threshold in Canada (Mikkonen and Raphael, 2010; Raphael, 2011), and which were subsequently operationalized in the study as basic needs activity areas: education, health, childcare, nutrition, and finance & income, transportation, and social service access. These seven basic needs activity areas constitute the primary operational categories that guided interviews with TCHC residents. For example, residents were asked to describe the activities and routines involved in grocery shopping, managing their health, and commuting to and from work or school.

Education

Residents at all three facilities perceived Internet access as compulsory in allowing them to engage in formal educational activities, the characteristics of which ranged from supporting the academic needs of school age children, pursuing post-secondary studies, and maintaining professional qualifications. The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) employs a range of online services to facilitate student registration, electronic document submission (immunization and absentee records), remote learning, library reserves, and payment for non-subsidized expenses such as school fees, agendas, yearbooks and class trips (Toronto District School Board, 2018, 2017). The support provided to school age children by primary caregivers emerged as a significant source of household labour expenditures over the course of data collection. Leveraging online tools to facilitate these tasks was identified as a significant benefit in single parent households, as illustrated by the comments of one single parent:

Most of the stuff with the school is online now. If they’re going to be away I have to e-mail a document to the office, and it can only be from the e-mail address they have on file, same goes for times when they skip school, I’ll get an e-mail from the school and then I have to start texting them like crazy! But things are much less time consuming now than in the past. They brought out a new payment system that’s all online, it’s much simpler than mailing cheques. I can pay for my kid’s school trips and stuff like that, but the most important thing for us are the Google Docs and library reservations, a lot of their class work is done through Google Docs, and I can look up any book they need through the library Web site and find out which library has it, because most of the time it’s already checked out at the school.

Household Internet services were identified as compulsory in supporting post-secondary education needs. One participant described their use of the Internet to support their academic responsibilities as “exhaustive”, noting that everything from Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) applications, tuition and fees payment, to library access and assignment submissions are facilitated online:

Wow, I couldn’t even begin to imagine how you could consider going to school these days, at any level, without having access to the Internet. I mean, I have access at home but don’t always stay there, sometimes I’ll go across the street to the coffee shop. I work part-time too so having the Internet at home is something I guess I take for granted, because I know I can plan to do school work when I get home from work. I know a lot of families rely on the public library to get their kids online, and that’s really sad because the libraries aren’t always open, and if you have something due first thing, or need to file an extension request, that would be really tough.

Two participants from the elderly care residence at 55 Rankin Cres., one a former paralegal and another a former auditor with the Canada Revenue Agency, described maintaining their professional certifications and association memberships by participating in coursework provisioned online:

Every year I re-certify by taking an online course through the CPAC (Chartered Professional Accountants Canada), I guess I don’t really need to because I’m officially retired, but it makes me feel good about myself. I also need to stay up to date because I do a lot of the taxes for residents around here. And some of them feel better knowing that I’m legitimate.

I’m not practicing anymore but I miss it, the law is really interesting when you look at it a certain way. I keep my membership up to date with the CAP (Canadian Association of Paralegals). You have to go through an online training session and then there’s exam you download, they give you 24 hours to send it back. Sometimes people will come to me with legal matters, my credentials allow me to sign off on things, notarize documents for them, that sort of thing.

These two participants described their efforts in maintaining their professional credentials as important to their personal sense of well-being, as well as having utility by way of supporting other residents in the facility. In both cases, these participants provide professional support for tax preparation and basic legal services (notary services) to their fellow residents.

I worked for CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) for 30 years, and most of the residents in here (55 Rankin Cres.) have very simple tax returns, so I do them for Can$50 each and submit them online. The building has a resident e-mail newsletter that goes out every month, I have a small ad in there that the management approved.

Healthcare

Low-income households are less likely to obtain necessary prescriptions as a result of financial constraints, and less likely to seek out uninsured services (ambulance, dental, etc.) than above average income households (Raphael, 2002). The elderly residents at 55 Rankin Cres. constitute a community of residents that are particularly susceptible to financial burdens associated with uninsured healthcare costs, and subsequently evidenced significant amounts of Internet activity in support of their healthcare needs. Healthcare related Internet activities were clustered into information management, transportation & mobility, and health maintenance activity areas.

