This study investigates the labor market impacts of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), the largest U.S. initiative to date aimed at reducing income-based disparities in Internet access. We assess ACP's effects on labor force participation and employment and test the hypothesis that a key impact mechanism is the expansion of remote work opportunities for program recipients. Using large-scale national datasets, we also explore heterogeneity in program effects by gender, occupation, and connection type (fixed vs. mobile). The analysis employs two complementary empirical strategies: (1) difference-in-differences estimators based on repeated cross-sectional data from the American Community Survey for 2016-2023 (N approximate to 29.8 million), and (2) augmented inverse propensity weighting (AIPW) models using cross-sectional data from the 2023 Current Population Survey (N = 35,561). The results provide robust evidence that ACP participation is associated with improved labor market outcomes, particularly among women and individuals with high-speed residential connections. These gains appear to be driven, in part, by increases in both the incidence and intensity of remote work. The findings suggest that a narrow focus on first-level adoption outcomes underestimates the broader socioeconomic benefits of affordable broadband initiatives. Theoretically, they indicate that the so-called Matthew effect - whereby digitization amplifies existing social inequalities - is not inevitable and can be partially offset by well-designed, targeted policy interventions.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is a means-tested federal program launched in January 2022 to support broadband connectivity among low-income households in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The expiration of the ACP benefit, the largest ever consumer support program for telecommunication services in U.S. history, invites a discussion about the impact of the program and what alternative policy mechanisms exist to promote equitable access to broadband. Conceptually, this study distinguishes two types of program impact. First, it examines the more immediate goal of the ACP program, namely, to promote and help sustain broadband access among vulnerable households. Second, the study probes for broader socioeconomic impacts related to labor market outcomes. Our primary hypothesis is that the more favorable labor market outcomes observed for eligible individuals are related to increased remote work opportunities, and that these effects will be stronger among female than male workers. We hypothesize that the massive expansion of hybrid work arrangements that followed the pandemic is a key explanatory factor for this trend, and that ACP expanded labor opportunities for women who otherwise would have more limited labor market prospects due affordability constraints in broadband access. The empirical challenge involved in evaluating the impact of the ACP program is well understood, and involves identifying a suitable counterfactual. We address this challenge in different ways. In the first set of model specifications, we compare outcomes for eligible individuals to those for ineligible individuals before and after the introduction of ACP within a narrow household income bandwidth. In a second set of estimates, we implement a semiparametric estimation of causal effects by modeling the propensity of individuals to enroll in the program, and adjusting our regression results accordingly. The results largely confirm our working hypothesis. Overall, eligible individuals are more likely to have home broadband than comparable ineligible individuals, with stronger effects for having any type of Internet connection than for having high-speed (wireline) broadband. Positive impacts on labor force participation and employment are observed for women (but not men), and the effect appears to be driven by an increase in remote work arrangements. Broadly speaking, the results suggest that the positive impact of ACP goes beyond first-order effects on adoption, as the program helped lower-income workers adapt to the expansion of non-traditional labor arrangements in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The broadcasting industry is rapidly entering the era of digitization, distributed intelligence, and interactivity. This chapter analyzes the development of interactive television (ITV) in the United States and Western Europe and the policy debates that have accompanied it. It expresses that despite the nascent character of the market, there are important regulatory issues at stake that will determine the future architecture of this new information distribution platform. In most local markets, cable operators function as monopolies. There is evidence that even in markets where competition exists, it does not significantly affect cable operators or the rates they charge. The chapter concludes that the wait-and-see approach taken by American regulators risks tolerating the deployment of a network architecture that could restrict competition in ITV services, hamper innovation, and leave second-class digital economy citizens with access to a limited array of entertainment, transaction, and educational services.

There is an emerging debate on effective subsidy mechanisms to help low-income households connect to broadband. The majority of broadband consumer subsidy programs in the U.S. are rebates administered through Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Direct-to-consumer voucher subsidies have been widely applied to non-broadband means-tested programs and are argued to improve consumer choice and increase competition, yet there is limited application for broadband. This paper contributes to this debate by evaluating the Alabama Broadband Connectivity for Students program (ABC) – which to our knowledge is the only digital inclusion program using direct-to-consumer vouchers that has been implemented in the U.S.. We find that ABC participation rate rises with lower median income, more Black and more Hispanic populations, suggesting that the program reached households that were most in need of assistance with broadband adoption. Additionally, we find that ABC participation is a positive predictor of participation in the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, suggesting outreach using trusted messengers and previous experience with broadband is beneficial.

