‘Taking the router shopping’: How low-income families experience,negotiate,and enact digital dis/connections

Project overview

The Connected Students programme was conducted in partnership with Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. The programme provided technology kits to low-income households with at least one child between the ages of 15 and 18 years, and aimed to measure the impacts of removing affordability barriers on digital participation for low-income households. The kits consisted of a laptop, a combined modem-router, and an activated SIM providing free, unlimited broadband Internet for the project’s duration—from April 2020 to September 2022. We provided the kits to students but encouraged the whole household to make use of them as they wished. As we note in the findings, this timeframe included periods where participants were under lockdown conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A report published at the conclusion of the programme gives full details of the methods and socio-demographic breakdown for the cohort of participants (Kennedy et al., 2022). In brief, the programme was rolled out in a regional Australian town with a significant low-income and digitally excluded population. A total of 100 kits were distributed to households from which we recruited 183 participants across 63 households to participate in our research on the impacts of the programme.

Data collection and analysis

Data collection was carried out in four phases. In the first phase, 63 households were surveyed to ascertain household connectivity statuses and costs. These data were used to inform subsequent phases. Phase 2 involved online video-based interviews with 73 individuals across 35 households, focusing on their experiences of digital exclusion. Phase 3 included in-person interviews and technology tours of their home with 47 individuals across 22 households, focusing on the impacts of the Connected Students kit on the household. ¹ In the final phase, exit telephone and video-conference interviews were conducted with 18 individuals across 15 households. All interviews were audio recorded and technology tours were filmed. Interview transcripts were analysed thematically (Charmaz, 2005; Lofland et al., 2005) to identify broad trends around experiences of digital exclusion.

This article draws on the interview and technology tour data. To investigate our research questions, we began by reviewing the initial thematic analysis for coding that spoke to ‘disconnection’ as conceptualised across both inclusion and disconnection research. This included, for example, codes about experiences of digital exclusion as well as codes about restricting use through household rules or personal practices. We then coded this subset of data to identify and analyse specific forms of disconnection.

All participants are referred to by pseudonyms.

Negotiating unwanted disconnections

Prior to the Connected Students programme, participating households reported a range of barriers to accessing connectivity and technology. For instance, the study was based in a regional town and the surrounding rural areas where many participants had limited mobile and home Internet service due to inadequate infrastructure. In this article, however, we focus primarily on challenges related to the cost of data and devices.

Affordability of data was a key barrier to households’ digital inclusion prior to the programme with many families struggling to afford adequate mobile or home Internet. To reduce costs, some families avoided having a home Internet connection and managed with mobile data instead. The 18-year-old Blake, for example, lived on a rural property with his dad, Chris. Before receiving the Connected Students kit, Chris avoided paying for a home Internet connection by allowing Blake to hotspot from his work iPad. Chris and Blake’s mum also shared the cost of providing Blake with a small amount of prepaid mobile data (6 gig).

Other families had a home Internet connection but with limited data or were periodically disconnected when they could not cover the cost. One example of the latter situation was Bella, who was 16 years old and lived with her parents and two siblings in a rented home. Her mum, Kim, explained that there were periods where ‘we’ve gone for a bit of time without the internet until I can pay the bill’, often because of needing to prioritise other expenses, such as electricity bills or car registration.

Households also experienced affordability issues around purchasing devices. Piper, for example, was living with her mum, dad and three younger siblings in a house near the centre of town. Piper’s mum Karina spoke about the difficulty of affording devices needed for the transition to learning from home caused by the pandemic lockdowns. She had four children who required home devices for schooling but only one child had a computer. The sudden need to purchase three computers was ‘very stressful’, with Karina recounting:

I bought two laptops on Afterpay ² and at the time, that was the only money I really had access to and it very much maxxed out my Afterpay. So at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to buy another one . . . I think the plan was for [Piper] and [younger sister] Emily to share a computer, which was stressing Emily out.

Piper’s family is illustrative of the experiences of many households. They typically had mobile devices but rarely had laptop or desktop computers as these were prohibitively expensive. When families did have computers, they often functioned poorly and/or were shared among the whole family.