Health information management

Thirteen of the participants from 55 Rankin Cres. report ongoing healthcare related issues as barriers to self-care compelling their decision to take up residency at the facility. All of these participants describe scheduling their routine appointments with in-home healthcare providers, specialists, and their primary health practitioners using a range of online tools:

My medical chart and history is online, I log into the UHN (University Health Network) Web site every day to make sure I haven’t missed an appointment or mixed up the medication I’m supposed to take every day. It can get very complicated, you know, I’m on four different medications that have to be taken on the correct day. I used to write it on paper, but I forget things, and eventually I started to forget to write the correct things down! But now I get an alert everyday on my iPad, I just press the button and poof! It’s much easier.

Several participants noted that the transition to online scheduling and information provisioning by their healthcare providers were the preliminary drivers that motivated their own adoption of the technology:

My own GP (general practitioner) set up a private Facebook group a few years ago. The nurse told me about it and asked if I had a Facebook account, I didn’t even have the Internet back then. But eventually they convinced me it would be worthwhile, so I got myself set up online. He posts articles and information about my particular condition, and there are a lot of other patients with the same problem, so when I go in and comment on something there’s always someone else sharing their own experiences. I live alone now, but when I see other people commenting on my posts it makes me feel a little less alone.

Beyond direct communication channels with healthcare providers, several residents describe leveraging the Internet in order to broaden their own knowledge about their medical conditions, obtaining information about at-home therapeutic activities and nutritional support, and even searching for alternative healthcare practitioners:

I’m partially paralyzed because of the stroke I had, but I found a YouTube channel full of exercises you can do at home to help with the symptoms. There are a few you can only do with another person, so I save those for when my son comes to visit. My doc gave me a pamphlet with exercises after I was released, but the videos online are much clearer, and there’s a lot more of them.

Health transportation

Transportation and mobility barriers related to healthcare were also evidenced amongst the resident population at 55 Rankin Cres., with participants describing a number of service providers that have migrated their booking and maintenance services online. These residents describe mobility issues as limiting the range of activities they are able to pursue outside of the facility. Healthcare related needs, however, constitute a distinct activity area where access to affordable and reliable transportation was perceived as a necessity. Several residents discussed their use online resources to arrange transportation through ride sharing services such as Uber, and to schedule WheelTrans pick-up at the building:

I use Uber, can you believe it? But that’s only when theres a delay with Wheel Trans. I used to call in to book the Wheel Trans pickup but they’ve got an online booking form now which is a lot easier and faster. I used to have to wait on hold for up to 45 minutes, by that time wherever I had to be wasn’t important anymore.

Residents who require the assistance of mobility devices (wheelchairs, walkers, etc.) often rely on private service providers where costs for a manual wheelchair can be upwards of Can$1,000. OHIP only offers partial coverage for the costs of these devices. To cover the balance, recipients must either turn to private insurance coverage (if available) or fund the remainder out of pocket. Upfront and maintenance costs for these devices constitute a significant burden for the residents of 55 Rankin Cres., where most of the building’s occupants have limited fixed incomes. The two study participants who require the assistance of mobility devices describe “pricing out” the best deals they could find on their wheelchairs by searching online, and subsequently scheduling routine maintenance service through the vendor’s Web site:

I used to have a manual chair but then my strength gave out and I had to get an electric. The prices for these things are ridiculous, my CPP and ODSP payments just werent enough to cover the balance, even on the cheapest model I was able to find online, so I ended up putting it on my credit card. OHIP covers 75 percent of the maintenance costs, and I get an e-mail every two months from the store reminding me that my service is coming up. It’s like a car you know? I just go through their Web site to book the appointment and they’re here the next day, so that’s OK.

Health maintenance

While the majority of residents at 55 Rankin Cres. qualify for extended prescription medication and dental care coverage, the residents of the TCHC facilities at 50 Regent Park Blvd. and 2739 Victoria Park Ave. report limited availability of extended coverage options, even for those receiving fixed government benefits, as a result of the mixed income characteristics of their households. These costs were noted to constitute a significant burden for several participants from these facilities:

I’m a disability recipient, but medicinal cannabis is not fully covered. So when I was looking for options I found a licensed supplier that gives 30 percent discounts to ODSP recipients who order online and submit their benefit receipts.

