Crang, Michael, Tracey Crosbie, and Stephen Graham. "Variable geometries of connection: Urban...

Variable Geometries of Connection: Urban DigitalDivides and the Uses of Information Technology

Michael Crang, Tracey Crosbie and Stephen Graham

[Paper first received, July 2005; in final form, March 2006]

Summary. This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising urban ‘digital divides’. It focuses onthe ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) unevenly affect the pace oflife within the urban environment. Based on a detailed case study of how ICTs are being used in anaffluent and a marginalised neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, the paper suggests that urbandigital divides need to be understood as more than uneven patterns of access. They emerge in thiswork as more than the presence or absence of specific technological artefacts. Rather, it is arguedthat different styles and speeds of technologically mediated life now work to define urban socio-spatial inequalities. The paper distinguishes between two such key styles and speeds. First, thepaper argues that affluent and professional groups now use new media technologies pervasivelyand continuously as the ‘background’ infrastructure to sustain privileged and intenselydistanciated, but time-stressed, lifestyles. Secondly, more marginalised neighbourhoods tend tobe characterised by instrumental and episodic ICT usage patterns which are often collectivelyorganised through strong neighbourhood ties. For the former, mediated networks help toorchestrate neighbourhood ties; for the latter, it is those neighbourhood ties that enable on-lineaccess.

Introduction

Whilst research on the so-called urban digitaldivide is well established, it has thus fartended to de dominated by aggregate accountscharting of the interaction of two variables—access to the Internet and socio-spatial inequal-ity (Compaine, 2001; Holloway, 2005; Loader,1998; see also Graham, 2002, 2005). Suchresearch has successfully traced how the leadsand lags of on-line access move, over time,between different social groups and geographi-cal areas, whether regionally through econom-ies, or as rural and urban contrasts, as access

to information and communications technol-ogies (hereafter ‘ICTs’) diffuse unevenlythrough society.

Thus far, however, such aggregate andquantitative depictions of wide-scale Internetdiffusion processes have dwarfed efforts tolook at the effects that access, or lack ofaccess, to ICTs—and all the transactional,informational and communicational worldsthat they can open up—have on individuals,households and neighbourhoods. This hasled to three major research problems whichwe seek to address in the current paper.

Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 13, 2551–2570, December 2006

Michael Crang and Stephen Graham are in the Department of Geography, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK.Fax: 0191 334 1801. E-mails: [email protected] and [email protected]. Tracey Crosbie is in the School ofEnvironment, University of Manchester, Architecture Building, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. Fax: 0161 275 6893. E-mail: [email protected]. This research was made possible by a grant from the ESRC for the project ‘Multispeed Cities and theLogistics of Everyday Life’ (RES-335-25-0015) as part of the E-Society programme. The authors would like to thank variouscolleagues in conversations and presentations, and the four anonymous referees who were a model of constructive engagement.

0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=06=132551–20 # 2006 The Editors of Urban Studies

DOI: 10.1080=00420980600970664

First, digital divide literature tends to reducecommunication and information technologiesto a set of artefacts whose distribution canbe plotted against socio-demographicvariables. This, we suggest, puts too muchemphasis on artefacts and reads off theiruses rather deterministically as stable andunchanging, often assuming they give somesort of ‘technological push’ to society—forgood or ill. Thus, the challenge is to unpackthe practices and modalities of using ICTsand the ways in which they configure usersand users configure them. Secondly, workwhich focuses upon ways of using ICTstends to be micro scale and eschews dealingwith broader social consequences. Thirdly,accounts tend to examine not just individualtechnologies but individualised users—down-playing socialised use and outcomes. It is notsufficient simply to map out aggregate urbandigital divides by analysing aggregate ICTusers and activities. Rather, we need to lookat socio-spatially embedded actions andsynergies between multiple technologiesused in places with mutually overlappingeffects occurring through those places.

Multispeed Cities: Beyond QuantitativeMappings of Urban Digital Divides

By way of a critical review of urban digitaldivides literatures, it is worth elaborating onthese three points in a little more detail.Taking the first, much work on digital divideshas been resolutely aspatial. Its main focusthus far has been to relate the presence orabsence of specific technical artefacts—suchas the ownership and ability to use PCs(Selwyn, 2004)—with socio-demographic vari-ables. Occasionally, these patterns are spatiallyreferenced to the geographical units for whichthe data were collected—usually at supra-urban or regional scales. That is the focus isthe distribution of access, usually socially (forUS data see NTIA, 1999, 2000; for the UK,Policy Action Team 15, 2000; Bromley,2004) but in a few works spatially—such asfocusing on variations in connectivitybetween cities (Townsend, 2001) and some-times at the intraurban level (Baum et al.,

2004; Holloway, 2005). The literature on thedigital divide thus has gaps in terms of scale.These works do not tend to focus upon the con-sequences of using ICTs, even though theyoften imply benefits through ‘digital inclusion’.They chart the distribution of artefacts and tendto assume their use and effects. Crucially,however, they also largely ignore the socialconsequences of ICT-mediated social inequal-ities. While theories make often sweepingclaims, empirical work rarely looks to theeffects on daily life in cities resulting fromdifferential contours of the digital landscape.Research is particularly lacking which exploreswhat it means for individuals, groups andneighbourhoods not to have access to ICTs ina world where personal, welfare and leisure ser-vices are increasingly being fundamentallyrestructured to orient themselves towards nor-malised consumers who do have ICT access.Notably, the urban impacts of using ICTs arenot just confined to the household. Theyquickly cascade into other spheres andscales—producing second- and even third-order effects, in, say, local service provisionand community dynamics. To adapt ElizabethShove’s words, ICTs

not only permit people to fulfil necessarypractices, they have the further conse-quence of modifying what those practicesare and how they are ‘normally’ configuredand structured (Shove, 2002, p. 2).

Through such processes of normalisation,ICT-mediated economic and social relation-ships provide opportunities for restructuringthe time–space dynamics of everyday lives,service supply regimes and the broadertime–space patterns of urban development.The dynamic and relational geographies ofsuch transitions reconstitute cities as keyspatial pivots within telescoping scalarrelations, operating at near-instantaneousspeeds, from the scale of the body to the trans-national (Crang, 2000). It follows that thosegroups, neighbourhoods and communitieswithin cities who are marginalised fromICT-mediated links will be excluded not justfrom physical access points to technology.Just as importantly, they will be distanced

2552 MICHAEL CRANG ET AL.

from the complex and multiscale constella-tions of increasingly normalised electronicflows, transactions and exchanges whichoperate within, through and beyond theirneighbourhoods. Consequently, the

social and economic cores and peripheriesof the global information ‘age’, ratherthan being continents apart, now lie geo-graphically adjacent to each other withinindividual cities (Graham, 2002, p. 34).

Starting from these differential processes ofICT-mediation, it follows that, on a neigh-bourhood level within cities, we may findthe emergence of a kind of ‘multispeed’urbanism with some areas still stuck in anurban ‘slow’ lane—still reliant on the arraysof physical cash, face-to-face services andphysical service offices which are increasinglybeing marginalised or withdrawn as ICT-mediated service systems become both nor-malised and dominant (Graham, 2002).Equally, we may also find other hyper-connected areas where residents experiencethe stress of a rapidly accelerating life—where technologies that promised toameliorate the tensions of a busy world,simply enable ever-more frenetic and multi-scalar patterns of activity, co-ordination andmultitasking to be performed simultaneously,at greater and greater speeds, and increasinglevels of complexity.

