Can You Engage in Political Activity Without Internet Access? The Social Effects of Internet Deprivation
| Author | Ryan Shandler,Michael L Gross,Daphna Canetti |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919877600 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Early Results |
research-article2019
Early Results
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(4) 620 –629
Can You Engage in Political
© The Author(s) 2019
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Activity Without Internet
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919877600
DOI: 10.1177/1478929919877600
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Access? The Social Effects
of Internet Deprivation
Ryan Shandler , Michael L Gross
and Daphna Canetti
Abstract
To what extent can you engage in political activity in the modern age without Internet access? The
growing dependence on Internet access to fulfill basic civil functions is threatened by increasing
personal and societal cyber vulnerability. In this article, we explore the extent to which citizens
are able, or unable, to engage in specific political activities in the absence of Internet connectivity.
To concretize the subject, we test how Internet deprivation affects the ability to realize three
basic elements of political participation: political expression, civic association, and access to
information. To measure this, we develop a new experimental methodology that tests people’s
ability to complete tasks related to each function under simulated treatments of Internet access
or deprivation. This empirical methodology offers a new framework through which to quantify the
realization of social tasks under experimental conditions. Early results suggest that the absence of
Internet access significantly reduces task completion for activities related to political expression
and political association and conditionally reduces task completion for practices associated
with freedom of information. Having substantiated this empirical framework, we encourage its
application to additional forms of political activity.
Keywords
Internet access, Internet deprivation, cyber policy, freedom of speech, cyber terrorism
Accepted: 31 August 2019
Introduction
To what extent can you engage in political activity in the modern age without Internet
access? In the last decade, a rich field of literature has made significant inroads in explor-
ing the effects of Internet dependence by looking at its effect on depression and interper-
sonal relationships (Andreassen, 2015), psychological and physical health (Jenaro et al.,
2007), and modes of interpersonal communication (Fox and Moreland, 2015). Yet the
School of Political Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Corresponding author:
Ryan Shandler, School of Political Sciences, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 3498838, Israel.
Email: ryanshandler@gmail.com
Shandler et al.
621
focus on the individual-level risks associated with deprivation has in many ways obfus-
cated the wider social implications of this phenomenon. In this article, we explore the
extent to which citizens are able, or unable, to engage in political activity such as political
communication or expression, civic participation, and access to political information in
the absence of Internet connectivity.
Debate on the social importance of Internet access is not novel, and scholars have even
begun debating the merits of including Internet access as a new human right (Mathiesen,
2012; Shandler and Canetti, 2019). Although the scholarly debate on the role of technol-
ogy in civic life has developed significantly in the last decade, “empirical evidence on
how the Internet may influence [individual-level] political participation remains rela-
tively scant” (Campante et al., 2017; see also Kruikemeier et al., 2014). This is due both
to empirical difficulties in identifying these effects and the complex relationship between
politics and a continuously evolving technology. There is an urgent call in the literature
for empirical data that can support the normative speculation regarding the role of cyber
citizenship (Aichholzer and Allhutter, 2011).
Our article helps remedy this absence by conducting a controlled empirical experiment
that quantifiably measures how the deprivation of Internet access cripples the ability to
participate in civic life. To operationalize civic participation, we focus on three fundamen-
tal civil acts: political expression, political association, and the acquisition of political
information. This is the first research to experimentally test and quantifiably measure the
effect of Internet deprivation upon the realization of particular element of political activity.
We find that Internet deprivation substantially negates civic participation to varying
degrees for particular elements of political activity. Establishing this relationship could
impose significant positive obligations upon governments to actively provide Internet con-
nectivity for its citizens.
The Role of Internet Access in Enabling Political
Participation
Scholars have argued that the growth in Internet technologies requires a new model to
understand the framework of political participation since widespread digital accessibility
has altered the nature of what it means to participate politically (Coleman and Blumler,
2009). “Structurally, the Internet has inverted the few-to-many architecture of the broad-
cast age, in which a small number of people were able to influence and shape the percep-
tions and beliefs of entire nations” (Coleman and Blumler, 2009). This change has enabled
millions of people to participate more actively in modern political discourse and action
from the comfort of their own home. Yet it is unclear whether the ease of realizing basic
civic functions through online avenues has supplanted traditional analogue avenues of
participation. If this were the case, it would mean that citizens lacking Internet connec-
tions are prevented from exercising their rights. Research has sought to measure whether
digital forms of political participation have eased or entirely supplanted other forms of
civic engagement, but the results have been equivocal (Gibson and Cantijoch, 2013;
Vissers and Stolle, 2014).
Our objective in designing a new experimental methodology is to attain quantifiable
metrics that examines the social implications of our digital dependence and the subsequent
risks...
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