Me and my kids require prescription meds, and I only work part-time when they’re at school so it gets expensive. I didn’t even know that pharmacies charge different rates for dispensing until I started googling ways to find cheaper prescriptions. There’s also a bunch of online services that will show you cheaper alternatives for the brand name drugs, and the pharmacies that charge the lowest fees. So I created an online profile with one and they sent me a card that gives me a discount on no-name meds. My doctor is OK with it.

Online services provided by most major pharmacies were noted to constitute a key resource for prescription drug users, with e-mail reminders for refills, information on potential conflicts and adverse interactions between drugs, and the option to automate prescription renewal requests without the patient having to liaise with their doctor:

My doctor gives me three months of refills on my prescription, and as long as I get the blood test done on time, I can just click ‘request refill’ on my profile page at the pharmacy and they’ll do the rest. All of this is done online so I really only have to get myself to the testing clinic instead of having to run all over town like I used to.

Residents operating in a caregiver role describe relying on Internet based services to enable their direct and indirect caregiving responsibilities. These scenarios, in particular, are examples of the ways in which household Internet services facilitate the interconnection of activities that constitute normalized routines in TCHC households. In one particularly stark example, a single parent caregiver to an adult autistic child describes how their ability to maintain employment is contingent on managing their child’s healthcare needs with the support of Internet based therapeutic services:

My son was diagnosed autistic back in middle school, he’s considered low-functioning, but can be on his own for most of the day as long as the schedule is consistent and he’s on the computer. God, I’m lucky my work lets me schedule my hours in a certain way and doesn’t ask me to come in outside of them. I wouldn’t be able to do it (leave him unattended) without the Internet. He’s got a bunch of sites bookmarked, games, puzzles, things like that to keep him focused. Some of the sites were recommended by the clinic. When the Internet goes down it’s a disaster, I have to leave work to get home quick, sometimes the neighbours will call me saying that he’s yelling or banging things around. When my husband and I split the Internet was just becoming a thing, so I guess it’s lucky that it happened when it did or I wouldn’t have been able to keep my job.

Childcare

Two primary categories of caregiver activities were identified throughout the study and are implicated in the basic needs activities described by caregiver participants: direct care activities (education and healthcare), and indirect care activities (nutrition and finances). Though not operationalized prior to the study, security and safety emerged as a notable theme over the course of discussions with participants from households with school age children:

I have two teens in high school, they both have mobiles that are part of Internet package. I like to be able to keep in touch with them, even through text. But I also have to make sure that their Presto Cards [transit passes] are loaded and they have money on their bank cards. We have a data cap on mobile but they go over it all the time. One month there was a Can$150 in overage fees between the two of them. What am I supposed to do except pay it? I can’t cancel their mobiles. What if something happens and they can’t contact me?

The household labour expenditures of caregivers, expressed in terms of income value (financial costs associated with caregiving activities) and social value (the externalities of the care provided), were perceived in relation to productivity levels informed by household Internet services:

It’s funny because you’d think that when they’re at school I’d get a bit of break but it doesn’t work like that, that’s the only time I have to actually get all the household stuff done. It changes from week to week, but basically at the start of the month is when I’m dealing with all the groceries and shopping, for clothes I usually go on Joe Fresh or GAP because I get weekly discount codes emailed to me, but if things are tight I’ll use Kijiji. With Fresh I can order online and arrange pick up at Loblaws when I do the shopping, kills two birds with one stone. The middle of the month is when I’m usually doing bookkeeping work for clients, I’ll start with client stuff in the morning, get some housework done around lunch, then try to get back to clients before they’re back from school. End of the month is the worst, I basically can’t leave the house because that’s when clients usually need their stuff and the bills are coming in. My desktop (computer) is so cluttered most of the time but I use a lot of apps on my phone for stuff like banking, Presto, PayPal.