Opening Black Boxes: Doing Things withICTs

Turning to the second problem, there is apaucity of work in urban studies that examineswhat people do with ICTs. Thus, we tend tohave a dichotomous understanding of ICTsand society where one is assumed to‘impact’ on the other to varying degrees inabstract, generalised and deterministic ways.Indeed, it is remarkable how quickly termslike ICTs and connectivity become linguistic‘black boxes’ that bundle together a wholeassemblage of technologies and assume orimply a raft of resulting technologicallymediated social practices. So, despite someexcellent early work (for example, Silverstone

and Hirsch, 1992), urban analyses rarelyattend to how new technologies are configuredand ‘domesticated’, in everyday practice, asmeans of remaking the time–space fabrics,and the logistical dynamics, of everydayurban life. This is partly because “very littlework has been done at the local scale”(Crampton, 2003, p. 19).

Outwith urban studies, human computerinteraction (HCI) studies have successfullyunpacked the overabstract and generalisedterms used in the policy literature. Thus, mul-tiple technologies emerge here as being con-figured by people in their practicalengagements in daily life. In terms of users,the implication is that we should not be think-ing of singular elements, but also the inter-action of phones (landline and mobile) withcomputers, with embedded processors, withtelevision (digital and analogue). Problemati-cally, however, the dominant notion of theurban digital divide has tended to rely on sim-plistic notions of what is meant by ‘ICTs’.Very often, this term is equated purely withInternet computers (Selwyn, 2004, p. 346).Only very rarely have researchers exploredthe ways in which multiple forms of technol-ogy are enrolled simultaneously and in paral-lel to support shifts in the time–space andlogistical dynamics of urban life. Conse-quently, there is very little research thus farwhich explores how mobile phones, landlinephones, Internet computers and digital TVsystems are being used together, as combinedand interconnected systems, to support chan-ging practices and patterns of urban everydaylife.

The need to focus on the interactions of mul-tiple technologies and forms of access is throwninto relief by the example of mobile workerswho may well be thus using multiple ICTtechnologies to turn transit or leisure spacesinto work space. Thus, intricate ‘juggling’amongst multiple uses of different technologiesmay be needed to make such continuous on-linemobility a possibility. The dance of people andtechnologies occurs in detail as things are madeinto workable solutions—not pristine oroptimal technical specifications—by user prac-tices (Brown and O’Hara, 2003). Despite all the

VARIABLE GEOMETRIES OF CONNECTION 2553

accounts of speed and the ideologies of ‘wire-less’ worlds and ubiquitous computing,anyone with personal experience of ICT useknows that the connecting of various devicesis often a sub-optimal ‘kludge’ driven by‘good enough’ technical fixes, user preferencesand needs (Mackenzie, 2005).

The example of mobile phones throws lighton this reconfiguration of practice and tech-nology. Mobile phones, like satellite or cableTV, rarely figure in discussion of digitalconnectivity. Yet they are intricately boundinto people’s lives and have rather differentpatterns of ‘access’ than the Internet. Textmessaging is an almost paradigmaticexample of unintended uses, developingfrom a facility originally intended fornetwork engineers (Agar, 2004). The mobilephone is not used in the same way as a land-line—despite its functional similarities.Instead, mobiles have been endowed var-iously with more ‘personality’, being treatedas a friend or fashion item, different and shift-ing amounts of social status, being connectedto and incorporated into other ICTs and,increasingly, embodying different communi-cation technologies in themselves (with text,visual, video and web browsing as well asaudio). Work on mobile phones for instancewould suggest taking seriously the spatialtransformations enabled in using these arte-facts. In its use, a mobile moves from vitalwork tool, to technology of reassuranceoften bought for ‘safety’, reassuring carersabout contact with roaming youngsters whilesometimes ending up resented by thosebearers as a tool of surveillance. Yet, withinpeople’s lives, the mobile also becomes anessential urban navigational tool (Townsend,2000, p. 88; Laurier, 2001), allowing meetingsof all kinds to be flexibly negotiated in timeand space (Jain, 2002). Thus mobilesinvolve and transform older technologiesthat manage ‘presence availability’ (Green,2002), transforming the boundaries of publicand private interaction and reappropriatingmarginalised spaces in the city for work andleisure. What this highlights is that ICTs arepractised and put to use in multiple ways inconfigurations with other technologies,

spaces and domains of physical interactionand mobility.

While there is a rich ethnomethodologicaltradition looking at ‘doing communication’,this work tends to shy away from addressingthe broader consequences of such practices.ICTs are neither coherent and discrete objectsnor are they ‘ends in themselves’. Using themrequires competences and represents an accom-plishment, but one which is often about accom-plishing something other than the intrinsicsatisfaction of getting a network to work. So,we need to think how various ICT artefactsand practices link into and enable changes inthe orchestration of everyday life (Cranget al., 2007). Whilst there is an emergingbody of work on household technologies andICTs, we remain largely uninformed aboutwhat the proliferation of ICT-mediatedrelationships means for neighbourhoods andplace-based communities (Little, 2000;Bridge and Giullari, 2004).

Collective Mediations of ICT Use

Returning to our third problem with urbandigital divide literatures, such work has, thusfar, been almost completely preoccupiedwith use of ICTs by individual people orhouseholds. Survey research on urban digitaldivides has concentrated overwhelmingly onapparently individualised ICT users and func-tions (for example, NTIA, 1999, 2000, 2002).With some notable exceptions (such asMorley, 2001; and Hampton and Wellman,2002), it is widely assumed within suchsurveys that ICTs are used by individuals ordiscrete household units with little regard tothe collective logistical and time-spacedynamics of their work, home or social lives.

Such a perspective ignores the ways inwhich collective and social relationships andnetworks, grounded within households, neigh-bourhoods and cities, help to mediate howICTs are domesticated, shaped and used. Italso ignores how ICT access and feedbackshaping use are mediated collectively inplaces. Put simply, e-mail access, forexample, is pointless if you have nothingsuitable to say or no one with whom


communicating that material would be mean-ingful or useful. As a practice, as much asindividual choice, e-mail use depends onothers existing in a social network being avail-able and responsive.

The Approach and Structure of This Paper

To address these three research gaps, this paperfocuses on the ensemble of information tech-nologies and practices, grounded in everydaysocial lives, that together are shaped tosupport varied reconfigurations in the logisticsof everyday urban life. The result, we argue, isthe emergence of a ‘multispeed urbanism’which structures urban digital divides basedon communities’ varying abilities to hook upto multiscale and increasingly normalised elec-tronic flows—and the urban restructuringdynamics that are increasingly derived fromthem. Our focus here thus falls on the differentways in which multiple ICTs are unevenlyreconfiguring the logistical time–space prac-tices of everyday urban life at the level ofbroadly ‘included’ and ‘excluded’ neighbour-hoods within cities. We do not just attend to‘on-line division’ as an indicator of exclusion.Rather, we are concerned with the ways inwhich uneven geographies of ICT mediationwithin cities may function, or be performed,as an engine of exclusion and the oft-trumpetedpossibilities offered for greater inclusion. Wetherefore agree with Bromley’s (2004) stresson the fundamental social consequences ofICTs, although not the solely positive out-comes. She points out, in particular, that

The Internet . . . is a portal which has thepotential to liberalise access to a wholehost of resources and opportunities, and toincrease social connections. . . . It has thecapacity to impart knowledge to groupswhich have tended to be excluded fromtraditional information sources, to providenew channels of communication, and toopen up access to goods and services pre-viously denied or impeded by older technol-ogies or methods of exchange (Bromley,2004, p. 73).