Despite these challenges around affordability, households highly valued Internet connectivity and access to devices and often worked hard to mitigate these obstacles. Ellie’s family provides one example. For 17-year-old Ellie, who was living in government housing with her mum and sibling, the cost barrier for home Internet and a laptop was prohibitively high. Ellie’s mum, Melanie, was on a disability pension which made it ‘very hard to afford things’. She explained that it would have been impossible for them to manage without the Connected Students kit during the learning from home period caused by the pandemic:

I couldn’t afford to buy a brand-new laptop. Not to mention have the internet. Everything was going up. Everything is getting very expensive, like food, like petrol, like everything else. How was I going to afford a brand-new laptop? Or internet?

Prior to the pandemic and the Connected Students programme, they relied on going to the local public library so that Ellie could complete her schoolwork. Melanie was grateful for this option but also described it as ‘one extra chore you have to do’. She would drive Ellie to the library after school and they would stay for several hours—sometimes until the library closed at 8 pm. Melanie accepted this as necessary because of the value she placed on connectivity: ‘If you don’t have internet, if you don’t have easy access, you just can’t keep up with the everyday things. It doesn’t matter if it’s work or studies—everything is connected with [the] internet. Internet is the future’.

Many parents likewise viewed Internet connectivity as a necessity, particularly for their school aged children, and made sacrifices to access it. For families like Ellie’s who used public services as a workaround, these sacrifices involved time and convenience; for other families, their sacrifices involved reducing or foregoing other expenses in order to pay for devices and connections. Lisa, for example, lived with her husband and their seven children, including two with disabilities. Despite their incredibly tight household budget, she explained that having a functioning Internet connection and sufficient mobile data was a necessity:

We just have to make it work. There’s no real choice . . . We put food on the table. We put clothes on the kids’ backs, and we put fuel in the car and that’s pretty much [it]. We pay our devices. And our money’s gone.

Covering the cost of connectivity meant foregoing other kinds of spending. Holidays, for example, were rare: they had gone camping once in the past 4 years. Lisa explicitly framed these choices as ‘sacrifices’ and noted that, at times, they extended to buying less food:

We do sacrifice to make sure that everyone’s got their phones and stuff running, because if there’s not enough money at the end of the day, you just don’t buy as much food at the supermarket. You know, you’ve got to get it somewhere, and that’s about the only place you can take it from.

These examples point to the significant compromises households made in order to sustain their connectivity.

Disconnections to manage and extend connectivity

Prior to the Connected Students programme, many households engaged in forms of disconnection to help them manage and extend their Internet connectivity. In a few cases, this involved limiting one form of Internet connectivity, namely home Wi-Fi, in order to preserve other forms of connectivity, such as mobile data. Tahlia, for example, lived with her mum, dad, and teenage sibling in a house they were paying off on the outskirts of town. Tahlia’s mum Sandra explained that they had recently disconnected their high-speed ‘National Broadband Network (NBN)’ Internet service as they could no longer afford it because she had significantly reduced her paid work hours to care for her terminally ill mother:

We changed all of our phone plans and everything around because [of] the cut of income with me in the caring role. We changed to have a shared family data plan to our phones and we stopped having the NBN.

Sandra’s account illustrates that pathways to connection and digital inclusion are not always linear. This household did have high-speed home Internet but were forced to disconnect it and make do with mobile phones in response to unavoidable changes to their income.

The other, more common example of this type of disconnective practice took the form of what one parent described as ‘data rationing’—that is, carefully monitoring home and/or mobile data and rationing it to avoid running out. For example, several participants turned their phones’ data connection on and off throughout the day. Others limited their phone use as much as possible when not connected to Wi-Fi. Some participants also avoided data-hungry activities, such as streaming or using social media platforms, especially as they neared their data limit.

Nathan’s household demonstrated a unique example of disconnecting to manage data. Nathan, 17 years old, lived with his dad, step-mum Karla, and siblings in a rural community about 25 minutes’ drive from town. Prior to the Connected Students kit, the family had very limited Internet. This was partly because of inadequate infrastructure in their area but also because of cost—a factor exacerbated by the fact they could only get mobile broadband coverage. The household had a limited data allowance; when they reached it, they turned off the Internet until the next month to avoid extra charges. These periods without Internet were difficult, especially for Karla who ran a small business from home and for her husband Robert, who needed Internet access for his role as a community firefighter. It also caused conflict between Nathan and his siblings. Karla described feeling worn down by ‘the tension over the phones, the arguments over data usage, who’s doing what’. In response, Karla developed strategies to manage the family’s data use. A key technique was to take the router in her handbag whenever she went into town to do the weekly shop, severing the Internet access for several hours until she got home. This stopped her children using her absence as an opportunity to engage in data-hungry activities. If she did not, she explained, ‘You’d go out, you come home and somebody’s downloading songs or something and, you know, we’ve got 3% of data left and we’ve still got 25 days to go’.

