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I’ve spent way too much of the past month staring at a screen – you probably have too. I’ve also spent many hours complaining to friends about it, usually over Skype, Wire or Zoom. Since they dominate our lives even more than usual during lockdown, I wanted to think critically about them for a second. A lot of “thinking critically” about screens is essentially unalloyed criticism (much of it perfectly valid), or a call to spend less time using them. I want to talk about one specific thing, for a second: screens as point-of-access.
There’s a well-known meme that reads “Tired of looking at Bad Screen. Can’t wait to get home and look at Good Screen”. The reality of lockdown is that for many people, they’re now the same screen. The device you read the news on in the morning is probably the same one you use to write to colleagues and friends; edit photos/audio/video; check social media; file your accounts; watch a film to unwind at the end of the day. There’s been an inordinate amount of talk about the difficulty of living in a confined space over the past month or two, but I haven’t heard anything about the difficulty of being stuck on one screen, even though that’s a huge change. We spend all day staring at them, but it’s somehow as if we don’t see them.
Like the inequalities in the size and standard of the homes we’re all stuck in, there are inequalities in our digital lives too. Friends who only have a phone, and do anything requiring an actual computer at work, are finding life harder now. So many simple tasks are impossible when you only have a tiny screen, a crappy processor and locked-down apps. I’ve talked to other friends who have slower laptops – it doesn’t sound like much, but waiting a few seconds for a window to load makes almost any task impossible, and every day stressful. This isn’t just bad luck. A new iPhone costs over a grand, and a usable laptop costs about the same, whilst if you want to do anything creative with it then you need more processing power, which can easily double the price tag.
At least as important is your internet connection. Rural areas can see speeds measured in kilobytes per second, making everything from streaming TV to sending files virtually impossible. The gap between urban and rural is compounded by the fact that rural populations are generally older. Your elderly relative in a village somewhere is cut off from wider society in a very real sense. In 2019, 9% of the UK hadn’t used the internet in the past three months. For over-75s, the figure was 80%. Eight in ten older people essentially have no internet access. Normally, they might be okay with that, but now, when everything from lifesaving information to benefits access to socialising are being done online, it’s a rights issue.
One of my collaborators making the film shows us her phone, which she needed to access Universal Credit through McDonald’s wifi whilst living on the street
For the past year I’ve been making work with a group of young people in Stoke-On-Trent who are homeless. In normal times some are always online, send me memes and have a fully-developed digital life and persona. Others have a dumbphone which is usually out of battery and (quite understandably) gets lost every few months , meaning the only way to re-establish contact is to bump into each other on the street. The ones with phones rely, in a very real sense, on McDonald’s free wifi, or the half an hour of free access you get in the library – both are now gone. If I, or anyone who has never been homeless, were to design a shelter then the wifi connection might easily be an afterthought. The reality is that it’s an essential utility that many don’t have access to, like having a house in winter with no electricity connection.
Poverty doesn’t even have to be that extreme to be untenable. I have friends whose only internet connection is their phone, with a monthly data cap measured in megabytes, or others who pay the insane rates charged for data on Pay As You Go contracts. Again, in normal times it’s a pain, caused by the fact that we don’t see digital access as the basic utility that it is. Right now, it makes lives impossible.
I don’t have any immediate answers. Everyone’s talking about the Better World we’ll apparently be able to build once this is all over, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one suggesting that this new utopia has amazing wifi. Famously, Labour called for free broadband at the last election. Sounds great to me, although my personal pref would be for it to be paid for by the BBC License Fee (which could therefore increase, but still be much cheaper than your current broadband/TV package), and structured in such a way that it’s free at the point of access, the same way BBC radio is.
Is there anything we can do now? Here are two tiny things I’ve tried. They’re sticking plasters, they don’t solve the problem and as one individual their impact is miniscule, but if I suggest them to you, that’s maybe two of us doing it. It’s all I have.
I’ve been calling or writing to people I know who don’t have internet access, or don’t feel comfortable using it. I’ve made at least one call a day, sometimes a few. It’s not an act of charity on my part – they’re people I love to talk to, but am usually too selfish to make the time – but it has taken effort to maintain. Again, I’m in a relatively privileged position, but if you’re reading this and you know anyone who doesn’t spend time online, and you can spare half an hour, give them a call. It’s the best thing I do every day.
The second thing I did was equally simple, and phone contracts working as they do, I think a lot of people could probably do the same right now but haven’t realised. One of my friends in Stoke who’s been homeless now has a registered address, and lost his phone, but was able to get in touch and tell me. I’d just got out of a phone contract and got a new one, meaning I had a battered-but-usable phone I could just send him in the post. Just to be clear, I didn’t do this as charity - it’s solidarity. He’s my collaborator making the film, and he’d do the same thing for me in a second.
So check your phone contract, and if you can renew it now, do it! Get a new phone, and put your old handset to good use – there’s never been a better time. If you don’t know anyone personally who needs one, email a few local schools – they’ll know plenty of kids stuck at home and trying to study on a parent’s work laptop right now, and they’re gonna be in that situation until September.
If you’re lucky enough to have an old laptop that you don’t use anymore, even better! Of critical importance is that it gets to someone with the greatest level of need, who is going to be hit worst by this crisis. So if you don’t know anyone personally who has no device, go the schools route.
I feel ambivalent about the above – welfare and access are civil rights, not charity. Every person should be able to afford to access digital resources, and everyone’s social network should be strong enough that they’re in regular contact with friends and relatives in a pandemic. But we didn’t build that world before this happened, so we’ve gotta do whatever we can right now, and whatever it takes once this is over.