Glancing nervously at my watch, I tried to remember the password I had gotten at the coffee shop earlier that week—Was it a capital letter at the beginning? What was the number at the end?—stabbing at my laptop’s keyboard with increasing urgency as the seconds ticked by, closer to the beginning of the meeting that I was about to be late for. A few minutes earlier, realizing that my Wi-Fi was down, I had gathered my laptop and charger and made a break for the coffee shop down the street. It was early, and the sidewalk tables weren’t out yet, so I sat on the ground and started guessing the Wi-Fi password. After an eternity of fruitless typing, I finally landed on the right combination and logged in to participate in the meeting. Flustered, I realized that a lumbering garbage truck was slowly making its way up the street, flooding the call with background noise, and that my connection wasn’t strong enough to keep my video on. “I’m sorry for the background noise! I’m having some issues with the internet this morning and will have to keep my video off too … just one of those days!” I said, forcing a nervous laugh.
The transition to working from home and fully digital ways of working are now associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. But long before that, many workers had to navigate these issues on a daily basis. For the past several years, I’ve been interviewing workers doing independent and contingent work across the so-called gig economy—from higher wage freelance accountants to those piecing together low-wage work across the formal and informal labor markets—to understand what was emerging as the supposed “future of work” from either side of a polarized labor market. What I found was a surprising similarity in the ways workers used their tech, but that usage was occurring in vastly different circumstances that privileged some and further marginalized others.
Some scholars refer to the knowledge I used to quickly compensate for my lost Wi-Fi connection as digital “skills”—but deployed by different kinds of workers in different contexts, the very same skills are received in very different ways. While I was able to sit on the sidewalk outside this coffee shop undisturbed by anyone and use the Wi-Fi without spending a dime, many of the low-wage workers I talked to had stories of getting kicked out, or even threatened with arrest at fast-food joints for spending too long using the Wi-Fi. My knowledge of where to find internet and my ability to connect and use it was unremarkable and expected by those around me, so much so that I felt compelled to apologize and immediately explain the only slightly less than perfect connection and background noise to my colleagues. While disruptive, it was relatively easy for me to compensate for this momentary lack of internet. Seamless connectivity and robust bandwidth quickly became taken for granted by myself and my colleagues, and the institutions of our high-wage work mostly facilitated these conditions. As Shamus Rahman Khan points out, “ease” is a key indicator of privilege. While it was similarly necessary for the low-wage workers I interviewed to be connected to find and keep their jobs, their connectivity was anything but easy—unsupported and even punished by the institutions around them.
For several decades, sociologists have been examining the ways digital technologies become enmeshed in existing social inequalities and how oftentimes technology exacerbates these inequalities for those who already bear the heaviest burdens. Sociologists, alongside scholars from other fields, have measured and tracked those who lack different kinds of internet access and skills and the obstacles they face in obtaining them. However, while we’ve rushed to document the size and scope of digital exclusion for the marginalized, we haven’t examined the ways that the conditions that marginalize some create advantages for others. While it’s certainly still a problem that some people are connected to the internet and phone services while others aren’t, it’s becoming important to understand the contours of what Forrest Stuart has called “digital disadvantage,” meaning the ways that “different people, with contrasting levels of privilege, fatefully engage with the same technologies in their daily lives.”
The ease with which many of us have shifted to online work and compensate for disruptions isn’t only the result of our individual skills but is facilitated by the environments in which we live, work, and connect and the ways our (ultimately very similar) practices are received and interpreted by others in those environments. This privilege isn’t only an analytical issue for those concerned about inequalities in an increasingly digital age, but an ethical and moral one that will continue to haunt us into the future.
Institutional Support for Connectivity
The image of kids huddled on sidewalks or crammed into cars to find the internet they need to do their homework should prompt a reckoning on the institutional supports for connectivity. But so should the incredibly rapid shift to remote work that occurred last spring. The way that white-collar work is organized now is an exceptional and contingent phenomenon. These conditions facilitated an incredibly fast transition to remote work in March 2020 to stem the transmission of COVID-19. Digital technologies first became ubiquitous in the world of white-collar work and were, at first, largely studied there too—where workers enjoyed livable and largely stable incomes, predictable schedules, and the autonomy afforded to professional workers. For these privileged workers, stable labor market conditions were layered on top of unproblematic and nearly universal internet access at home and at work, updated and sophisticated software and hardware, and organizational acknowledgment (and sometimes even financial support) for the necessity of connectivity for work. As a result, the early and remarkably well-supported digital inclusion of white-collar workers in the early years of this century became the measuring stick we now use to measure everyone else as they get online.
