Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Within digital media scholarship, there are significant bodies of literature investigating forced disconnection (‘digital exclusion’) and voluntary disconnection (‘digital disconnection’) but there is little research addressing entanglements between them. This article explores how bringing together these bodies of literature through an empirical study offers new pathways and considerations for both areas. In doing so, we draw on qualitative data about the forms of disconnection experienced, negotiated, and enacted by low-income families in regional Australia before and during their participation in a digital inclusion initiative that provided them with Internet connections and laptops. We argue that their experiences illustrate the complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary factors that shape socially situated practices of disconnection. We also identify further implications for inclusion and disconnection research, including the need to recognise that within digital inclusion initiatives, participants’ non-use of provided technologies does not necessarily indicate failure but may instead be a positive outcome.

Keywords

Connection digital divide digital exclusion digital inclusion digital media digital technology disconnection family media resistance young people

Introduction

Within digital media scholarship, there are significant bodies of literature investigating forced disconnection and voluntary disconnection but there is little research addressing the entanglements between them. The first of these bodies of literature, ‘digital inclusion’ research, is concerned with populations who are unwillingly excluded from digital connectivity due to a lack of infrastructure, financial resources, or digital literacies. Broadly, this literature asks, who struggles to access or use digital technologies and what impact does this digital exclusion have on their ability to access information and services, or their participation in social and political life? The focus here is on understanding technologies as vital tools that people have a right to access.

In contrast, the second body of literature, ‘digital disconnection studies’, is concerned with how people resist and push back on problematic elements of digital technologies. It asks, what concerns do people have about technology and what practices do they use to mitigate these concerns? Who restricts their own technology use and to what extent is this an effective mode of resistance? The focus here is on understanding technologies as tools that must be managed or critiqued.

It is true that digital connectivity is both important and fraught; indeed, the paradoxical outcomes of technologies have been well-theorised (Arnold, 2003). But there is also tension between these two perspectives: when is the use of digital technologies a necessary, critical right and when is it something to be cautiously managed and/or even resisted? Our aim in this article is to explore how bringing together these bodies of literature through an empirical study might offer new pathways and considerations for both areas.

We do so by drawing on interview data from a digital inclusion programme that provided Internet connections and laptops to low-income households with high school-aged children. Bringing together digital inclusion and disconnection studies, we ask, how do these households experience disconnection before and during this intervention? And what do these experiences offer in terms of extending existing understandings of and approaches to digital inclusion and digital disconnection?

We address these questions first by outlining the disconnections that families experienced because of affordability issues. We then complicate this by mapping the forms of negotiated dis/connection they employed to mitigate affordability challenges and the disconnective practices they enacted in response to concerns about digital technology use. In discussing what these observations offer to digital inclusion and disconnection research, we argue primarily that they illustrate the complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary factors that shape socially situated practices of disconnection. We also identify further implications for inclusion and disconnection research, including the need to recognise that in the context of inclusion initiatives, participants’ non-use of provided technologies does not necessarily indicate failure but may instead be a positive outcome as people reflect on and set boundaries around their digital connectivity.

What is digital inclusion?

Digital inclusion refers to the concept of ensuring equitable access to digital technologies, resources, and opportunities for individuals from various socioeconomic backgrounds, regardless of their geographical location or other determining factors (van Dijk, 2019). It involves the provision of reliable Internet connections, digital devices, and the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively navigate an ever evolving digital landscape. Initially, digital inclusion was viewed as a binary concept, often referred to as the ‘digital divide’, which categorised individuals as either online or offline (DiMaggio et al., 2004). Digital inclusion research has since demonstrated that mere access to devices and connections is insufficient for digital inclusion; it also necessitates the ability to effectively utilise these resources. Consequently, subsequent research identified a ‘second-level’ digital divide, highlighting discrepancies in digital skills and literacies required for meaningful participation (Hargittai, 2002). The financial demands for gaining access to digital resources and developing necessary skills have also been increasingly recognised (Breunig and McCarthy, 2020). These core dimensions of digital exclusion are of most relevance to this article, however it is worth noting that digital inclusion research has broadened to include issues around selective inclusion through automated and algorithmic decision-making processes (Eubanks, 2018) and around how compounding advantage or disadvantage impacts who derives the greatest benefits from digital resources (Wise, 2013).

Lack of digital connectivity for specific vulnerable communities or population groups may be attributed to a lack of access to infrastructure (such as those in remote regions, for example, Rogers et al., 2022), financial resources (such as those in low-income households, for example, Sanders and Scanlon, 2021), or digital literacies (such as seniors, for example, Bossio and McCosker, 2021), or some combination. Research on digital inclusion emphasises the significance of all three elements—access, skills, and resources—for digital inclusion. Simply having access is inadequate unless it is coupled with the essential skills and financial means that facilitate significant and advantageous involvement.

With the increasing importance of digital inclusion for social, cultural, and economic participation, it has also become a matter of concern for policymakers. Consequently, quantitative methods have been used to measure digital inequality at the population level, through indices such as the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al., 2021) and the United Kingdom’s Essential Digital Skills Measure (Lloyds Bank, 2022).

What is digital disconnection?