We would add that, as Internet use becomesnormalised in daily routines, those withoutaccess may find access and services pre-viously supplied otherwise becoming moreinaccessible.

The discussion that follows falls into twoparts. As a means of laying the conceptualfoundations for the following analysis, webegin with a brief theoretical discussion.This addresses two key conceptual problems:first, how geographies of multispeed urbanismmight be imagined; and, secondly, how urbandigital divides might be affected by thealleged speeding-up of urban living and thespace–time configurations of cities thatresult from ICT use. The second part of thepaper then outlines findings from a detailedcase study of the ways in which ICTs arebeing enrolled to reconfigure the logisticsand time–spaces of urban everyday life intwo highly contrasting neighbourhoodswithin one city: Newcastle upon Tyne in theUK. The case study addresses how the differ-entials of demographics, social capital andneighbourhood social organisation inflect theuse of ICTs in practice in the two neighbour-hoods. This analysis highlights two themesin particular. First, rather than presence orabsence of technologies, it emphasises morefluid urban digital divides constitutedthrough varying time–space rhythms of ICTuse. Here, a pervasive, ubiquitous presenceis seen to exist amongst more affluent andincluded users which contrasts sharply withmore episodic and instrumental usage ofICTs amongst less affluent ones. Secondly,this section looks at a blurring of access pat-terns through locally embedded, socialiseduse, which appears to be especially importantamongst marginalised neighbourhoods associ-ated with episodic styles of ICT use.

Imagining Multispeed Urban Landscapes

The preceding critique and reconceptualisa-tion of notions of urban digital divides,based on the central importance of the inter-play of ICTs, time–space and the dynamicprocesses of urban everyday life, raises akey question: how might we imagine the


social and geographical landscapes of urbandigital divides within cities characterised bymultispeed urbanism?

Multispeed Cities as ‘Tame’ and ‘Wild’ Zones?

Scott Lash’s (2002) work offers a provocativelead here. He contrasts what he calls the ‘live’and ‘dead’ zones of cities defined by the pre-sence (or relative absence) of the flows ofinformation within such ‘zones’ (pp. 28–29). This he pairs with responses to suchinformation, referring to a parallel urbangeography of what he calls ‘tame’ and ‘wild’zones. Thus, Lash produces a four-way typol-ogy. Dead/tame zones are characterised bymajoritarian ethnic groups clinging to tradi-tionalist values in the face of change. Live/tame zones are dominated by the ‘informa-tional bourgeoisie’, with affluent connectedpopulations doing comfortably, and thus rela-tively conservative, as regards the socialorder. Live/wild zones are marked by theemergence of new cultural forms driven bythe ‘cultural capital faction of the post-indus-trial middle class’. Finally, Dead/wild zonesare areas of social decomposition, character-ised by marginal groups, cultural change andfluidity. Such a schema addresses not justuneven informational landscapes withincities; it also highlights that intraurban socialgeographies and the informational environ-ment interact. Informational environmentsare thus seen to affect neighbourhoods,which reciprocally affect how that infor-mation may be accessed and used.

Lash’s typology, however, is both dualisticand freighted with valorisations that privilegethe ‘wild’ where even the urban information‘have-nots’ are exciting, and ‘culturalcreatives’ drive innovative urbanism (see forinstance Pratt, 2002). This loading of thedice, especially for the live/wild zone,suggests that we have something of a fashion-ing of a self-image or, at least, fantasy identityfor information professionals. Such anargument has led Frank Webster to voice

an uneasy suspicion that many commenta-tors, from academe, business, politics and

media, in effect write themselves on to thecity today. That is, much of the writing ofthe ‘new urbanism’, about the city’s dyna-mism, its flexibility, its stimulation, itsdiversity, its computer communicationstechnologies, its style, its cosmopolitanism,its cultures, seems to be, well, our story. Weare indisputably part of the knowledge elite,and we tell our own favoured tale as regardsthe city of the future (Webster, 2001, p. 42).

While such reflexive understandings of anurban ‘information revolution’ are vital to ouranalysis, we do not want to be seduced by awalk on the wild side. We wish to know what‘taming’ such technologies is all about withinthe context of urban digital divides.

Multispeed Cities and the UnevenAcceleration of Urban Everyday Lives

If we look at information ‘haves’, we see apicture, or at least a self-image, of acceleratinglives. Here, information technology is offeredas a solution to managing a ‘24/7’ lifestyle(for the ‘wild’), or the competing timedemands of work, family and self (for the‘tame’). In essence, then, far from a fantasyof speed, many of the ‘hyper-connected’ inthe latter camp may well experience a stressfuland debilitating time-squeeze as the logisticaldemands of intensification and speed-upbecome increasingly problematic (Eriksen,2001). Stories of acceleration and squeezingmore activities into the day are a key part ofthe imaginary of the digitisation of urban life.The flipside is that speeded-up lives, orche-strated by suites of always-on ICTs, entaildouble- and triple-shifting women and enablelong hours by overachieving men in informa-tional sectors (Perrons, 2003).

On the one hand, then, ICTs are apparentlyadopted as a time-saving technology in theface of mounting pressures. So a variety ofcommunication media are now sold as acollective ensemble of systems and infrastruc-tures which together allow more activities tobe crammed in lifestyles characterisedincreasingly by multitasking, always-onconnectivities, the continuous interactions of


multiple scales and fluid co-ordination. On theother, empirical analysis suggests that ‘free’time is generally growing—although manywith diverse home and work activities com-peting for time feel ‘busyness’ as a pressure(Gershuny, 2000, 2002). Moreover, varioustechnologies have not simply freed up timepreviously spent on chores—more often theyreallocate that time within a household oreven expand chores, by increasingfrequencies of activities (for a debate, seeBittman et al., 2004; Gershuny, 2004).

For digital media, there has been debateabout time on-line displacing other (‘real’)social activities—with accounts portrayingalienated Net users, where, as Mitchell pithilyput it, “They picture us all huddled at homein our underwear typing email messages toone another” (Mitchell, 1999, p. 91). As Ger-shuny (2003) points out, the ‘real’ versusmediated interaction literature assumes thaton-line and media time is a ‘final activity’that is substituted for others. However, ratherthan simply being a goal in themselves, activi-ties mediated through ICTs—such as e-shop-ping, contacting people or informationsearching—often enable or orchestrate other‘off-line’ activities and goals. Much earlyresearch focused upon enthusiastic early adop-ters, who also indeed liked to see themselves asharbingers of change. Now, with widespreadadoption and mass diffusion, we can focusrather more upon the ‘quiet pragmatists’ whoform a majority using the technology conserva-tively and whose “motivation for using tech-nology is dominated by everyday concerns”(Crabtree et al., 2002, pp. 3, 26–28).

Four important points emerge here. First,ICTs may—but only may—facilitate quickerconnectivity, communications or transactionsthan traditional physical access—either bydesign, as a privilege of mediated access(effectively a ‘by-pass’ or queue jumping;see Graham, 2005), or unintentionally (if, forinstance, an e-shop discourages productbrowsing, purchases may be more ‘efficient’).