Disconnections motivated by mistrust

Another group of disconnective practices stemmed from concerns around mistrust and security. In these cases, participants avoided certain online activities to protect themselves from the theft of their money or personal information. For instance, several participants avoided free public Wi-Fi (despite struggling to pay for Internet access) because of concerns about security. The 17-year-old Rose was one example. She explained, ‘My mate’s details got stolen doing that so I was like, no man, I’m scared of those. I don’t touch them’.

Others had concerns about online banking and transactions. Several households tried to avoid online payments as much as possible, although they noted that this was becoming more difficult. Chris, who lived in a rural area with his son, explained that he used to avoid online banking entirely by withdrawing his whole wage as cash but has had to adapt as cash payment options have reduced, including bills which he now has to pay online.

Despite the increasing difficulty, many participants limited their use of online transactions as much as possible. Renae explained that her family of five tried to avoid online banking because ‘We just don’t trust it’. They paid bills and council rates in person at the post office or council office. For online purchases, they would use PayPal or transfer the amount required onto a Visa debit card. Janet, who lived with her husband and their four kids, also paid as many bills in person as possible. Like several other participants, she preferred to receive bills through the post when possible as opposed to through email, which she did not ‘trust’.

These general concerns about trust often had specific drivers. Some participants had experienced fraud, including Renae, who had a credit card hacked, and Janet whose family had lost money through an issue related to online payments. Others, like Rose above, knew someone who’d had personal details or money stolen. Often these concerns were compounded by a sense that institutions may not help if something went wrong. As Renae noted, ‘You don’t want this much money to go missing because I don’t know if the bank would pay it back. And I don’t want to risk it, so we just don’t do it that way’.

Another factor was a lack of familiarity with digital technologies, which produced a general sense of mistrust and, for some, a sense that they might make mistakes. Ahmed, for example, was in his final year of high school and lived with his parents and younger sister. He was in the process of setting up a small business with a friend but did not use online banking or transactions. This is largely because he grew up in Iraq without access to digital technology so the idea of doing financial transactions online felt unfamiliar and unsafe. He used cash wherever possible and paid for goods and services upfront to avoid recurring transactions. For others, lack of familiarity with digital technologies and processes meant they were worried that they would do something wrong, which compounded their distrust of online platforms and services. For example, Richard, a single parent of two daughters, was broadly distrustful of doing things online and avoided using government services online:

I prefer to go into Services Australia ³ myself to get face to face access because I don’t know what I’m doing [online]. And I prefer to get all my mail in the mail; not online. I lose things online, things might get deleted. On Monday, I’ll do my tax return online, yes, but other than that I don’t use Centrelink ⁴ or anything online.

These disconnective practices involved costs and, in some cases, effortful workarounds. Ahmed bought phone credit AUD$30 at a time from the petrol station in order to avoid buying it online or having recurring payments. Renae would make a 50-minute round trip into the nearest town to pay bills and rates in person, saving up several bills to pay at once to make it worth the trip despite this making it more difficult to manage financially. Importantly, these actions generally were not perceived as inconveniences by participants—they were simply necessary parts of running their lives.

Disconnections to manage children’s use

Many households had processes or rules for regulating children’s technology use. Sometimes this involved setting time limits, such as allowing 2 hours of Xbox use per day; other rules were about cutting off use in the evening, such as in one home where a parent turned off the Wi-Fi at the same time every night. These examples speak to the challenge of parents managing children’s digital media use and how practices of negotiating dis/connection with children continued despite, or were perhaps even exacerbated by, the introduction of the Connected Students programme.