Finances

Of all the basic needs activity areas, finance and income routines evidence the highest concentration of Internet based resource use amongst TCHC households. All but two participants across the three TCHC facilities report finance management activities performed exclusively through Internet based banking, payment and income reporting mechanisms. Reconciliation and reporting obligations associated with most fixed and government income sources were noted as being primarily facilitated online (ODSP, Employment Insurance etc.). Maintaining RGI status with the TCHC itself requires that residents provide income statements at regular intervals, with residents describing their use of e-mail as the primary mechanism through which this obligation is met:

I submit all my income statements to TCHC by e-mail, I know some who don’t but they have to take the bus to another office, if they’re missing something they end up wasting time going back and forth.

We used to use H&R for taxes, but they charge a lot so we switched to EasyTax. I just downloaded all my income statements from EI and emailed them. Last year I did the taxes on my own, it’s just government statements and some receipts from part-time work I did so it wasn’t that hard, I downloaded the program from the Revenue Canada Web site, saved me Can$100 bucks in accountant fees. Anything you need to do with Revenue Canada, applying for benefits and stuff, means you have to go online and connect to them through your bank, which means you need online banking so, yeah ... I don’t how some people can manage without it.

In one example a single mother describes how, after years of frustration pursuing her ex-husband for child support payments, she was able to obtain the payments by using the Province of Ontario’s online Child Support Payment Service to arrange for monthly electronic funds transfer from her former spouse:

The cheques I was getting from him were always bouncing, and I couldn’t afford a lawyer, but the province has this online service that only costs Can$80 and you don’t need a lawyer. I got him to agree to use it and now I get the funds through e-transfer. If he misses a payment I can go in and report it and upload the electronic records. So far so good.

Canada’s consumer payment and billing sector has undergone significant transformations over the past decade which, in turn, has situated household Internet service as a “de facto compulsory” resource for reconciling basic financial needs. The Canada Revenue Agency reports that roughly 90 percent of tax returns for the 2018 and 2019 tax seasons were filed online (Canada Revenue Agency, 2019). E-billing has overtaken paper based billing by banks, consumer credit, public utility, and government service providers (Brethour, 2001; Payments Canada, 2018), electronic bill payment increased by 24 percent while in-person payments decreased by 23 percent between 2012 and 2016 (Payments Canada, 2018), Canada’s incumbent TSPs now charge fees for the delivery of paper bills (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, 2015), and Canada’s largest banks continue to close physical branches (seven percent between 2012 and 2019) in favour of online banking services (Canadian Bankers Association, 2019). Remote reconciliation of household financial obligations was identified by participants from all three facilities as a primary affordance of Internet based resources:

Well, I get all my bills through e-mail now, saving the environment you know? I only have automatic payment set up through online banking for the Internet bills, because that’s something I can’t afford to get behind on but the rest, like my credit card and even my rent, I login and transfer the payment myself because sometimes there isnt enough in the account and I can’t get hit with overdraft fees.

For the longest time we didn’t even have a bank branch in the neighbourhood, I think the Royal branch only opened two years ago. I was with Scotiabank for a long time but I switched over to Simply Financial [virtual bank] because their service fees are a lot lower. I never go into the physical branches anyway so what’s the point of paying the service fees?

Mobility and transportation constraints amongst elderly residents can compound the need to adopt online banking services, although in light of privacy and security concerns, participants from this cohort also expressed a great deal of reservation about conducting their banking activities online:

I used to go to the bank every week and take out cash, I miss doing that because the staff were always friendly. But I’m in a chair now and can’t get around easily. In the winter it’s even more difficult. The gentleman who helped set up the Internet for me showed how to use the bank app on my iPad. I used to worry a lot about using it, I’ve heard stories about people stealing your information, but he showed me how to set up a good password and nothing’s gone wrong so far.

Households from all three facilities noted the role the Internet plays in helping them to pursue supplemental income sources, with several notable examples of residents engaged in remote part-time work facilitated by ads placed in online classifieds and through e-mail lists:

When the kids are at school is the only time I can do my part-time work, I do bookkeeping from home, that was my career, I get most of my clients through Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace ads. It’s enough money to keep me under the radar with TCHC and cover the kids mobile phones. I prefer to accept payment through e-transfer, but will use PayPal if necessary even though they charge me a fee.