Digital disconnection research has its roots in early studies of digital inclusion. As scholars began researching the emerging ‘digital divide’, some noted that not everyone was excluded because of cost or infrastructure; some were ‘non-users’ by choice (Selwyn, 2006; Wyatt, 2003). Recently, interest in voluntary disconnection has grown into a significant subfield of digital media research. In part, this is a corrective to the field’s long-standing emphasis on theories and practices of connection, production, and use (Light, 2014; Syvertsen, 2017). More significantly, it is also a response to emerging practices and discourses of resistance to the digitalisation of everyday life (Kennedy et al., 2020; Lomborg and Ytre-Arne, 2021).

A key stream of research within this emerging subfield, and the one we build on in this article, examines disconnective practices—that is, the forms of disconnection people enact to avoid or reduce unwanted elements of technology use. Research has found that people typically engage in disconnective practices because of a common set of factors, including privacy concerns, disenchantment with a specific device or platform, or concerns about time-wasting, distraction, or ‘inauthentic’ sociality. For some people, these concerns prompt drastic forms of disconnection, such as quitting platforms (Baumer et al., 2013; Karppi, 2011; Portwood-Stacer, 2013) or rejecting devices (Ribak and Rosenthal, 2015); for others, they lead to more partial disconnections, such as taking breaks (Jorge, 2019) or setting boundaries on use (Aharoni et al., 2021).

There have been two key conceptual trajectories across disconnections research. The first involves challenging the assumed binary between connection and disconnection by illustrating that disconnective practices can be partial, temporary, cyclical, or even integrated into use (Mannell, 2019), and can sustain connections, not just interrupt them (Light and Cassidy, 2014). The second is growing debate over whether practices and discourses of disconnection represent a meaningful form of empowerment and resistance for users (Bucher, 2020; Hesselberth, 2018). We return to these conceptual trajectories in the discussion.

Research at the intersection of these fields

Research in each of these fields recently began indicating possible connections between them. While digital inclusion research has generally emphasised the benefits of connection, there is a growing body of research acknowledging problematic dimensions of increasing connectivity among the previously excluded, such as issues around data privacy (Li et al., 2018), financial risks (Humphry, 2022), and increased expectations of availability (Wilding, 2009). For example, Wilding’s (2009) study of refugee youth found that while digital connection produced numerous benefits for participants, it also created new obligations and responsibilities, such as the need to support others remotely by providing money or other resources. Humphry’s (2022) research on mobile communication use by homeless Australians likewise demonstrates that while mobile phones are valuable tools for people experiencing homelessness, they can also lead to financial debt through high costs, inflexible contract options, and high usage driven by the necessity of accessing services online.

While this work identifies potentially negative implications of increased digital inclusion, there is little consideration of the deliberate disconnective practices that people might enact to mitigate them. Gangadharan’s (2021) work is an important exception. She outlines six forms of digital exclusion for marginalised groups; notably for the focus of this article, the last of these is refusal. Refusal ‘posits exclusion in affirmative terms, in which members of marginalized groups assert their agency in the face of structural injustice and refuse technology in different ways in order to develop and determine their own technologically mediated lives’ (Gangadharan, 2021: 114). Gangadharan’s work underscores the need for nuance in considerations of digital inclusion and exclusion, and advocates for a more complex rendering of socio-technical dynamics among marginalised groups by including refusal in the digital exclusion lexicon.

In terms of digital disconnection, research has primarily focused on comparatively wealthy, highly connected populations in the Global North, albeit with growing attention to the intersections between disconnection and privilege. Early work by Portwood-Stacer (2013) noted that the option to ‘unplug’ requires forms of privilege. As the field has matured, there have been explicit calls for more diverse empirical research, including with less digitally connected populations (Lomborg and Ytre-Arne, 2021; Treré et al., 2020). A few recent studies have begun to explore this area. Lim (2020) and Pype (2021) focus on the Global South, highlighting involuntary disconnections caused by inadequate infrastructure or government interventions, like Internet shutdowns. Treré (2021), a key advocate for more diverse studies of disconnection, makes similar observations in his international study of disconnective practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. His findings also build on earlier observations about the privilege of opting out by highlighting the difficulty of disconnecting for those employed in insecure gig work and without the wealth required to buy disconnective solutions, like having a ‘dumb phone’ as a secondary device. These are important inroads, yet overall, there remains limited work examining what digital disconnection looks like in less-privileged contexts.

There is also almost no work that explicitly connects digital disconnection and digital inclusion research. One recent paper by Bozan and Treré (2023) identifies the lack of engagement between these fields and draws them together through an interview study of villagers in eastern Turkey. While aiming to explore how villagers’ digital exclusion shapes voluntary practices of disconnection, Bozan and Treré’s data indicate that villagers’ disconnections are largely unwanted, forced experiences driven by geographical, infrastructural, and affordability issues. They note that community members had some concerns around over-use of digital technologies and their impacts on parenting, but these did not result in disconnective practices and were generally overshadowed by the stress and frustration of ‘undesired disconnections’. This work contrasts the villagers’ experiences with those usually examined in disconnections research and draws attention to the generative potential of bringing together inclusion and disconnections research. A second paper by Tai et al. (2021) explores ‘manifestations of disconnection’ surrounding the Health QR Code app—a mandatory location and health tracking app deployed in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their study, which explicitly aims to map ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ disconnections, notes that app use was disrupted by factors including inadequate devices and skills among the elderly, expatriates’ exclusion from China’s resident identification system, as well as intentional resistance because of privacy concerns or wanting to evade quarantine requirements.

