Computer Access Equity - The Call for Access Rights - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Walter Maner

1. The Call for Access Rights

By luck of a biased social lottery, the advantages of computer access accumulate and multiply in the hands of people like me: middle-aged or younger, white, upscale, male, city-dwelling, English-speaking, able-bodied, computer-literate technophiles. When I look around me, I become uncomfortable with my good fortune. Reconsidering the luck of the draw, many would say we need to create a new political right, perhaps one as fundamental as the right to free speech. They propose a right to benefit from access to information technologies – in short, an access right. Stuart Brand (1987), writing in his book The Media Lab, observes that “you may not choose to reach everyone, or be reachable by everyone, but the connection should be possible.” If people are not interconnected to information sources and to each other, participatory democracy may be at risk in the next century. Creation of an access right could fuel the social effort needed to make the new information technologies more pervasive. Proponents claim it could transform the Information Age into an Age of Access.

Ronald Doctor (1990), in a recent paper written for the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, documents four trends in information policy and practices that push us toward granting electronic rights of access:

Information resources and the means to deliver information are increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer companies

Information resources are increasingly controlled by profit-driven information brokers who find it to their corporate advantage to restrict access.
Rural areas are increasingly shortchanged because information technology vendors much prefer to have an affluent, urban clientele.

Low-income people cannot afford the technology or the training that would allow them to jump into the fast lane of emerging inter-connectivity. Put simply, they can’t get “on the grid.”

In addition,

Information technology supports more complex forms of corporate integration, exacerbating center-periphery problems (Gillespie and Robins, 1989).

Public libraries, which have the historic role of making recorded knowledge accessible, are using fee-based systems to pay for electronic access (Buckley, 1987).

Supreme Court decisions have reinforced class divisions by defining information rights and responsibilities in terms of one’s profession (Braman, 1989).

Citizens find it increasingly difficult to access government information due to lack of citizen participation in the formulation of information policy (Gray, 1987).

In their book, Information Technology: A Luddite Analysis, Frank Webster and Kevin Robins argue that such trends vest an increasing and disproportionate power in a centralized, controlling oligopoly. This does not happen, as we often hear, because “information is power.” If this were so, we would be empowered by file drawers stuffed with microfiche. In reality, information is chaos. We are barely afloat in the flood of information that surrounds us. Power comes only if we can have efficient access to relevant information (Reinecke, 1987). Power comes only if we can have the proper tools to mine mountains of data for the nuggets we need. Computerized access to electronic information delivers the promise of power because it delivers the right tools.

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