 

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Barriers to obtaining & maintaining Internet access

Barriers to obtaining and maintaining Internet access were expressed in the characteristics of two primary user cohorts that emerged over the course of the study. These include late adopters, operationalized as residents whose use of the Internet began after or near the end of their professional or caregiving careers, whose period of time as Internet users is limited relative to their time as non-users, and where Internet services have been introduced into activity areas previously reconciled by non-Internet based or analog resources. Early adopters are operationalized as residents whose use of the Internet emerged commensurate with professional or caregiving responsibilities, whose period of time as Internet users is greater than any period in which they may have considered themselves non-users, and who describe limited or few experiences with non-Internet or analog based resources (analog telephones, typewriters, etc.).

Late adopters

Late adopters tended to conceptualize the Internet for its utility characteristics, often contrasting how tasks were performed before and after their adoption of the technology, and frequently using active phrasing when describing Internet supported activities (“with the Internet I can ...”):

I use the Internet to make sure my bills are paid and so I can budget for groceries and sometimes send money to my grandkids. When my husband was alive he took care of all the bills, I never had to think about those things, I would just go to the bank once a week to get grocery money. The Internet is really helpful for the banking stuff. That’s the main reason I signed up with Rogers, it’s not easy for me to get out.

There was far more emphasis on moderating Internet use in late adopter households, with Internet activities that are less data intensive, and where data and speed limitations of low cost Internet services packages were not perceived as a barrier:

I know some of the residents watch a lot of movies but stuff like that doesn’t interest me, I use the Internet to help me with my exercise routines, renew my prescriptions, maybe find some recipes and e-mail with my kids. I’m not on it all day, oh no, usually just in the morning before I go downstairs and a little before I go to bed at night.

Late adopters, such as those at 55 Rankin Cres., were most likely to describe barriers related to literacy and user skills. Several participants, despite their apparent proficiency in using mobile and tablet based devices, still expressed anxiety in relation to data and identity security:

I only started online two years ago, and the other residents have been very helpful with showing me how to use Facebook and how to take pictures and e-mail them. The banking stuff scares me though. I went into the bank branch and the manager helped me download the app and set it up. I’m mostly afraid that I’ll make a mistake, and I never click on e-mails from people I don’t know. They used to offer computer classes downstairs but that stopped awhile back, not enough people were interested.

Early adopters

The tasks and activities described by early adopters tend to situate the Internet in the background of daily routines, conceptualizing its use as normalized, emphasizing the services or service outcomes associated with activity, and frequently omitting the role of the medium itself:

I get weekly flyers with coupons for all the grocery stores nearby through my Flipp subscription. It’s great because I can click on something I want right in the app and have it ready for pickup when I get to the store.

The infrastructural characteristics of the Internet became apparent in resident interviews with early adopters who tended to make explicit reference to the technology when describing Internet service disruption:

There are a lot of Bell subscribers in the building, and I’m on Bell too, so there’s lots of times when the service goes down and I know it’s not just me because you get people coming out into the hallway yelling about the Internet being down, ‘Is it down for you? How about you?’ It always happens at the worst time too, like when the kids just get home from school or when I’m trying to send a document to a client.

Early adopter households were more likely to evidence a wider range of data intensive Internet activities, commensurate with more overall time spent online as well as multiple users in the household:

Between my school work, my brother and our dad, someone’s always online. My dad is always on Netflix and my brother is a gamer. It’s a pain sometimes when they’re both on at the same time, things slow down so I end up going across the street to Tim’s.

These households were also more likely to describe being constrained by data and speed limitations associated with their service plans, with only four of the 13 households in this cohort subscribing to unlimited Internet service plans:

We were on a 50Gb plan for a long time, the speed was fine if only one person was online but got really bad once someone else was on. When my brother moved back home we started hitting the data limit every month, and the overage fees were ridiculous so we moved up the unlimited plan, it’s Can$30 more per month.