This article continues the trajectory of these recent developments in digital inclusion and digital disconnection literature by examining the forms of connectivity and disconnectivity experienced by low-income families in regional Australia. We draw on data from their experiences before and during a digital inclusion initiative that provided Internet connectivity and device access.

Research design

Project overview

The Connected Students programme was conducted in partnership with Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. The programme provided technology kits to low-income households with at least one child between the ages of 15 and 18 years, and aimed to measure the impacts of removing affordability barriers on digital participation for low-income households. The kits consisted of a laptop, a combined modem-router, and an activated SIM providing free, unlimited broadband Internet for the project’s duration—from April 2020 to September 2022. We provided the kits to students but encouraged the whole household to make use of them as they wished. As we note in the findings, this timeframe included periods where participants were under lockdown conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A report published at the conclusion of the programme gives full details of the methods and socio-demographic breakdown for the cohort of participants (Kennedy et al., 2022). In brief, the programme was rolled out in a regional Australian town with a significant low-income and digitally excluded population. A total of 100 kits were distributed to households from which we recruited 183 participants across 63 households to participate in our research on the impacts of the programme.

Data collection and analysis

Data collection was carried out in four phases. In the first phase, 63 households were surveyed to ascertain household connectivity statuses and costs. These data were used to inform subsequent phases. Phase 2 involved online video-based interviews with 73 individuals across 35 households, focusing on their experiences of digital exclusion. Phase 3 included in-person interviews and technology tours of their home with 47 individuals across 22 households, focusing on the impacts of the Connected Students kit on the household.¹ In the final phase, exit telephone and video-conference interviews were conducted with 18 individuals across 15 households. All interviews were audio recorded and technology tours were filmed. Interview transcripts were analysed thematically (Charmaz, 2005; Lofland et al., 2005) to identify broad trends around experiences of digital exclusion.

This article draws on the interview and technology tour data. To investigate our research questions, we began by reviewing the initial thematic analysis for coding that spoke to ‘disconnection’ as conceptualised across both inclusion and disconnection research. This included, for example, codes about experiences of digital exclusion as well as codes about restricting use through household rules or personal practices. We then coded this subset of data to identify and analyse specific forms of disconnection.

All participants are referred to by pseudonyms.

Findings: Tracing the contours of disconnection

Negotiating unwanted disconnections

Prior to the Connected Students programme, participating households reported a range of barriers to accessing connectivity and technology. For instance, the study was based in a regional town and the surrounding rural areas where many participants had limited mobile and home Internet service due to inadequate infrastructure. In this article, however, we focus primarily on challenges related to the cost of data and devices.

Affordability of data was a key barrier to households’ digital inclusion prior to the programme with many families struggling to afford adequate mobile or home Internet. To reduce costs, some families avoided having a home Internet connection and managed with mobile data instead. The 18-year-old Blake, for example, lived on a rural property with his dad, Chris. Before receiving the Connected Students kit, Chris avoided paying for a home Internet connection by allowing Blake to hotspot from his work iPad. Chris and Blake’s mum also shared the cost of providing Blake with a small amount of prepaid mobile data (6 gig).

Other families had a home Internet connection but with limited data or were periodically disconnected when they could not cover the cost. One example of the latter situation was Bella, who was 16 years old and lived with her parents and two siblings in a rented home. Her mum, Kim, explained that there were periods where ‘we’ve gone for a bit of time without the internet until I can pay the bill’, often because of needing to prioritise other expenses, such as electricity bills or car registration.

Households also experienced affordability issues around purchasing devices. Piper, for example, was living with her mum, dad and three younger siblings in a house near the centre of town. Piper’s mum Karina spoke about the difficulty of affording devices needed for the transition to learning from home caused by the pandemic lockdowns. She had four children who required home devices for schooling but only one child had a computer. The sudden need to purchase three computers was ‘very stressful’, with Karina recounting:

I bought two laptops on Afterpay² and at the time, that was the only money I really had access to and it very much maxxed out my Afterpay. So at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to buy another one . . . I think the plan was for [Piper] and [younger sister] Emily to share a computer, which was stressing Emily out.

Piper’s family is illustrative of the experiences of many households. They typically had mobile devices but rarely had laptop or desktop computers as these were prohibitively expensive. When families did have computers, they often functioned poorly and/or were shared among the whole family.

Despite these challenges around affordability, households highly valued Internet connectivity and access to devices and often worked hard to mitigate these obstacles. Ellie’s family provides one example. For 17-year-old Ellie, who was living in government housing with her mum and sibling, the cost barrier for home Internet and a laptop was prohibitively high. Ellie’s mum, Melanie, was on a disability pension which made it ‘very hard to afford things’. She explained that it would have been impossible for them to manage without the Connected Students kit during the learning from home period caused by the pandemic:

I couldn’t afford to buy a brand-new laptop. Not to mention have the internet. Everything was going up. Everything is getting very expensive, like food, like petrol, like everything else. How was I going to afford a brand-new laptop? Or internet?

Prior to the pandemic and the Connected Students programme, they relied on going to the local public library so that Ellie could complete her schoolwork. Melanie was grateful for this option but also described it as ‘one extra chore you have to do’. She would drive Ellie to the library after school and they would stay for several hours—sometimes until the library closed at 8 pm. Melanie accepted this as necessary because of the value she placed on connectivity: ‘If you don’t have internet, if you don’t have easy access, you just can’t keep up with the everyday things. It doesn’t matter if it’s work or studies—everything is connected with [the] internet. Internet is the future’.

