Barcelona Metropolis

Fulfilling fundamental rights such as employment, training, health and citizen participation calls for access to a high-speed connection and advanced digital skills. Now that everything is digital, difficulty accessing the internet is a new cause of social exclusion. The challenge the State is up against is to guarantee universal access to the internet and to build a digital society governed by fair criteria and not by those dictated by algorithms and the market.

The concept of the digital divide has been evolving in lockstep with the growing digitisation of society. Initially, it concerned the difficulty of having devices or accessing infrastructure, whether owing to economic reasons or geographical location, to which lack of knowledge and training to understand and use certain functionalities were soon added. In other words, in both cases it concerns deficiencies among users that can hinder or prevent them from using technology properly. Nevertheless, we have recently discovered other factors that divide and harm specific groups without them being able to do much to avoid it, since they are brought about by the biases inherent to algorithms and tools, almost always introduced by white males who imprint their cultural, moral and gender biases on them. The result is a set of circumstances that hinder or prevent some people’s access to the digital society and, therefore, now that everything has been digitised, making it hard for certain people to access society.

The first determining factor of the digital divide concerns inequality in access. Stating that 87% of households have internet in Spain and 91% in Barcelona might suggest that the issue is being resolved. However, we should focus on the fact that, in the 21^st century, 21% of households still have no internet in Spain’s rural areas, and that, in a big European city like Barcelona, the figure comes to 8,1%. Furthermore, if rather than talking about households we talk about people, the figure is even starker: more than 5.5 million people in Spain do not have internet access. It is cause for alarm because the pandemic has revealed that no internet access can mean not being able to enjoy access to such basic and fundamental rights as a job, education and health. The situation could be even more serious, because many households, that have internet access according to the statistics, actually have unstable, insufficient and expensive internet access.

Digital natives, not always the most competent

The second factor determining the divide is linked to the necessary knowledge to use the technology. In this context, much has been said about digital natives, as if being born in one decade or another justified greater or lesser integration into the digital society. As if the mere fact of being born in 1997 guarantees a greater capacity to share information or a better understanding of the modern meaning of identity or participation, than being born in 1964. Any human classification of digital society based on the year of birth is fundamentally flawed. Age is not a good point of reference. It would be much better to consider the length of time exposed to the phenomenon, that is, the number of hours spent on digital media (use of computers, work on the internet, digital photography and video, mobile telephony, etc.), and even an additional nuance: how much of this time devoted to digital media is related to problem solving or goal achievement. There are twenty-year olds with access to digital technologies, but with a poor capacity to use technology to solve real problems, while the over-sixty have developed fully-fledged digital skills. What defines us and sets us apart is not so much our date of birth but our mindset, training and level of use of the digital world to address certain challenges. There are indeed digital natives, but this does not imply that they are competent digital citizens. If we seek out a determining factor behind the generation of the divide, before age, we must consider gender, income, level of education and ethnicity. Without delving any deeper, the study of the digital divide carried out in 2020 in the city of Barcelona reveals gender and cultural biases in uses. Men make more banking-related inquiries and women deal more with health-related issues.