When my daughters got into high school and got mobiles we had to move up to the unlimited plan with higher speeds because our old plan just wasn’t cutting it, it was too slow and we were going over every month and was hurting my part-time work, it didn’t include mobile either, that was back when Bell only offered one unlimited plan. I switched our plan a few times since then because it was so expensive, anything I made doing side work was basically just going to cover the Internet and mobile costs. Now we’ve got a plan that gives us unlimited Internet and 5Gb for each mobile, but it’s still almost Can$200 per month.

Financial burdens associated with maintaining Internet services were most prominent in households with practitioners in a caregiver role, and where high demand Internet use is informed by multiple user needs. These households situate direct and indirect caregiving activities (support for schoolwork, banking and finance, transportation etc.) as primary motivators with a view to maintaining at-home Internet services:

With kids you can’t get around it, for school, shopping, everything. And it gets worse as they get older, because sharing the computer or iPhone isn’t an option anymore. I’ve had to put the Internet bill on credit sometimes, after rent comes out most of what’s left over goes to groceries, Internet and TTC.

I have teens so I don’t really have a choice, would be nice if there was a discount for single moms with teenage kids! There was a time when my middle girl lost her phone while she was out with friends, I couldn’t get in touch with her and nearly called the cops I was so worried.

The reported costs of Internet services, inclusive of mobile, within the family households who participated in the study averaged 11.5 percent of net household income (after housing costs), reconciling with the average household costs associated with telecommunications services reported by secondary sources including the CRTC (2016), ACORN Canada (2020), and the City of Toronto (2017).

 

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Discussion

Late adopter households were localized to the residents of 55 Rankin Cres. whose primary motivation in adopting the Internet were informed by health, nutrition and financial needs. The median length of residency among participants from 55 Rankin Cres. is five years, with 13 out of the 16 participants noting that their introduction to, and adoption of the Internet coincided with their residency at the facility. The income and basic needs characteristics of these participants suggest that social rather than economic indicators are more suitable to assess the value of household labour expenditures associated with their Internet supported activities.

Thirteen of the 16 participants from 55 Rankin Cres. described increases in the overall volume of tasks and activities they were able to pursue compared to their productivity prior to adopting household Internet services. For example, obtaining prescription medication prior to the adoption of household Internet constituted a ratio of four distinct tasks over the course of a day (arranging transit, attending pharmacy appointments, etc.) with the majority of time expenditures associated with transiting outside of the home. Incorporating the Internet into this activity area yields a ratio of seven tasks over the same period of time by allowing the participant to forgo certain activities that require transiting outside of the home (e.g., using online prescription refill and delivery services), adopt new routines (medical calendaring, emailing practitioners), and increase the amount of time available for socialization and self-care activities (exercises and group meals). For these participants, minimizing the labour expenditures associated with basic needs activities was framed as a constructive outcome of household Internet adoption, with subsequent benefits for their physical and psychological well-being, and informative of their self-esteem.

Of the three residential facilities included in the study, 55 Rankin Cres. was notable for the level of community interaction evidenced between households, both directly and in relation to the health, nutrition, and social programming available to residents through the Loyola Arrupe Centre for Active Living. Social interactions between these residents constituted a key indicator of the ways in which the diffusion of literacy and support for Internet adoption can be facilitated within close knit communities, with several participants noting that their preliminary introduction to the affordances of household Internet services emerged from observations of the Internet activities of their neighbours. The apparent diffusion of Internet literacy between residents at 55 Rankin Cres. evidences characteristics that are similar to those observed amongst residents of Toronto’s Native-Mens-Residence (Mersereau, 2016), with participants at that facility identifying fellow shelter residents as their primary means of acquiring technical knowledge. These findings suggest that close social ties can be formative of Internet literacy, and that early adoption by individuals in otherwise disconnected communities may be an important vehicle for Internet skills diffusion.