Secondly, ICTs enable time-shifting activi-ties to formerly unavailable time slots as therigid time–space routines of traditional face-to-face work and urban consumption within

mass, industrialised cities, give way to flexibleand complex orchestrations involving geo-graphically distanced access combined withcontinuous temporal opportunities for engage-ment. Thus, on-line grocery shopping orphone banking may be no quicker at all.But, if they can be done in the evening, theymay fit around other more valued or con-strained tasks—such as work hours or childcare. All these outcomes are contingent—phone banking may beat travelling to thebank and physical queuing, or being placedin a phone queue preference system may notbe any advantage. Equally, on-line bankingmay be faster than both or getting access ona secure PC, starting it, getting a connectionand processing may be just as slow.

Thirdly, more than just time use constraints,ICT mediations also enable the relocating ofsome—but only some—activities within,through and beyond the material spaces ofcities. Thus, both phone and on-line bankingdo spatially relocate tasks and thus reducetravel time and may allow multi-taskingwhilst doing banking, but being able to tellchildcare providers on your mobile phonethat you will be late does not make you getthere quicker (Jarvis, 2005).

Finally, mobilised devices can enable usersto convert formerly ‘dead’ space(–time)—such as the bus stop, or indeed the bus—toconnect with people not physically present.Thus, multi-tasking is moved out of thehome, facilitating complex processesthrough which electronic and physicalroaming within and between cities is continu-ously recombined in new ways.

These latter two points exemplify the possi-bilities of the intensified use of time throughICTs—not simply moving it around within afixed time budget. This complex pattern maystart to explain mixed effects where analysessuggest that

each extra minute on the Internet is associ-ated with about one-third of a minutereduction in personal care time, one fifthof a minute less visiting, half a minuteless watching television . . . [and], nearlyone-fifth of a minute of extra time


devoted to going out — eating or drinkingin a public place, going to the theater orcinema (Gershuny, 2003, pp. 158, 164).

Longitudinal measurement of changes in timeuse by people adopting ICT technologies actu-ally suggests an even stronger positiverelationship with socialising and specificallywith going out to public places. Time-usefigures also suggest that people with homeWeb access tend to work longer hours andsleep for fewer, although there is no simplecausal inference here. This highlights thatwhile, so far, we have couched this changingon-line and communication time pattern interms of consumption, when looking at the‘hyper-connected’ who are often bound upin the transnational informational economyat work, what we also have is the delocalisa-tion of work and its relocation into thehome—as out of hours, weekend work andso forth. Thus, ‘creative work’ often involvesperiods of intense, and not entirely predict-able, activity, tied into the dynamics of trans-national urban networks. But these periodscan be followed by periods of slack time.Thus, ‘creative’ workers work flexible hoursin order to deal with the volume and rhythmof work (Perrons, 2003, pp. 70, 84).

Exploring Multispeed Urbanism: A CaseStudy of Newcastle upon Tyne

In what follows, we seek to build on the abovetheoretical and conceptual discussions aboutthe connections between urban inequalities,ICTs and the changing logistics of everydaylife through a detailed case study of two neigh-bourhoods in Newcastle upon Tyne. Thisenables us to focus on the varied ways inwhich affluent and marginalised users areusing ICTs to reshape the logistics of daily lifewithin one city. Newcastle was selected as thesubject of research for two reasons. First, at aregional scale, the North East of England isone of the UK’s ‘lagging regions’ in terms ofICT adoption. In 2003–04, for example, theregion had the lowest rates of Net usage in theUK (43 per cent as against London’s 64 percent) and the lowest rates of home Internet

access in England (41 per cent as againstLondon’s 56 per cent) (Office of NationalStatistics (ONS) household and omnibussurveys). However, regions are poor reflectorsof varying rates of ICT access within cities.

Secondly, then, Newcastle offers contrastswhere neighbourhoods might share publicand private urban services but be worldsapart in terms of the dynamics of multispeedurbanism, as stark variations of income,social class, levels of digital inclusion orexclusion, and the time–space dynamics ofICT-mediated urban life are played outdifferently across the city’s affluent andmore marginalised neighbourhoods.

Within the city, we selected two highlycontrasting neighbourhoods for study whichare barely a mile apart geographically: Blake-law and Jesmond. Blakelaw is in the bottom20 per cent wards on the UK government’sindex of social deprivation; Jesmond isamong the wealthiest 20 per cent. Nationally,home Internet access in the UK varies fromaround 85 per cent for the wealthiest quintiledown to 15 per cent for the poorest quintile(ONS, 2003/04). This gap, moreover, is widen-ing in both the UK and the US (Bromley, 2004,p. 78; NTIA, 2002). The two wards were thusselected because they presented remarkablydiffering profiles on a range of variables thatmight be expected to lead to widely disparatepatterns of ICT adoption, the organisation ofdaily life and utilisation of ICTs (seeTable 1). Methodologically, each ward wassubject to a stratified postal survey (n ¼ 400)to establish baseline levels of ICT usage. Thiswas followed by in-depth interviews with 50respondents in each ward and a similarnumber of technology-use diaries to try andtrack not just what people said but what theydid, when, where and how often. All interviewswere recorded and transcribed, then codedfollowing an abductive approach, buildinginferentially on patterns in the material usingNUD�IST qualitative analysis software (seeCrang, 1997, 2003).

Blakelaw and Jesmond offer something ofthe contrast between the ‘live’(tame) and‘dead’(tame) informational zones that Lashoutlined. Blakelaw has a history as a dormitory


neighbourhood for working-class, manufactur-ing employees; Jesmond, meanwhile, is andhas been a professional enclave orientedtowards the information economy—but gener-ally the ‘safer’ public-sector and corporatejobs. The income profiles would lead us toexpect varying adoption rates for ICTs and,indeed, 60 per cent of our respondents fromJesmond but only 37 per cent from Blakelawhad Internet access at home (Table 2), asmaller gap than socioeconomic statisticswould suggest. Despite stark income differen-tials, the digital divide was more complex,with a relative similarity in broadband ratesexplained by its bundling with cable TV bythe local service provider—and cable TVdoes not follow the same socioeconomicprofile as the Internet. So, for our neighbour-hoods, the key factor in ‘bandwidth’ was not

income but rather supply-side combinationsof ICTs. But households with access to cableconnectivity did not always use on-line servicesthe most and virtually no one used digital TVitself as the means to access the Internet.

This pattern of access suggests that risingincome is a significant, but far from exhaustive,predictor of Internet usage. In our sample(Table 3), 16.7 per cent of all respondents inBlakelaw (i.e. 26 per cent of non-users) and3.6 per cent in Jesmond (9 per cent of non-users) cited cost as a reason for not using the‘Net—a stronger income effect on choicethan national data predict. With respect to theoften-conjectured lack of social capital andskills as ‘barriers to diffusion’, only 3.3 percent of Blakelaw respondents (5 per cent ofnon-adopters) and a surprisingly larger 11.8per cent of Jesmond respondents (30 per centof non-adopters) cited knowledge barriers.This flips the expectations of programmeswhich concentrate training initiatives onpoorer wards as an alleged solution to urbandigital divides. Such data accord with studieswhich suggest that people are making prag-matic and relatively informed judgementsabout the use and value to them that particularICTs will have (Crabtree et al., 2002).

