INDICATORS OF INTERNET NON-USE IN SAMPLE SURVEYS ON ICT USE: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The digital divide/digital inclusion concepts have been of interest to policymakers, particularly since the 1990s. However, the social transformation promised with ICTs adoption and diffusion is more complicated than just providing access. Qualitative studies have emphasized the importance of analyzing skills, appropriation, and negotiation. Authors in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies and in the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies also argue that studying technology non-use is also valuable as it broadens the concept of user/non-user beyond a binary look, diving in to understand how people engage or disengage with technologies, besides bringing relevant outputs about why some people do not or cannot become an Internet user. In this paper, we take this approach to analyze national sample surveys carried out in the three most populated countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia). Data from those surveys have directly been used to help formulate public policies in the three countries. We seek to identify indicators related to non-use present in the surveys, analyzing them in order to suggest the broadening of their scope. Besides specific questions about each survey, we find that all of them do not provide data, for example, on people who have stopped using the Internet (as a whole or part of it); do not consider people who access the network indirectly, by other people; and often bring, among motivations for non-use, sentences that do not reveal whether non-use is voluntary or involuntary. At the background of the discussion, we propose that further studies on technology non-use should be done in order to question technology determinism, the idea that everybody should and will become an Internet user.