Early adopter households, localized at 50 Regent Park Blvd. and 2739 Victoria Park Ave., similarly describe the utility of the Internet in maintaining household routines. Early adopter households were not able to characterize household activities independent of Internet support, rather, Internet access was largely perceived as a normalized household resource by these residents. The economic value of household labour implicated with Internet use was more concretely described in early adopter households, and tasks and activities tended to be explicitly reconciled with securing income and minimizing costs associated with provisioning for basic needs. Discussions related to household activity patterns informed by Internet use illuminated two sub-groups of early adopter households, single occupant and family households, each characterized by unique financial constraints in maintaining Internet access. While long-term Internet service disruptions were not reported as regular occurrences, when they do occur, the consequences illustrate significant distinctions between single occupant and family households. Residents from single occupant households describe service disruptions associated with technical issues rather than financial constraints, and as resulting in relatively few disruptions to their household routines.

Service disruptions related to financial constraints and affordability barriers were most apparent in family households. Higher demand Internet use amongst multiple users, as well as a wider range of Internet enabled devices informs the need for higher tier Internet services in these households that can strain limited income resources. Long-term Internet service disruptions were characterized by service disconnection lasting five days or more. The longest reported period of disruption was forty-five days, and the shortest five days. Seven periods of long-term disruption were reported in this range by participants from family households.

Long-term Internet service disruption in family households tends to compromise the ability of caregivers to perform the consumption labour associated with indirect care for dependents and maintain key basic needs activities. Finite labour resources, supported by incomes that are liminal to the poverty threshold, are further strained during long-term Internet service disruption. The tactics employed to mitigate the effects of Internet service disruption include; elimination of discretionary activities and expenses, and reorganizing household routines to allow time for accessing the Internet outside of the home (public libraries, coffee shops, etc.). Responding to long-term Internet service disruptions in these ways results in a near doubling of labour performed outside of the home, lowering the overall productivity of caregivers, and frequently results in additional household debt (borrowing, credit cards, etc.) in order to reestablish household Internet services.

 

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Summary

The analytical approach undertaken in this study situates the totality of a household’s activities and routines as the entry point for analysis rather than individual Internet tasks themselves. From this vantage point a more fulsome picture of the essential characteristics of the Internet begins to emerge, one where the technology is seen to inform the overall stability of TCHC households, rather than a technology upon which discrete tasks are contingent. The data provided by TCHC residents illustrates the heterogeneity of household adaptations to the affordances and constraints informed by Internet access, and suggests that the ability to interconnect tasks and activities into predictable routines situates the technology as an essential technical resource in maintaining the stability of the household.

Other themes that emerged from resident interviews include: differentiation between late and early adopter cohorts in relation to perspectives on the enabling and constraining characteristics of the Internet, with the former reflecting on the ways in which Internet services have emboldened their abilities, and the latter commenting on the compulsoriness of Internet access in performing key basic needs activities. Though cognizant of the ways in which Internet services have informed their sense of agency and independence, late adopters also expressed hesitation in their capabilities to perform online tasks and a fear of compromising their personal security. Important distinctions emerged in households comprised of practitioners in caregiving roles. Affordability barriers were most apparent in family households, and were observed to be commensurate with higher demand Internet activities between multiple users. Family households were most at risk of long-term Internet service disruption, and to experience significant constraints in their abilities to maintain household routines during periods of service disruption.

The parallels between the results of this study and current trends in scholarship concerning the ‘digital divide’ are evident. While a rural-urban divide in the availability of last mile broadband services has constituted a focal point of policy discussions and advocacy across all levels of government (McKeown, et al., 2007; Sandvig, 2011; Consumers’ Association of Canada, 2015), recent trends evidence increased attention being paid to digital exclusion in nominally ‘wired’ urban centers (City Manager’s Office, 2018; Toronto Media Relations Department, 2020; Rajabiun and McKelvey, 2019). The data gleaned from this study of TCHC residents indicate that the affordances associated with household Internet use, as well as the precarity associated with financial barriers, is most prevalent in households characterized by heightened levels of vulnerability (elderly and family households). This suggests that households with the most to gain and the most to lose from stable Internet services are those that struggle to acquire or maintain it.