Urban Digital Divides as Process: Contrastsbetween Pervasive and Episodic ICT Use

Our key analytical issue was not the physicalpresence or absence of ICTs, but how ICT

Table 1. Jesmond and Blakelaw: ward characteristics, 2001

Blakelaw Jesmond

Population 11 300 9 700Number of households 5 000 4 400Ethnicity (percentage White) 97 93Percentage working more than 49 hours per week 17 F 30 F

4 C 16 CPercentage in all professional/managerial SECs 18 41Percentage who moved in past 12 months 6 21

(1 per centfrom outside city)

(50 per cent fromoutside city)

Percentage of households with PCs 17 40

Source: UK Office of National Statistics, 2001 Census.

Table 2. Blakelaw and Jesmond: types and rates ofhome Internet access

Percentage

BlakelawDial up 23.3Broadband 13.3No home Internet access 63.3

Total 100.0

JesmondDial up 41.3Broadband 18.3No home Internet access 40.4

Total 100.0


use varied between the two neighbourhoodsamples (Selwyn, 2004, pp. 347–348). Interms of looking up information, the pro-portions for the neighbourhoods followed thepattern of access, but around double the pro-portion from Jesmond (45 per cent) useddigital media for regular communication.Communicability, not information, tends tosupport feelings of social inclusion andquality of life (Anderson, 2002). Several ofour interview respondents argued that on-line access to information told them littlethey could not already find out—althoughmore quickly and generally while staying athome. If we focus upon the orchestration ofdaily living, rather than information trans-mission, then patterns of usage were moreskewed than access, with 16 per cent ofrespondents from Blakelaw using Internetbanking, 10 per cent paying bills on-line and28 per cent of respondents using Internetshopping as opposed to 26 per cent of therespondents from Jesmond using banking, 16per cent paying bills and 40 per cent shoppingon-line. If ICTs are enabling the accelerationof urban life, that acceleration was doublyconcentrated among the connected.

As we explored patterns of usage, keyissues emerged around the mode of ICT useand how this related to the broader logisticsof everyday urban life between the twosamples. It quickly became clear that “con-ditions of inclusion and marginalisationcould not be treated as an ‘either–or’ state”(Beck et al., 2004, p. 280). As Bromley hassuggested in the case of national UK data

Certain patterns start to become familiar:younger people, those with degrees, andhigh household incomes are more likely to

make extensive use of the Internet thanare older Internet users or those withfewer educational or economic resources(whose use tends to be restricted to justone or two different applications). It istherefore perhaps more apposite to talk ofdigital divides rather than simply referringto it as a singular phenomenon (Bromley,2004, p. 93).

The pattern was of multiple social factors butalso how extensive was people’s use. Nation-ally, across the UK, 28 per cent of personalusers accessed the net at least once a day, 27per cent ‘several times a week’, 16 per centonce or twice a week, 14 per cent up to oncea week and 16 per cent once a month (ONS,2003/04). If we look at personal ICT time-use, rather than the physical access, we findthat men

in higher professional and managerial occu-pations spend 4 hours per week in compu-ter-related activities and similarly placedwomen, 3 hours per week. Those inmanual occupations spend hardly 1 hourper week in these activities (Gershuny,2003, p. 153).

Our sample suggested how profound a differ-ence this pattern of use makes, as the effects ofICTs cascade into other activities. The dividein use, we found, was not access per se but apattern of pervasive use amongst affluent resi-dents in Jesmond contrasted with cultures ofepisodic ICT use amongst the more margina-lised residents of Blakelaw.

Our study suggested the existence of twodistinct modes of ICT use: discrete, episodicICT use—mostly for instrumental and specificreasons—and a more constant style of

Table 3. Blakelaw and Jesmond: reasons for not having home Internet access (percentages)

Blakelaw Jesmond National ONS 7/2004

Cannot afford it 16.7 3.6 4.5Have never thought about it 11.1 9.1Do not know how to use the Internet 3.3 8.2Do not know how to organise Internet access n/a 3.6 16Other 32.2 14.5 30Has Internet access in household 36.7 60.9 52


pervasive ICT use. For pervasive users in ourstudy—predominantly affluent and time-pressured professionals living in Jesmond—various ICTs worked together to permeate,and continually orchestrate, their everydaylives. ICTs, in other words, become a taken-for-granted and always-on ‘infrastructure’—a background assemblage of technologiesand practices sustaining continuous multitask-ing involving simultaneously many geo-graphical scales of distanciated connection.

Telephones were seen to be the most vitaltechnology for modern life by both sets ofrespondents—although often mobile phonesrather than landlines. This varied by area,though, with 45 per cent in Jesmond feelingthe phone was “essential” to their lives asagainst 25 per cent in Blakelaw. How theybecame essential and what that actuallymeans we shall see below. The mean use oflandline telephones in the neighbourhoodswas not statistically different—in both areas,two-thirds of people used their landlines forless than 3 hours per week. It was notable,however, that the heavy users making 3–6hours of calls a week were much more pro-nounced in Jesmond (34.2 per cent of allusers as against 18.7 per cent in Blakelaw).There was a positive correlation of usagewith income in Blakelaw, but not inJesmond—suggesting an income thresholdbeyond which there is no further effect.However, within Jesmond, 15 per cent hadmore than one phone line, while in Blakelawonly 5 per cent did—and the most frequentreason given for multiple lines was to facili-tate dial-up Internet access.

The second-largest use of home telephonesin Jesmond was communicating with work,with 7 per cent using phones more to commu-nicate with work than friends and family,while Jesmond respondents were also morelikely to use phone connections to arrangefinances, utilities and services. The depen-dence on pervasive access to mobile connec-tions in Jesmond came through strongly ininterviews where one user spent 10 per centof her interview narrating the gradual moveof her mobile phone from a tool with aspecific, limited purpose where uses were

clearly demarcated, to a situation where itbecame an intrinsic and habitual componentof the logistics of living—a background infra-structure orchestrating everything she did

I suppose it’s always like this, you get [amobile phone] thinking “Well, I’ll have itfor an emergency” and then you end upbeing one of those people standing atTesco’s saying “They don’t have freshbroad beans, do you want runner beansinstead?” So I think what a sad soul I’veturned into. But you can get that instanthit. . . . It’s that kind of, I don’t know, itjust takes all the little wrinkles out of yourlife, you don’t have to wait. You know, “Ineed to consult you, is it OK”. “Yes, it isfine”. “Oh that”s marvellous’ and it canhappen and I think that’s great so I’vebecome one of those people who wouldnever ever want to give up a mobile (Inter-view 17, Jesmond).

This passage shows the gradual embedding of atechnology, until it becomes essential for dailyliving, and both a purveyor and solution to dis-courses that demand instantaneity and theability to orchestrate daily living for peoplemoving through the city separately but interde-pendently. How ICTs pervade activitiesbecame clear in the time diaries of severalJesmond respondents who were unable to indi-cate when they used ICTs—because they wereunable to indicate when, if ever, they did not.Thus, one Jesmond respondent simply drewlines all the way across the day in her time-diary to indicate constant use of phone ande-mail. In the free entry sections, she wrote“Constant e-mailing”, “Constant [Internetaccess] at work”, “E-mails all day”. Thisperson was not solely e-mailing all day, butthere were no prolonged spells when she wasnot connected and in that sense the task of‘doing’ e-mail became continuously woveninto her work.