Many parents likewise viewed Internet connectivity as a necessity, particularly for their school aged children, and made sacrifices to access it. For families like Ellie’s who used public services as a workaround, these sacrifices involved time and convenience; for other families, their sacrifices involved reducing or foregoing other expenses in order to pay for devices and connections. Lisa, for example, lived with her husband and their seven children, including two with disabilities. Despite their incredibly tight household budget, she explained that having a functioning Internet connection and sufficient mobile data was a necessity:

We just have to make it work. There’s no real choice . . . We put food on the table. We put clothes on the kids’ backs, and we put fuel in the car and that’s pretty much [it]. We pay our devices. And our money’s gone.

Covering the cost of connectivity meant foregoing other kinds of spending. Holidays, for example, were rare: they had gone camping once in the past 4 years. Lisa explicitly framed these choices as ‘sacrifices’ and noted that, at times, they extended to buying less food:

We do sacrifice to make sure that everyone’s got their phones and stuff running, because if there’s not enough money at the end of the day, you just don’t buy as much food at the supermarket. You know, you’ve got to get it somewhere, and that’s about the only place you can take it from.

These examples point to the significant compromises households made in order to sustain their connectivity.

Disconnections to manage and extend connectivity

Prior to the Connected Students programme, many households engaged in forms of disconnection to help them manage and extend their Internet connectivity. In a few cases, this involved limiting one form of Internet connectivity, namely home Wi-Fi, in order to preserve other forms of connectivity, such as mobile data. Tahlia, for example, lived with her mum, dad, and teenage sibling in a house they were paying off on the outskirts of town. Tahlia’s mum Sandra explained that they had recently disconnected their high-speed ‘National Broadband Network (NBN)’ Internet service as they could no longer afford it because she had significantly reduced her paid work hours to care for her terminally ill mother:

We changed all of our phone plans and everything around because [of] the cut of income with me in the caring role. We changed to have a shared family data plan to our phones and we stopped having the NBN.

Sandra’s account illustrates that pathways to connection and digital inclusion are not always linear. This household did have high-speed home Internet but were forced to disconnect it and make do with mobile phones in response to unavoidable changes to their income.

The other, more common example of this type of disconnective practice took the form of what one parent described as ‘data rationing’—that is, carefully monitoring home and/or mobile data and rationing it to avoid running out. For example, several participants turned their phones’ data connection on and off throughout the day. Others limited their phone use as much as possible when not connected to Wi-Fi. Some participants also avoided data-hungry activities, such as streaming or using social media platforms, especially as they neared their data limit.

Nathan’s household demonstrated a unique example of disconnecting to manage data. Nathan, 17 years old, lived with his dad, step-mum Karla, and siblings in a rural community about 25 minutes’ drive from town. Prior to the Connected Students kit, the family had very limited Internet. This was partly because of inadequate infrastructure in their area but also because of cost—a factor exacerbated by the fact they could only get mobile broadband coverage. The household had a limited data allowance; when they reached it, they turned off the Internet until the next month to avoid extra charges. These periods without Internet were difficult, especially for Karla who ran a small business from home and for her husband Robert, who needed Internet access for his role as a community firefighter. It also caused conflict between Nathan and his siblings. Karla described feeling worn down by ‘the tension over the phones, the arguments over data usage, who’s doing what’. In response, Karla developed strategies to manage the family’s data use. A key technique was to take the router in her handbag whenever she went into town to do the weekly shop, severing the Internet access for several hours until she got home. This stopped her children using her absence as an opportunity to engage in data-hungry activities. If she did not, she explained, ‘You’d go out, you come home and somebody’s downloading songs or something and, you know, we’ve got 3% of data left and we’ve still got 25 days to go’.

Disconnections motivated by mistrust

Another group of disconnective practices stemmed from concerns around mistrust and security. In these cases, participants avoided certain online activities to protect themselves from the theft of their money or personal information. For instance, several participants avoided free public Wi-Fi (despite struggling to pay for Internet access) because of concerns about security. The 17-year-old Rose was one example. She explained, ‘My mate’s details got stolen doing that so I was like, no man, I’m scared of those. I don’t touch them’.

Others had concerns about online banking and transactions. Several households tried to avoid online payments as much as possible, although they noted that this was becoming more difficult. Chris, who lived in a rural area with his son, explained that he used to avoid online banking entirely by withdrawing his whole wage as cash but has had to adapt as cash payment options have reduced, including bills which he now has to pay online.

Despite the increasing difficulty, many participants limited their use of online transactions as much as possible. Renae explained that her family of five tried to avoid online banking because ‘We just don’t trust it’. They paid bills and council rates in person at the post office or council office. For online purchases, they would use PayPal or transfer the amount required onto a Visa debit card. Janet, who lived with her husband and their four kids, also paid as many bills in person as possible. Like several other participants, she preferred to receive bills through the post when possible as opposed to through email, which she did not ‘trust’.

These general concerns about trust often had specific drivers. Some participants had experienced fraud, including Renae, who had a credit card hacked, and Janet whose family had lost money through an issue related to online payments. Others, like Rose above, knew someone who’d had personal details or money stolen. Often these concerns were compounded by a sense that institutions may not help if something went wrong. As Renae noted, ‘You don’t want this much money to go missing because I don’t know if the bank would pay it back. And I don’t want to risk it, so we just don’t do it that way’.