This study explores mobile phone use among people experiencing homelessness in downtown Los Angeles. It explores usage patterns and connectivity challenges, and how these affect access to social services as well as opportunities for information seeking, skills building, and social capital formation. To characterize the unreliable conditions under which this population uses mobile phones, we introduce the concept of access instability to capture not simply the obstacles to technology access imposed by poverty but more broadly those stemming from a combination of poverty, housing insecurity, and discrimination. The study is primarily based on a survey among adults experiencing homelessness (or at risk of) conducted over a span of 5 months, complemented by findings from a participatory research intervention carried out in collaboration with a local advocacy organization. Among the key findings is that reliable access to electrical power represents a fundamental yet understudied barrier to mobile use among marginalized populations, including (but not limited to) those experiencing homelessness. Lacking a safe and reliable place to charge their devices, the unstably housed must activate coping strategies that limit digital engagement and constrain use. Overall, access instability disrupts the expectation of constant reachability that underpins modern economic and social relations. Ultimately, this narrows pathways out of homelessness by limiting the ability to gain or sustain employment, to connect with healthcare providers and other vital resources, and to maintain networks of personal support.

A growing number of urban practitioners and scholars are interested in using digital storytelling to strengthen neighborhood connections to shared culture and build a coherent sense of place. This article contributes to this discussion by investigating how 'urban furniture' can sustain social capacity for digital placemaking. While traditional 'urban furniture' in public space is purely physical, digital-physical hybrids are emerging, from benches that tell stories to bus stops that play videos. This extended case follows the travels of an Afrofuturist piece of urban furniture: a community-hacked payphone called Sankofa Red. Our analysis triangulates findings across three installations to show how placemaking can be sustained as a social process: as part of a successful makeover of a community plaza, featured in a neighborhood history game, and in an art exhibition on race and ethnicity. We identify promising practices to adapt urban furniture and retain design collectives beyond a single placemaking installation. As a way for cities to build capacity, we propose that rotating one kind urban furniture (e.g., payphones) across neighborhoods can build the social capacity for placemaking around a shared technical foundation, while still prioritizing local needs and culture.

This case study describes the co-design of Charge ‘n Chill, a charging cart serving houseless residents of Skid Row. This project brought together community activists, Skid Row residents, and university researchers over the course of an 8-week intensive co-design workshop that culminated in the unveiling of a working prototype in the community. Through this case study, we describe the projects’ goals and motivations, as well as the participatory methods which guided our work together. We analyze both our process and its outcome, highlighting lessons we learned and guidelines we offer to others engaged in similar collaborations.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is having a devastating impact on global health. In the United States and abroad, there is concern for how the novel coronavirus will affect vulnerable populations, including people experiencing homelessness. Individuals who lack stable housing are more likely to have preexisting health conditions and limited access to basic preventative hygiene practices such as handwashing and sanitizing. The situation has become critical in Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood, where nearly 5,000 unhoused residents (13% of the city’s homeless population) reside on any given night. Community members’ concerns have mounted as social and health services in the area have decreased, and early efforts to prevent the transmission of coronavirus did not adequately address the lack of access to handwashing stations and hand sanitizing products. This Practice Note details an academic–community partnership that uses grassroots organizing to provide “do-it-yourself” handwashing stations to the Skid Row neighborhood. We describe how an academic–community partnership was mobilized to establish innovative practices in response to the coronavirus, offering lessons and recommendations for others hoping to do similar work.

The challenge in evaluating China's foreign aid has always been the unavailability of reliable data sets. This study constitutes the first analysis of the AidData data set from a communication network perspective. It examines China's development aid to Africa in the ICT sector from 2000 to 2014. Combining data mapping, network modeling, and regression, it uncovers general trends of aid allocation, central players, and collaboration patterns among aid agencies. The results demonstrate the variability in the distribution of China's foreign assistance to 44 African countries. In particular, African countries with less population, worse economic development, but higher oil rents are more likely to receive ICT aid from China. This study also finds that aid implementation is less likely to occur through collaboration within the same sector or between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private companies. This research reveals nuanced geometries of aid with "Chinese characteristics" that move beyond the extractive "Angola model" or the mutual benefits model. These findings provide implications on how Chinese telecommunication companies are shaping Africa's digital future.

During the 2012 US presidential debates, more than five million connected viewers turned to social media to respond to the broadcast and talk politics with one another. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examines the prevalence of humor and its relationship to visibility among connected viewers live-tweeting the debates. Based on a content analysis of tweets and accounts, we estimate that approximately one-fifth of the messages sent during the debates consisted of strictly humorous content. Using retweet frequency as a proxy for visibility, we found a positive relationship between the use of humor and the visibility of individual tweets. Not only was humor widespread in the discourse of connected viewers, but humorous messages enjoyed greater overall visibility. These findings suggest a strategic use of humor by political actors seeking greater shares of attention on social media.