This research forwards an explanatory model of the Internet’s role in structuring and patterning the tasks required to perform the mundane and routine activities that constitute the basic needs undertakings of TCHC residents, and in ways that are unique to the information processing affordances of digital technologies. In doing so, the study undertaken contributes to the slow march towards statutory provisions for universal Internet service delivery. While calls for policy intervention have become more urgent in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, until recently, a proposition for non-excludability in the provisioning of Internet services have received cursory attention. The idea of non-excludability itself is not a novel proposition (ACORN Canada, 2020). Calls for ostensibly ‘free’ Internet have gained momentum in the wake of the public health emergency, but as of yet have not benefitted from evidence based research intended to synthesize a policy actionable rationale for government to commit the necessary resources. Community based mesh networks, such as those facilitated by the Global Internet Society initiative in New York City (Internet Society, 2017), as well as the Detroit Community Technology Project (Greig, 2018), demonstrate that ‘freely’ accessible broadband is achievable in urban areas. These cooperative undertakings also suggest that social, rather than infrastructural barriers are the primary delimiters of universality, and that government intercession is not the only means of redressing connectivity divides. As promising as these approaches appear to be, they rely on the mobilization of network literate (often volunteer) administrators, and can be confounded by local topography which may problematize their efficacy in sustaining long-term household Internet needs (Akyildiz, et al., 2005; Newcombe, 2014).

In the context of redressing the household Internet needs of TCHC residents, a proposal currently under review would see the organization intercede in the provisioning of fixed at-home retail Internet services by coupling its delivery to utilities already included in subsidized tenancy agreements. The proposition represents a pragmatic and actionable approach to redressing connectivity barriers for a socially housed population of more than one hundred thousand low-income individuals in Canada’s most populous city, and one that would sidestep the regulatory barriers faced by Canadian municipalities who, under federal and provincial statutes, exercise little authority in the direct provisioning of telecommunications services (Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 2009; Middleton, 2008). This approach would not only help to ensure universal service availability for a sizeable population of low-income households, it would also entrench the principle of non-excludability as a redress to the risks of internet disconnectivity faced by communities who are most at risk; a concept which itself is antithetical to the dominant model of Internet provisioning by the commercial sector. While not a panacea in redressing the urban digital divide, the direct provisioning of household Internet by the TCHC is an opportunity for the municipal government to leverage its purchasing power in remediating connectivity barriers for a readily accessible population of low income households.

No policy mechanism intended to ameliorate Internet service exclusion can redress the broader indicators of poverty and material deprivation experienced in low-income households. However, the data gleaned over the course of this study suggests that Internet precarity in low-income communities unnecessarily conflates the risk of household destabilization. A broader portrait of the societal costs of poverty illustrates the dividends that could be realized in concert with efforts to universally provision non-excludable Internet services in low-income households. At the provincial level, the annual dollar costs associated with poverty average Can$11.75 billion dollars [6.05 percent Provincial GDP], which is diffused at an average cost of Can$2,597 per household. Of the more heavily burdened public service sectors, the provincial healthcare system absorbs an average of Can$2.9 billion dollars per year in costs associated with poverty remediating services (Laurie, 2008). The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed persistent gaps in household Internet penetration (Toronto Media Relations Department, 2020; Robinson, et al., 2020; Sharp, 2020). While recovery plans are currently underway across all levels of government, it is incumbent on policy-makers to consider the importance of mechanisms and public service provisions aimed at stabilizing low-income households that are inclusive of household Internet services. End of article

 

About the author

Michel Mersereau received his Ph.D. in 2020 from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Michel’s research focuses on the role of the Internet in facilitating the delivery of public and essential services, and the policy implications of Internet precarity in low-income communities. Michel’s prior research explored the role of Internet based technologies in supporting and sustaining the organizational practices of Toronto’s Native Mens Residence.
E-mail: m [dot] mersereau [at] mail [dot] utoronto [dot] ca

 

Note

1. Gilbert, 2010, p. 1,011.

 

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Editorial history

Received 14 August 2020; revised 18 September 2020; accepted 1 December 2020.


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The Essential Internet: Results from a study into household Internet use at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation
by Michel Mersereau.
First Monday, Volume 26, Number 3 - 1 March 2021
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/11066/10082
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i3.11066