Another factor was a lack of familiarity with digital technologies, which produced a general sense of mistrust and, for some, a sense that they might make mistakes. Ahmed, for example, was in his final year of high school and lived with his parents and younger sister. He was in the process of setting up a small business with a friend but did not use online banking or transactions. This is largely because he grew up in Iraq without access to digital technology so the idea of doing financial transactions online felt unfamiliar and unsafe. He used cash wherever possible and paid for goods and services upfront to avoid recurring transactions. For others, lack of familiarity with digital technologies and processes meant they were worried that they would do something wrong, which compounded their distrust of online platforms and services. For example, Richard, a single parent of two daughters, was broadly distrustful of doing things online and avoided using government services online:

I prefer to go into Services Australia³ myself to get face to face access because I don’t know what I’m doing [online]. And I prefer to get all my mail in the mail; not online. I lose things online, things might get deleted. On Monday, I’ll do my tax return online, yes, but other than that I don’t use Centrelink⁴ or anything online.

These disconnective practices involved costs and, in some cases, effortful workarounds. Ahmed bought phone credit AUD$30 at a time from the petrol station in order to avoid buying it online or having recurring payments. Renae would make a 50-minute round trip into the nearest town to pay bills and rates in person, saving up several bills to pay at once to make it worth the trip despite this making it more difficult to manage financially. Importantly, these actions generally were not perceived as inconveniences by participants—they were simply necessary parts of running their lives.

Disconnections to manage children’s use

Many households had processes or rules for regulating children’s technology use. Sometimes this involved setting time limits, such as allowing 2 hours of Xbox use per day; other rules were about cutting off use in the evening, such as in one home where a parent turned off the Wi-Fi at the same time every night. These examples speak to the challenge of parents managing children’s digital media use and how practices of negotiating dis/connection with children continued despite, or were perhaps even exacerbated by, the introduction of the Connected Students programme.

One particularly evocative example of these negotiations was Nathan’s household, discussed earlier. When we interviewed the family after they had lived with the Connected Students kit for a year, they spoke strongly about the many benefits it had provided. However, Karla explained that she still took the new router with her into town when she did the shopping despite now having unlimited data, choosing to continue with this prior dis/connective practice even though it was no longer a necessity for managing data use. Now, the purpose of this practice was to keep her children off the Internet while she was away so that they did their chores. As she explained, ‘Yes, [the router] goes shopping . . . because I want the floors swept. The washing needs to go on the line. Make your bed. That sort of stuff’. Karla’s choice to disconnect the household was no longer about managing their data allowance but rather part of her efforts to keep the household running and teach her children life skills, an example of how previously established workarounds derived from necessity can still retain utility in alternative ways. Of course, for the children, this was not a voluntary disconnection and, in some ways, having an unlimited data connection made it more difficult for Karla to implement this practice as the kids often anticipated these disconnected periods and ‘downloaded enough stuff to get through’. Without having the data limit as an additional reason to curb their downloading, Karla was finding it harder to prohibit digital media use when she went into town and at night when she had previously required them to be off their devices. She had given up trying to police it as tightly, explaining, ‘I’m over it. I’m over it. I used to make a big thing all the time, and I was the only one stressed about it. They’re all big kids. What do you do?’ In this example, we see an existing practice of disconnection (taking the router shopping) take on a new meaning in the context of improved Internet connectivity, as prior challenges around data allowances are replaced with challenges around children’s time.

Disconnections motivated by preferences for non-use

A final form of disconnection was demonstrated by Yamina, a year 12 student who developed new disconnective practices that were specifically aimed at managing distraction prompted by the Connected Students kit. Yamina’s family had immigrated from Iraq. Her parents had limited English and the household was on a tight budget—their main income was her dad’s disability pension and the government payments her mum received for caring for him and for parenting her and her younger brothers.

Yamina initially found the laptop useful as her schooling moved online due to the COVID-19 lockdowns; like many households, the family would have struggled to provide Yamina with a laptop if she had not received one through the Connected Students programme. Having used it for several months, Yamina appreciated ‘easier access to knowledge and information’. It also became an important way for her to keep in touch with her friends as she did not have a phone. She noted, however, that studying online came with challenges. She found it harder to concentrate, explaining, ‘There’s countless things you could do online. It’s really hard to stick to one thing’.

During our second interview with Yamina, it became clear that her relationship to the laptop had changed. She was now back at school in person and also had a phone, so the laptop was no longer important for social interaction. It was her choice to no longer use it for study, however, that was particularly interesting. She was halfway through her final year of high school and studying for long periods each day in the hope of securing good grades and, ultimately, university admission. At school, other students took notes on their laptops but she preferred writing hers by hand. This was partly because she felt it was easier to find information again later and partly because she found it helped her concentrate. She explained, ‘I feel like it’s a mind[set] sort of thing. Because when you see paper your brain is telling you “This is schoolwork.” When I’m looking at a laptop, I don’t really take it in as well’. She avoided using the laptop when studying at home for similar reasons and because she preferred to spread out all her study materials in front of her. This was a practice she struggled to replicate on the laptop which instead required her to navigate between documents or windows: ‘It’s like, you just gotta keep going back and forth, back and forth. Then you just lose concentration’.