This video was produced as part of the participatory speculative design project "Sankofa City." The project engages community residents to design emerging technologies (e.g. augmented reality, ubicomp, and self-driving cars) tied to their cultural practices. This collaboration is based in the African-American neighborhood of Leimert Park, in South Los Angeles. With increasing urban development in the area, residents are concerned about cultural displacement. In this twelve-week workshop series, local residents worked with university students (Figure 1) to design and plan their neighborhood's future. Groups began by brainstorming high-level concepts through "what if" hypothetical questions. Then they created prototypes and scenarios based on their user personas, which were inspired by local residents. Lastly, they created seven collages (Figure 2) and a design fiction video to share at a local stakeholders' meeting, in order to gather larger community feedback. The video portrays an ARenabled self-driving shuttle that dynamically displays local history. The video was particularly effective for gaining community buy-in and has since been shown at a number of local events and festivals. By grounding speculative designs in a community context, students and residents imagined novel technologies that support Leimert Park's local economy and project their cultural heritage into the unknown future.

This study examines dynamic communication processes of political misinformation on social media focusing on three components: the temporal pattern, content mutation, and sources of misinformation. We traced the lifecycle of 17 popular political rumors that circulated on Twitter over 13 months during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Using text analysis based on time series, we found that while false rumors (misinformation) tend to come back multiple times after the initial publication, true rumors (facts) do not. Rumor resurgence continues, often accompanying textual changes, until the tension around the target dissolves. We observed that rumors resurface by partisan news websites that repackage the old rumor into news and, gain visibility by influential Twitter users who introduce such rumor into the Twittersphere. In this paper, we argue that media scholars should consider the mutability of diffusing information, temporal recurrence of such messages, and the mechanism by which these messages evolve over time.

Urban placemaking can deepen the sense of place, including with novel technologies. Placemaking seeks to revitalize public spaces, attract investment, and rally stakeholders. How can play help to position residents as storytellers and circulators of key images tied to local history? This study shows how play can leverage smart city technologies, including urban furniture and rebuilt payphones. Game mechanics were selected to gather crowds at local monuments, generate pictures of the group tied to local mythology, and automatically circulate images online. In contrast to “app” based approaches, the design facilitated cross-platform “spread” for local storytelling. The study shows how placemaking can benefit from physical objects and hybrid interfaces to facilitate the circulation of local placemaking narratives.

Despite the growing significance of mobile devices, especially among marginalized communities, there are few explorations of how participatory design (PD) can be applied to mobile communication technologies. This case study of Mobile Voices (VozMob) explores a community-based approach to PD and its potential to promote the participation of groups typically marginalized from the design process, and to empower users. VozMob is a mobile platform that was codesigned with and for immigrant workers and organizers to facilitate the online publishing of multimedia stories about their lives and their social justice efforts. Through collective visualization methods, observation, and interviews, this study investigates the factors that enabled or hindered meaningful user participation in the VozMob design process. Significant differences emerged between participants' experiences of the design process, which allow for the exploration of themes related to technology appropriation, design ownership, and power sharing in collaborative processes. Our findings reveal that a community-based approach to PD can shed light on the degree to which-and how-collaborative design and equitable participation is possible through mobile media.

Recent speculative and critical design practices may critique the dominant socio-cultural assumptions of technologies, but often lack diversity and participatory input outside the privileged realm of academic and professional designers. This paper investigates the process and potential of designing speculative futures with local communities, in order to collectively imagine technology that serves a common good and reinforces local identity. This study reflects on the "Sankofa City" project, a three-month community-university collaboration based in a historically black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. The project utilized design fiction scenario videos and collages to present provocative design concepts to local stakeholder meetings and the general public. This paper analyzes the methodology and outcomes of co-designing emerging technologies (such as augmented reality and self-driving cars) in order to establish "infrastructures of the imagination" for long-term strategies and alternative cultural models of innovation.

Social media can be a double-edged sword for political misinformation, either a conduit propagating false rumors through a large population or an effective tool to challenge misinformation. To understand this phenomenon, we tracked a comprehensive collection of political rumors on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election campaign, analyzing a large set of rumor tweets ( n = 330,538). We found that Twitter helped rumor spreaders circulate false information within homophilous follower networks, but seldom functioned as a self-correcting marketplace of ideas. Rumor spreaders formed strong partisan structures in which core groups of users selectively transmitted negative rumors about opposing candidates. Yet, rumor rejecters neither formed a sizable community nor exhibited a partisan structure. While in general rumors resisted debunking by professional fact-checking sites (e.g. Snopes), this was less true of rumors originating with satirical sources.