Compare this with an episodic ICT user whoworked with computers quite extensively andrecorded a lot of communication activity intheir diary, but who could record specifictimed events: “9.10: 3 work e-mails sent to col-leagues”, or: 2pm: “Check e-mails—receive 5


work tasks send 3 replies further 2 work”. Wefound these episodic users to be much moreprevalent in Blakelaw than in Jesmond. Episo-dic users were able to demarcate quite pre-cisely the times and spaces of ICT usagefrom the times and spaces of non-use. Theywere also able to recall the specific reason forthe shift from non-use to use and back againto non-use. Take, for example, the discussionwith Interviewee 1 from Blakelaw

I: Will you use the e-mail?

R: I’ve used the e-mail.

I: Who do you e-mail?

R: Well I’ve e-mailed me family andfriends. Oh, I booked me holiday, I’vebooked me holiday with [partner] lastweek on the Internet. I did that, and thatcame through fine. . . .

I: How important, would you say, is thee-mail and the Internet for organising yourdaily routine?

R: Oh no, not really, not for organising medaily routine. But for the odd occasionwhen you want something done, it’s comeup trumps for me.

The respondent, with broadband access and ahousehold income between £16 000 and£20 000, downplays the Internet’s role inorganising their daily life. But she recountsspecific occasions when she gained benefitsfrom individual ICT-mediated transactions.To episodic users, based overwhelmingly inBlakelaw, moments of ICT use thus remainednotable and still carried a sense of being noveland separate from the wider background of anon-ICT-enabled everyday life.

Contrast this with the effects noted by inter-viewee 17 from Jesmond, who prefers amobile phone to e-mail because she can turnit off or leave it in her bag while e-mail isfor her a constant, and demanding, presence

R: No because you’ve always got thefreedom to switch [the mobile] off . . . whenI haven’t got it it’s because I’ve extractedmyself or I’ve turned it off so I don’t feel

I’m kind of on a chain, whereas I actuallydo with e-mail.

I: Oh you do with e-mail?

R: Oh yes, because I think it’s addictive andyou think, I know the . . . of course the thingis now I’ve got speakers, it goes ‘bing bong’and I think I should turn them downbecause every time there’s a ‘bing’ I goand see what it is.

I: You can switch the ‘bing bong’ off.

R: Yes, I know, yes I have, I thought I mustdo this because, I just feel, it’s like being adog on a lead, you sort of get hooked into it,I know you, the idea of e-mail is that peoplesend you a message when it’s convenient ormaterial, you look at it when it’s convenientto you, but I think increasingly that’s notthe case. You feel almost obliged to makeinstant response and if you neglect your e-mails and you go into them, and there’slike, you know, 210 . . .

Here, the hyper-connected, pervasive ICTuser from Jesmond (occupationally one ofthe ‘informational workers’, with a householdincome over £60 000, who banks on-line,shops on-line and has broadband access)experiences ICTs not just as a solution totime pressure and life speed-up, but as acause of the problem. Indeed, in her interview,she valued the ability to disconnect, to ‘extractherself’, something she found hard to do evenon evenings or on holiday as pervasive ICTuse blurred the divisions between connectedand non-connected spaces and times. If welook at her account in detail, we have tothink that this technically connected personhas not disabled the e-mail alert, but insteadarticulates a sense of obligation about themessages—that they demand a speedy reply,there is an expectation and possibly sanctionsfor failure. Here, we see articulated the notionof acceleration, but bound to a technology thatis usually referred to as ‘asynchronous’ mes-saging. The synchronous real-time conversa-tion by telephone can by contrast be avoidedand disconnected, whereas e-mail is felt as‘chain’. Thus, this respondent can be


unavailable for real-time communication, bute-mail accumulates with a sort of awful ines-capability. So she feels a shifting pressurefrom something that should enable her tochoose when to read the messages to some-thing demanding a response—a demand forimmediacy that she finds in the expectationsof senders. So these different ICTs arebrought into her life in different ways offeringher different amounts of control that are notdetermined by the technology itself. Manyother examples of ICTs creating time stresswere found among the Jesmond sample, withinterviewee 35, for example, arguing that

There’s a need to look at the clear down-sides [of pervasive ICT use], I think it canbe incredibly stressful, intrusive, I’veheard other people say that their heartsinks, they’re constantly trying to managean inbox of e-mails, and this isn’t just the‘spam’ stuff this is the simple demands ofwork. . . . There is simply too much infor-mation that comes through which I dothink has an influence on people . . . Thereare countless ways in which it can be asource of stress, and I’ve heard manyother people say that.

This interviewee is not just stating theirexperience here, but reproducing a populardiscourse and reflexive self-understandingabout information overload and the stressesof accelerating everyday life caused by perva-sive ICT use. ‘Many other people’ are talkingabout this ‘busyness’. And yet, the broaderempirical data suggest that work time is notexpanding. So here we may be seeing anintensification of work within a given time,the production of new work (having to‘manage an inbox’) or the social valorisationof ‘busyness’ as a badge of honour, a state-ment of importance and value for eliteworkers (Gershuny, 2005). Notably, and insharp contrast to the focus amongst episodicusers on isolated moments of connectivity,these pervasive users’ stories highlightedmoments of disconnection from ICT use asaberrant and remarkable. Moreover, differentcommunicative media—from texting to e-mailing, to phoning—were portrayed by

such users as part of an overall ecology,with different strategies for each, but never-theless all forming a communicative assem-blage in which multiple systems are usedtogether to sustain multiple, simultaneousand continuous tasks. There is, then, a differ-ence in strategies of use and outcome despitesimilar technical accomplishments. Thus, thedense interweaving of on-line and off-lineactivities among the highly connected, wherepatterns of texting quick messages bleedthrough to e-mail, where physical shoppingand on-line ordering for convenience, orches-trating friends gathering via e-mail circularsforms this pervasive infrastructure—that is aqualitatively different experience from arran-ging to log on and getting a good deal forone isolated transaction through a comparisonshopping website.

Episodic ICT Access: The Importance ofNeighbourhood and Social Mediation

If traditional access data derived from house-hold surveys seem to underplay the effects ofthe digital divide on the one hand, they alsotend to overstate urban digital divides as astructural binary simply dividing urbansocieties into two parts. This portrayal actu-ally misses a large amount of ICT usage.Our study suggests in particular that episodicusers tend to be underreported in studiesbased on access, and their neighbourhoodsthus not so ‘dead’ to digital flows. Mostdigital divide and household ICT accesssurveys, to be comparable with nationaldata, ask questions on personal ICT use inthe previous three months. Evidence fromthe ONS and our other methods suggeststhat this does not give a full picture. Inseveral interviews, when asked about e-com-merce, respondents would say that they hadnot used ICTs. However, further into the inter-view, they would suddenly recall how theyhad bought something on-line throughanother person. Had we simply conducted aquestionnaire then they might never haverecalled their indirect and collectivelymediated ICT access and thus we wouldhave simply labelled such people as digitally


excluded non-users. This concurs with ONSsurveys of non-use of the Internet whichintroduced a new category in 2003—‘someone else uses the Net for me’—whichcomprised 10–15 per cent of non-users and,in the ONS omnibus survey for 2003/04, 25per cent of users had accessed Internet atsomeone else’s house, while British SocialAttitudes data suggests 15 per cent do so(Bromley, 2004).