Yamina’s choice to voluntarily limit her use of the laptop in this way was unique among participating students however it provides an important account of someone opting out of using a newly accessible technology. Notably, Yamina could not imagine this changing when she began university although she thought she probably would use one to fit in. As she explained, ‘I don’t really see myself really needing it, but it’s just like the whole idea of everybody having a laptop. It just looks really smart and sophisticated’.

Discussion

This study draws together emerging concerns in digital disconnection and digital inclusion literatures by tracing the modes of disconnection evident among low-income families before and during their participation in a digital inclusion programme. Our findings illustrate the complex and context-specific ways that households experienced, leveraged and mitigated different modes of disconnection.

In some cases, disconnection was a process households were subjected to as they faced affordability barriers that made Internet connectivity difficult to access. At the same time, the necessity of being connected meant that many households carefully negotiated and mitigated their unwanted disconnections, making finely calculated sacrifices in terms of household budgeting, convenience, and data use to ensure they retained a minimum degree of connectivity. These practices included tactical disconnections designed to mete out data allowances over a billing period—a practice also identified in Bozan and Treré’s (2023) study of Turkish villagers. Finally, participants engaged in forms of disconnection that stemmed from concerns about technology use. Some concerns, such as security and privacy, existed irrespective of the households’ degree of connectivity, although, as we note below, they were shaped by the participants’ socioeconomic conditions. Other concerns emerged because of or were exacerbated by the Connected Students kits, such as Karla’s challenge with managing her children’s time and Yamina’s concern with distraction. These disconnections were less common but are important exceptions to the conventional narrative that greater access is straightforwardly embraced by those who were previously excluded. Overall, these findings provide a nuanced picture of the disconnections experienced and enacted by low-income households.

Beyond voluntary and involuntary disconnection

Much of the existing research in digital disconnection studies has focused on problematising the binary of connection and disconnection. Our findings point to another limiting binary—that of voluntary and involuntary disconnection. This has been a key conceptual mechanism across research on disconnection. As noted earlier, the fields of digital inclusion and digital disconnection stemmed from early ‘digital divide’ research that distinguished between people excluded by choice and by circumstances. Studies of digital disconnection now often describe their focus as ‘voluntary’ disconnections (e.g. Jorge, 2019; Nassen et al., 2023) and recent studies that have looked to establish links to digital inclusion research have done so by mapping the ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ disconnections evident in specific populations (Bozan and Trere, 2023; Tai et al., 2021).

This framing has been and remains a valuable way of pointing to different experiences and concerns; yet, our data highlight experiences of disconnection that sit across and between this binary. This is evident in the fact that households were not completely disconnected because connectivity was critical for the everyday functioning of the household. In this sense, financial barriers did not always produce involuntary disconnection in the simple sense of households being wholesale disconnected; rather they produced forms of negotiated dis/connection where households made difficult decisions about what to sacrifice to maximise whatever connectivity they could access. Similarly, a combination of voluntary and involuntary factors shaped participants’ disconnective acts relating to trust and security. These practices of non-use might be read as voluntary in the sense of being active choices designed to manage risk. However, in cases like Ahmed and Richard, these practices were also a product of involuntary exclusion, as a lack of familiarity with digital technologies lowered participants’ trust in online processes and/or their ability to navigate these correctly.

Overall, then, we argue that disconnections that may initially appear voluntary or involuntary can result from a complex interplay of agentic and structural factors. This is not an argument about rejecting these labels entirely; they highlight important differences in issues and experiences around disconnection. Rather, our point is that researchers working with voluntary or involuntary forms of disconnection should not allow those labels to obscure the more complex interplay of agentic and structural factors that shape experiences and practices of disconnection. In our study, for example, highlighting households’ practices of negotiated dis/connection makes visible their digital and financial literacies, which can be overlooked and under-appreciated in low-income populations. Our argument is also significant for disconnection studies given emerging debates over whether, or to what extent, disconnection is a meaningful form of resistance against capitalist digital platforms, particularly in a datafied society where even absence is a data point (Bucher, 2020; Hesselberth, 2018). By looking to low-income families, our work points to different dimensions of agency and resistance where disconnection is instead enacted to manage connectivity, risk, and family life.

Finally, our argument has practical implications for digital inclusion initiatives. One legacy of the voluntary/involuntary binary is that inclusion interventions have largely targeted populations that can be clearly categorised as involuntarily disconnected (e.g. national broadband infrastructure projects such as the NBN). However, our findings illustrate the importance of acknowledging those who might be nominally connected but for whom that connection is the result of significant sacrifices, and who might modulate their connectivity over time according to their changing resources. These households might be missed by inclusion initiatives yet have substantial needs that deserve attention. Their experiences also point to the need for flexible billing options that allow for periods of disconnection, or reduced connection, when circumstances require.