This early image of the white-collar tech-user has been remarkably stubborn. While it’s now widely acknowledged that workers across the labor market rely on digital tools at work, a search through any stock image website for the terms “digital technologies” and “work” is sure to yield pages of photos of white-collar workers using laptops, tablets, and smartphones in sundrenched offices and coffee shops, and very few, if any, representations of workers wearing uniforms or working in cars, hospitals, or restaurants.
White-collar users are so dominant in the public imagination that the conditions that facilitate their easy access remain beyond explanation. During the pandemic, we saw this framing at work when the media reported on the injustice of low-income students doing their homework in parking lots, while the nearly overnight shift of entire sectors of white-collar work online remained a fact that needed no explanation. If students without internet demonstrated the failure of institutions to support learners in a newly online world, then the relative ease with which many workers were able to keep on working shows remarkable institutional support for their connectivity.
In my forthcoming book, Left to Our Own Devices, I point out the institutional dimensions of the “package of unearned assets” that high-wage workers can count on to maintain their internet connections, and about which they are mostly unaware. These assets include access to devices and premium internet and data subscriptions, as well as the formal and informal training in skills to use them. But these items alone don’t produce privilege; they become valuable to the extent they’re legitimized by social institutions like workplaces or schools.
Digital Inequalities among Gig Workers
For independent and precarious gig workers at the margins of employment, the ways their work legitimizes some types of capital produces privilege for higher wage workers and marginalizes lower wage ones. Many of the high-wage freelancers I interviewed talked about their use of social media to scout out new job opportunities during their working hours, even while spending dedicated hours at an office.
When I spoke with Grace, an IT contractor, she was bored with her job and biding the time left on her contract, which required her to work on site at a client office. She filled her time with celebrity gossip sites and online shopping. Generally, she took a conservative and careful approach to these illicit internet sojourns, using her personal phone because she assumed her office computer was tracking her keystrokes and web history. This cautious approach included one calculated risk, “I try to do as much personal stuff as I can on my phone, but I will use my desktop to go through my LinkedIn contacts, see where they work, look at the job postings … I do it on the computer because I’m old and I can’t see the text and it’s easier to search.” I asked her if hunting for a job while at her current job ever caused a problem for her: “They’d never know that’s what I was doing! Professional networking is an expected thing, like I could just say it’s for the project I’m working on for them.” Her workplace effectively subsidized her job hunt, helping her, and other high-wage workers like her, translate their social media use into their next gigs.
By comparison, this sly use of company time was a nearly impossible task for the low-wage workers I interviewed. Although they were often required to use their phones to find out their schedules, swap shifts, and even look up information for customers, many of the low-wage workers shared stories about being explicitly forbidden and punished by their employers for using their digital technologies at work. Lannie, an artist who once worked as a manager at a Starbucks, told me that she had gotten so frustrated with the workers she managed using their phones that she would lock them up in the safe and only give them back at the end of their shift.
Systemic Advantages Feed Privilege
Despite the growing scholarly awareness of understanding the role of privilege in enduring social inequalities, we don’t have many studies that examine the role of digital technologies in the reproduction of privilege. Privilege reproduces inequality behind our backs, requiring no effort or intention on the part of the people who benefit from it. Identifying digital privilege allows us to point out the structures and processes that make connectivity feel normal and unexceptional for some but not for others.
This isn’t to suggest that higher wage work doesn’t have its own problems. Indeed, the reality of the last year of remote work has drawn attention to the problems associated with rising expectations of constant availability, overwork, and professional burn out associated with the merging of work and home. However, focusing on digital privilege draws our attention to the ways these problems arise—in a context of systemic advantages that quickly becomes invisible. For these problems to emerge as problems in the first place requires a connectivity to the internet and to colleagues that is unproblematic, ubiquitous, and unremarkable. It requires workers who have the money and skills to buy and use ever more sophisticated technologies, software, and associated services. It also requires that the constant use of such technologies is authorized and rewarded in their workplaces, not punished. In this light, the growing social awareness of the ways that white-collar work, especially in the context of remote work, can seep into every spare moment of our lives is proof positive of the ways that particular and contingent kinds of digital privilege can disappear into the background of our everyday working lives.
The pandemic has shown, maybe more clearly than previous disruptions, the necessity of connectivity to the internet for the execution of daily life and the increasingly untenable assumption that this should be left up to individuals to provide for themselves. We are all affected by these digital inequalities. It’s not only a problem for those that struggle to maintain connections—it is a problem for those that rarely have to think about it as well.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