In our survey, 9 per cent of respondentsfrom Blakelaw and 8 per cent from Jesmondhad accessed the Internet from friends’houses. This pattern and proxy access makesus conclude that surveys asking about phys-ical Internet points of presence may wellunderestimate infiltration of the Internet.Interviews repeatedly found that the benefitsof cheap e-commerce provision, especiallyof travel purchases, spread much further thanhardware provision suggests. Take, forexample, Interview 15 (Jesmond)

I: [Have you shopped on the Internet?]

R: Me personally, no. Well you see my chil-dren will use it for me in that if, forexample, one of them will ring up and say“I’ve found you a cheap holiday mum” orI’ll ring them and say, because we go overto France a lot, and I’ll say “I’m lookingfor a cheap crossing”; “Oh leave it withme mum I’ll find you one”. And em, theydo it for me.

Using others’ knowledge of good deals andproducts through social networks is nothingnew and can be found in shopping practicesfrom markets to department stores. But itemphasises that, far from a purely individualpractice amongst atomised people or house-holds, here e-commerce emerges as a socialaffair. These episodic users tend to focus ondiscrete high-value transactions, where thereis a clear financial benefit and standardproduct. The standard product means thatthese can be delegated purchases. So belowwe see a respondent from Blakelaw, whostarted by saying that they did not shop onthe Internet. Through the course of the inter-view, however, the interviewee kept recalling

instances where they had done so, but throughcollaboration

I don’t think I’ll use it for shopping. I don’tthink I will. But saying that, for any bigitems, I’m not saying I wouldn’t do it forthat, for a washing machine for instance,for a television. Well actually I have doneit for a television, the television up in mybedroom. But, it was done, me niece doneit for us, she went onto Tesco’s and doneit and that (Interview 1).

This is not some delocalised realm ofe-commerce, but the embedding of e-com-merce via local social networks. Nor werethese examples of socialised e-commercetenuous or infrequent events. Often, theywere widespread and quickly facilitated. Inthe excerpt below, the Blakelaw respondentends up listing five separate people, all in thelocal neighbourhood, who shop on-line for her

I: Do you use the Internet at all?

R: No, em, I don’t go on it personally, but ifI need to know anything my daughter or myson, they get it up, because they just livewithin a few minutes, and I just phonethem, they sort things out for me over theInternet. If I want a railway ticket or some-thing like that, because sometimes whenyou go on the Internet you get deals, youknow. . . . I don’t need to, because as I sayI’ve got my son or my daughter, youknow, who’ve got them. Actually mysisters have all got them, well two of mysisters. . . . One of them, she just lives upthe road. And [another resident] she’s gota computer and they’re on the Internet aswell (Interview 12).

What this suggests is less an absolute divide ofaccess between ICT users and non-users sep-arated out amongst the various zones ofpolarised urban landscapes, and more a setof digital divides marked by contrasts intime–space modes of ICT use. We foundpeople without ‘access’ in conventionalmeasures who, whilst not able to use the Netthemselves, were nonetheless able, via tele-phone in the above excerpt, to exploit existing


off-line, local social networks to accessindirectly the benefits of on-line commerce.But, in the above quote, note how it is stillremarked upon who does have a computerand that this social network while local isdoubly mediated—her children live within afew minutes but she phones them to accessthe Internet for her. In Jesmond, this socialaccess occurred very largely within house-holds with numerous respondents sayingthey did not shop or bank on-line becausetheir partner dealt with those things. In Blake-law, however—with its low residential mobi-lity and dense, stable, familial andneighbourhood networks—indirect, socialiseduses of ICTs often also extended beyond thehousehold.

These socialised contacts, moreover,appeared much more significant than ‘publicaccess’ provision in libraries or kiosks. UKnational figures suggest that 8–9 per cent ofusers access the Internet via Internet cafesand 7–10 per cent via library or communitycentres (ONS National Omnibus Survey,2004). However, in our sample, only some 4per cent of respondents from Blakelaw and12 per cent of respondents from Jesmond,accessed the Internet from Internet cafes and7 per cent of respondents from Blakelaw and12 per cent of respondents from Jesmondaccess the Internet from their local library.Despite the implementation of ‘e-phones’and kiosks in Newcastle, we found only onerespondent who had used them (and that wasonly once). In other words, not only does thepresence of these public facilities appear notto provide meaningful access, they are slightlymore likely to benefit the better-off commu-nity with the competences, expectations andincentives to use them when they areavailable.

However, our analysis suggests that socia-lised access at the neighbourhood level in Bla-kelaw is unable to provide all the benefitsreceived through individual or household on-line services. These networks are mobilisedfor specific tasks where there is an overridingfinancial benefit and a simple product. Forpoorer residents of Blakelaw, though, therewere limits to this process. Probing on-line

banking and payment of bills—often offeringpreferential account rates—we found dispro-portionately less use in Blakelaw. On-linebanking and utility accounts are linked toprivate access. In Blakelaw interviews, wealso found preferences for unmediated ‘localprovision’ based on face-to-face physicalbranch offices. Often, this provision was nomore accessible in Blakelaw than it was inJesmond, yet physical access was felt asmore empowering and direct by Blakelawrespondents, where mediated access wasoften regarded with suspicion and as anobstacle, while Jesmond residents stressedthe convenience of digital services in termsof time of access, overcoming spatial distanceand speed. The ideological connotations of themedia and lack of access were thus almostdirectly opposite in the two areas of thestudy (see also Schofield et al., 2004).

Conclusions

Our evidence in this paper suggests that newimaginations of urban digital divides areurgently required. Moving away from a preoc-cupation with mapping the diffusion of phys-ical ICT access facilities within and betweenthe geographies of cities, attention needs toshift, rather, to the ways in which varyingmodes of ICT use are constructed to reshapeunevenly the times, spaces and logistics ofeveryday urban life between wealthier andless wealthy groups and areas in cities.

By taking such an approach, this study hasshown that the relationships between urbaninequality and ICTs relate less and less tostark, binaried geographies of access or lackof access. Rather, digital divides increasinglyentail contrasts in modes, styles, temporalitiesand intensities of ICT use. These imply thatthe ways in which ICTs are being unevenlyused reshape the temporal, spatial and logisti-cal constraints that characterise urban inequal-ities, mediate individual and collectiverelationships in new ways and requirecareful attention. On the one hand, then, ourstudy suggests that affluent neighbourhoodstend to be associated with pervasive ICT usethrough which multiple ICT systems are


configured together as an ‘always-on’ andbackground infrastructure orchestratingcomplex and speeding-up logistical, homeand work lives. Whilst certainly enrollingthe capacities of ICTs for relatively privilegedand powerful users, the resultant ‘time-crunch’, and the proliferating interactionsgenerated by the need to co-ordinate evermore extended, multiscalar and complex net-works of tasks, tends also to result in anincreasing sense of stress for users (Souther-ton, 2003).

Here, ironically, the absence of ICTs is bothfeared and craved; ICTs become so normal-ised as the transactional glue holding togethereveryday life that moments and spaces wherethey are not underpinning complex logisticalnegotiations actually become most noticeable.There is, thus, a dialectical relationshipbetween the orchestrational and liberatingcapacity of ICTs. For such technologies hold

The promise to help people cope with thecompression and fragmentation of time.But in so doing they lock their users intocertain practices and habits, at the sametime requiring an extensive if routinely invis-ible supporting infrastructure [with the]unintended consequence of tying peopleinto an ever denser network of interdepen-dent, perhaps even dependent, relationshipswith the very things designed to free themfrom just such obligations (Shove and South-erton, 2000, p. 315).