Further lessons for disconnection and inclusion studies

There have been recent calls for digital disconnection research to address a problematic ‘universalism’ in which disconnective practices have been described largely by looking at the experiences of educated, highly connected, middle-class populations (Treré et al., 2020). Our findings contribute to emerging evidence about more diverse populations by highlighting disconnective practices that are informed by experiences of digital exclusion and low-socioeconomic status. Several such practices have already been described earlier. In addition, we note that disconnective practices motivated by mistrust took very different forms to the mistrust-related practices usually described in disconnections research. These have typically focused on mistrust around the data privacy practices of platforms like Facebook, which have been expressed through quitting or reducing the use of social media platforms (Portwood-Stacer, 2013). In contrast, our participants’ privacy-related concerns focused on risks around the theft of personal information, or fraudulent financial transactions, and resulted in the non-use of online transactions including banking, shopping, and bill payment services. This reflects the reality that being subject to these crimes produces greater hardship and distress for lower income individuals as it is more difficult for them to absorb immediate costs or weather lengthy rectification processes (Greene, 2021; Li et al., 2018). This finding illustrates how experiences of disconnection are shaped by people’s ‘specific social circumstances’ including ‘status, social class and access to reliable technological infrastructure’ (Treré, 2021).

For inclusion research, our findings highlight the fact that increased access creates new challenges and thus inclusion research and programmes should not assume that there will be solely positive outcomes from increased connectivity. Existing research on this possibility has focused on risks around data privacy, government surveillance, scams and debt (Gangadharan, 2017; Humphry, 2022); our research indicates that people may also experience more ‘everyday’ concerns such as managing children’s time and reducing distraction. Significantly, our findings also show that participants in inclusion programmes may choose to voluntarily limit their use of the digital technologies they receive because of these kinds of concerns. It is important that these practices are seen as reasonable and legitimate outcomes for inclusion programmes as they reflect increased opportunities for people to consider how technology does and does not serve their needs, and to enact individual preferences around technology non-use. This is an important consideration for evaluating inclusion programmes; non-use is not necessarily a sign that an intervention has failed but may instead indicate positive outcomes. At the same time, these individualised practices of reflection and boundary-setting should not be taken as substitutes for inclusion programmes making their own efforts to understand and mitigate risks associated with increased inclusion.

Conclusion

This article brings together the fields of scholarship focused on digital inclusion and digital disconnection in order to offer a deeper understanding of the relationality between what are usually classed as ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ forms of dis/connection. Through analysis of a 2-year qualitative study of low-income families in regional Australia, we provide an exploration of the varied forms digital disconnection can take. What emerges is a picture that speaks to the involuntary exclusion faced by low-income families, particularly due to financial challenges, while also positioning non-use as a legitimate outcome of digital inclusion programmes, at it can also be an intentional practice of autonomy or resistance. It also highlights how households negotiate and leverage their level of digital connectivity to meet their needs, and that this process often depends upon sacrifices which may not be captured by typical measures of digital inclusion. These findings invite future studies on questions of digital inclusion and digital disconnection to recognise the intricate and necessarily relational dynamics between voluntary and involuntary forms of digital disconnection and non-use.

Footnotes

Authors’ note

We confirm that all authors have agreed to the submission and that the article is not currently being considered for publication by any other print or electronic journal.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Connected Students project was funded by Telstra. This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researchers Award funding scheme (project number DE200100540).

ORCID iDs

Kate Mannell

Estelle Boyle

Jenny Kennedy

Indigo Holcombe-James

Notes

Author biographies

Kate Mannell is a research fellow at Deakin University in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Her research examines the design, governance, and use of digital platforms with a focus on the role of digital technologies in the lives of families and young people. She has recently published in Mobile Media and Communication, Social Media + Society, Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Estelle Boyle is a research associate in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her research focuses on the intersections of digital media, belonging, migration, and digital and social inclusion.

Jenny Kennedy holds an ARC DECRA fellowship and is a senior research fellow in Media and Communication at RMIT University and Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Her research focuses on digital inclusion of low-income households, and the impacts of automated decision-making on domestic life.

Indigo Holcombe-James is ACMI’s Strategic Research Lead, where she coordinates and conducts the audience research that ensures visitors are at the heart of our museum. Previously, Indigo was a Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at RMIT, where she investigated digital inequality and transformation in the creative and cultural industries. Her research has been published in Cultural Trends, Archival Science, Cultural Studies, and the International Journal of Communication.

References

Aharoni

Kligler-Vilenchik

Tenenboim-Weinblatt

(2021) ‘Be less of a slave to the news’: a texto-material perspective on news avoidance among young adults. Journalism Studies 22(1): 42–59.

Arnold

(2003) On the phenomenology of technology: the ‘Janus-faces’ of mobile phones. Information and Organization 13(4): 231–256.

Baumer

Adams

Khovanskaya

, et al (2013) Limiting, Leaving, and (Re)lapsing: an exploration of Facebook non-use practices and experiences. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, Paris, 27 April2 May, pp. 3257–3266. New York: ACM.

Bossio

McCosker

(2021) Reluctant selfies: older people, social media sharing and digital inclusion. Continuum 35(4): 634–647.

Bozan

Trere

(2023) When digital inequalities meet digital disconnection: studying the material conditions of disconnection in rural Turkey. Convergence. Epub ahead of print 17 May. DOI: 10.1177/13548565231174596.

Breunig

McCarthy

(2020) Household telecommunications expenditure in Australia. Telecommunications Policy 44(1): 101837.

Bucher

(2020) Nothing to disconnect from? Being singular plural in an age of machine learning. Media, Culture & Society 42(4): 610–617.

Charmaz

(2005) Grounded theory in the 21st century: applications for advancing social justice studies. In: Denzin

Lincoln

(eds) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 507–535.

DiMaggio

Hargittai

Celeste

, et al (2004) Digital Inequality: From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 355–400.

10.

Eubanks

(2018) Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

11.