Moreover, the organisational webs mediatedthrough pervasive use of ICTs become moreflexible, multiscaled and complex to managewhen

By speeding things up, or offering increasedflexibility, contemporary technologies,systems and infrastructures of mobilitypermit the fragmentation of episodes intosmaller and smaller ‘units’ thereby increas-ing the challenge of co-ordinating whatbecome separate events. In addition, and inorder to cope, individuals adopt responsivestrategies that enhance their ability tofollow space–time trajectories of their ownchoosing. But when everyone else is doing

the same, the problem of co-ordinationincreases further (Shove, 2002, p. 5).

The need for different ICTs is thus evolving,not static. The tasks for which ICTs arenecessary change. For a long time, techno-advocates have seen ICTs as a ‘good thing’and necessary, when many people still seethem as incidental to their life (Crabtreeet al., 2002, p. 5). The digital divide had notbeen ‘impacting’ on people’s daily routines.However, as ICTs become bound into thewarp and weft of everyday life, activitiescome to depend upon them. We had askedrespondents whether they used e-mail, PCsand mobile phones instead of going places,and it became clear from the replies that thisquestion did not really make sense to them.In terms of PCs, they could talk about on-line purchases. But for pervasive users, andalmost everyone with mobile phones, theanswers broke down. These ICTs were sobound into co-dependent patterns of actionand mobility that it was no longer possibleconceptually to disentangle them—physicalmovement depended upon the ability formediated contact and mediated contact wasnecessitated by patterns of activity. Theimport of this integration of ICTs as part ofthe infrastructure holding complex lifestylestogether, is that the consequences of nothaving those technologies actually becomemore significant. Finally, our study suggeststhat pervasive ICT users do seem to havemuch more individualised usage practicesthan episodic users. In affluent, professionalneighbourhoods where pervasive ICT use isincreasingly normalised, collective use ofICTs tends to operate, if at all, purely withinhouseholds and at the level of the family.Here, mediated links are used to sustain real-life networks.

Conversely, our study suggests that, inmany lower-income and more marginalisedneighbourhoods, ICT use remains largely epi-sodic. Whilst physical ICT facilities arepresent to an increasing degree, they tend tobe used for specific, instrumental purposesand then switched off. Notably, specific ICTuses remain strongly demarcated in space


and time from wider, everyday urban livesstill marked by a reliance on traditional casheconomies, face-to-face services and theneed physically to travel to sustain economicand commercial transactions and social andfamilial links. Here, especially in neighbour-hoods like Blakelaw, which have relativelylow social turnover and very deep and stablesocial networks, our study suggests that ICTuse tends to be more collective and collabora-tive and less individualised than amongst per-vasive ICT users.

Importantly, such collective, collaborativeand episodic ICT use tends to be largely invis-ible to conventional digital divide mappingstudies. Amongst episodic users, the limitedtimes and spaces where ICT connectivity ismade remain notable and distinct from thewider background of everyday life. Whilstsuch users may escape the time pressures ofpervasive users, it is also clear that their con-tinued reliance on physical cash, physical ser-vices and-face-to face contacts is likely to beseriously threatened as ICT-based public andprivate service provision systems becomeboth normalised and used as a rationale forthe widespread withdrawal of non-on-lineand face-to-face alternatives.

Amongst episodic users, ICT use is stronglymediated by neighbourhood social relations—where real-world relations sustain on-line pos-sibilities. In this sense, the neighbourhoodeffect of Lash’s ‘tame’, stable places acts toenable informational access rather than ICTsresulting in turbulent ‘wild’ flows. Again,such neighbourhood and socially mediatedICT effects remain largely ignored withinurban digital divide literatures. Such effectssuggest that strong local social and neighbour-hood relations may work to ameliorate urbandigital divides, in that having local social net-works including people who go on-line ismore useful that having public accesswithout such networks. Indeed, our evidencesuggests that public access provision dispro-portionately benefits the more affluent, moretransient neighbourhood. This may suggestthinking through the issue not as public pro-vision of access to artefacts—socialised usecan enable that—but thinking through what

activities would benefit from what publicterminals.

Finally, our study suggests major impli-cations both for the future study of urbandigital divides and for policy initiativesaimed at ameliorating them. Drawing fromour conceptual and empirical perspective onmultispeed urbanism, the digital inequalitiesof cities are not sustained by stark and dualis-tic geographies separating information‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Rather, we wouldargue that conceptualisations now need tocentre, first, on variable styles and speeds ofICT use and, secondly, on the diverse waysin which such styles and speeds support, orinhibit, transformations in the logistics ofeveryday urban life for different groups ofusers.

Two particularly important distinctions,according to our research, are between instru-mental and episodic ICT users on the one handand users for whom new media constellationsare a pervasive, increasingly taken for grantedand culturally invisible underpinning ofeveryday life on the other. Our choice of con-trasting neighbourhoods presents them asperhaps too stark a contrast. We wouldsuggest that what we see is an axis of intensityof use. This is clearly not just a function ofincome, but work versus leisure habits,income and education. The issue is whatbenefits people are deriving from access—and, indeed, what pressures—and how this isconfiguring lives. The configuration of whatis done on-line and what off-line and why, iswhat shifts—not simply having access. Noris it simply the case that ‘going on-line’ is asign of privilege. An affluent consumer maypreview on-line, but examine goods inperson; they may buy in person but phoneelsewhere for advice while in the store andpay on-line later; a poor consumer may get afriend to purchase on-line for economy andpay that friend by cash in instalments.1

Such a perspective suggests that looking atthe ways in which ICTs are being enrolled inattempts to enhance organisational capacitiesand orchestrate the time–space logistics ofeveryday life reveals striking differenceswhich are usually ignored in both urban


digital divide studies and policy initiatives.Moreover, it suggests that a major divide inthe logistical enrolment of ICTs into urbanlife—between episodic, often sociallymediated, use and pervasive use where theorganisational power and tempo of life aremore deeply mediated—is emerging whichwill profoundly influence the ways in whichICTs relate to urban inequality in the nextdecade.

Four important research questions emergehere which are beyond the scope of thecurrent paper and which might thereforeprove useful foci for future research. First,how do patterns of pervasive and episodicICTs work to shape the broader social inequal-ities within cities, as ICT-mediated consump-tion, work and communication become ever-more normalised, assumed and taken forgranted, and so are used to restructure radicallythe urban geographies of service provision?Secondly, what social and economic advan-tages do pervasive user communities attainand, conversely, how does episodic ICT usework to shape the broader prospects of margin-alised groups and neighbourhoods? Thirdly,can episodic user communities eventuallymigrate towards pervasive use over time asbroadband and wireless connectivities diffusethrough city geographies and broader stylesof ICT use become normalised beyond the‘early adopters’ and their neighbourhoods?As interactive content becomes part of mobilephones and digital TV, will this pull moreinto a pervasive moving between media?Finally, how can urban digital divides shapedby contrasts between pervasive and episodicuser communities be addressed throughinnovations in public and social policy?

Note

1. We would like to thank one of Urban Studies’referees for some truly inspirational com-ments which we adapt here.

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Crang, Michael, Tracey Crosbie, and Stephen Graham. "Variable geometries of connection: Urban...

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