Gangadharan

(2017) The downside of digital inclusion: expectations and experiences of privacy and surveillance among marginal Internet users. new media & society 19(4): 597–615.

12.

Gangadharan

(2021) Digital exclusion: a politics of refusal. In: Bernholz

Landemore

Reich

(eds) Digital Technology and Democratic Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 113–140.

13.

Greene

(2021) Stealing (identity) from the poor. Minnesota Law Review 106(1): 59.

14.

Hargittai

(2002) Second-level digital divide: differences in people’s online skills. First Monday 7(4): 942.

15.

Hesselberth

(2018) Discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect. new media & society 20(5): 1994–2010.

16.

Humphry

(2022) Homelessness and Mobile Communication: Precariously Connected. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

17.

Jorge

(2019) Social media, interrupted: users recounting temporary disconnection on Instagram. Social Media + Society 5(4): 1–19.

18.

Karppi

(2011) Digital suicide and the biopolitics of leaving Facebook. Transformations Journal 20: 1–18.

19.

Kennedy

Holcombe-James

Mannell

, et al. (2022) ‘Telstra Connected Students: Lessons for Digital Inclusion’, RMIT University and Telstra, Melbourne. 12 October 2022. Available at: https://www.digitalinclusionindex.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Telstra-Connected-Students-Report.pdf

20.

Kennedy

Arnold

Gibbs

, et al (2020) Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21.

Chen

Straubhaar

(2018) Privacy at the margins concerns, skills, and activities: multilayered privacy issues in disadvantaged urban communities. International Journal of Communication 12: 1269–1290.

22.

Light

(2014) Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

23.

Light

Cassidy

(2014) Strategies for the suspension and prevention of connection: rendering disconnection as socioeconomic lubricant with Facebook. new media & society 16(7): 1169–1184.

24.

Lim

(2020) The politics and perils of dis/connection in the Global South. Media, Culture & Society 42(4): 618–625.

25.

Lloyds Bank (2022) UK consumer digital index 2022. Available at: https://www.lloydsbank.com/assets/media/pdfs/banking_with_us/whats-happening/221103-lloyds-consumer-digital-index-2022-report.pdf (accessed 29 May 2023).

26.

Lofland

Snow

Anderson

, et al (2005) Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

27.

Lomborg

Ytre-Arne

(2021) Advancing digital disconnection research: introduction to the special issue. Convergence 27(6): 1529–1535.

28.

Mannell

(2019) A typology of mobile messaging’s disconnective affordances. Mobile Media & Communication 7(1): 76–93.

29.

Nassen

L-M

Vandebosch

Poels

, et al (2023) Opt-out, abstain, unplug. A systematic review of the voluntary digital disconnection literature. Telematics and Informatics 81: 101980.

30.

Portwood-Stacer

(2013) Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: the performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention. new media & society 15(7): 1041–1057.

31.

Pype

(2021) (Not) in sync–digital time and forms of (dis-)connecting: ethnographic notes from Kinshasa (DR Congo). Media, Culture & Society 43(7): 1197–1212.

32.

Ribak

Rosenthal

(2015) Smartphone resistance as media ambivalence. First Monday 20(11): 6307.

33.

Rogers

Marshall

Osman

(2022) Connecting in the Gulf: exploring digital inclusion and access for low income indigenous families. In: Selected Papers in Internet Research 2022: Research from the Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Aoir—Association of Internet Researchers, USA. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/239857/

34.

Sanders

Scanlon

(2021) The digital divide is a human rights issue: advancing social inclusion through social work advocacy. Journal of Human Rights and Social Work 6(2): 130–143.

35.

Selwyn

(2006) Digital division or digital decision? A study of non-users and low-users of computers. Poetics 34(4): 273–292.

36.

Syvertsen

(2017) Media Resistance: Protest, Dislike, Abstention. New York: Springer Nature.

37.

Tai

(2021) Locked down through virtual disconnect: navigating life by staying on/off the health QR code during COVID-19 in China. Convergence 27(6): 1648–1662.

38.

Thomas

Barraket

Parkinson

, et al (2021) Measuring Australia’s digital divide: the Australian digital inclusion index: 2021. RMIT University, Swinburne University of Technology, Telstra. Available at: https://apo.org.au/node/314284 (accessed 1 June 2023).

39.

Treré

(2021) Intensification, discovery and abandonment: unearthing global ecologies of dis/connection in pandemic times. Convergence 27(6): 1663–1677.

40.

Treré

Natale

Keightley

, et al (2020) The limits and boundaries of digital disconnection. Media, Culture & Society 42(4): 605–609.

41.

Van Dijk

(2019) The Digital Divide. Cambridge: Polity Press.

42.

Wilding

(2009) Refugee youth, social inclusion, and ICTs: can good intentions go bad? Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 7(2/3): 159–174.

43.

Wise

(2013) Trying to connect: telecommunications access and affordability among people experiencing financial hardship. Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Anglicare. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20200612015630/https://accan.org.au/Telecommunications%20access%20and%20affordability%20among%20people%20experiencing%20financial%20hardship.pdf (accessed 1 June 2023).

44.

Wyatt

(2003) Non-users also matter: the construction of users and non-users of the Internet. In: Oudshoorn

Pinch

(eds) How Users Matter: The Co-construction of Users and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 67–79.

‘Taking the router shopping’: How low-income families experience,negotiate,and enact digital dis/connections