One particularly evocative example of these negotiations was Nathan’s household, discussed earlier. When we interviewed the family after they had lived with the Connected Students kit for a year, they spoke strongly about the many benefits it had provided. However, Karla explained that she still took the new router with her into town when she did the shopping despite now having unlimited data, choosing to continue with this prior dis/connective practice even though it was no longer a necessity for managing data use. Now, the purpose of this practice was to keep her children off the Internet while she was away so that they did their chores. As she explained, ‘Yes, [the router] goes shopping . . . because I want the floors swept. The washing needs to go on the line. Make your bed. That sort of stuff’. Karla’s choice to disconnect the household was no longer about managing their data allowance but rather part of her efforts to keep the household running and teach her children life skills, an example of how previously established workarounds derived from necessity can still retain utility in alternative ways. Of course, for the children, this was not a voluntary disconnection and, in some ways, having an unlimited data connection made it more difficult for Karla to implement this practice as the kids often anticipated these disconnected periods and ‘downloaded enough stuff to get through’. Without having the data limit as an additional reason to curb their downloading, Karla was finding it harder to prohibit digital media use when she went into town and at night when she had previously required them to be off their devices. She had given up trying to police it as tightly, explaining, ‘I’m over it. I’m over it. I used to make a big thing all the time, and I was the only one stressed about it. They’re all big kids. What do you do?’ In this example, we see an existing practice of disconnection (taking the router shopping) take on a new meaning in the context of improved Internet connectivity, as prior challenges around data allowances are replaced with challenges around children’s time.

Disconnections motivated by preferences for non-use

A final form of disconnection was demonstrated by Yamina, a year 12 student who developed new disconnective practices that were specifically aimed at managing distraction prompted by the Connected Students kit. Yamina’s family had immigrated from Iraq. Her parents had limited English and the household was on a tight budget—their main income was her dad’s disability pension and the government payments her mum received for caring for him and for parenting her and her younger brothers.

Yamina initially found the laptop useful as her schooling moved online due to the COVID-19 lockdowns; like many households, the family would have struggled to provide Yamina with a laptop if she had not received one through the Connected Students programme. Having used it for several months, Yamina appreciated ‘easier access to knowledge and information’. It also became an important way for her to keep in touch with her friends as she did not have a phone. She noted, however, that studying online came with challenges. She found it harder to concentrate, explaining, ‘There’s countless things you could do online. It’s really hard to stick to one thing’.

During our second interview with Yamina, it became clear that her relationship to the laptop had changed. She was now back at school in person and also had a phone, so the laptop was no longer important for social interaction. It was her choice to no longer use it for study, however, that was particularly interesting. She was halfway through her final year of high school and studying for long periods each day in the hope of securing good grades and, ultimately, university admission. At school, other students took notes on their laptops but she preferred writing hers by hand. This was partly because she felt it was easier to find information again later and partly because she found it helped her concentrate. She explained, ‘I feel like it’s a mind[set] sort of thing. Because when you see paper your brain is telling you “This is schoolwork.” When I’m looking at a laptop, I don’t really take it in as well’. She avoided using the laptop when studying at home for similar reasons and because she preferred to spread out all her study materials in front of her. This was a practice she struggled to replicate on the laptop which instead required her to navigate between documents or windows: ‘It’s like, you just gotta keep going back and forth, back and forth. Then you just lose concentration’.

Yamina’s choice to voluntarily limit her use of the laptop in this way was unique among participating students however it provides an important account of someone opting out of using a newly accessible technology. Notably, Yamina could not imagine this changing when she began university although she thought she probably would use one to fit in. As she explained, ‘I don’t really see myself really needing it, but it’s just like the whole idea of everybody having a laptop. It just looks really smart and sophisticated’.

Beyond voluntary and involuntary disconnection

Much of the existing research in digital disconnection studies has focused on problematising the binary of connection and disconnection. Our findings point to another limiting binary—that of voluntary and involuntary disconnection. This has been a key conceptual mechanism across research on disconnection. As noted earlier, the fields of digital inclusion and digital disconnection stemmed from early ‘digital divide’ research that distinguished between people excluded by choice and by circumstances. Studies of digital disconnection now often describe their focus as ‘voluntary’ disconnections (e.g. Jorge, 2019; Nassen et al., 2023) and recent studies that have looked to establish links to digital inclusion research have done so by mapping the ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ disconnections evident in specific populations (Bozan and Trere, 2023; Tai et al., 2021).

This framing has been and remains a valuable way of pointing to different experiences and concerns; yet, our data highlight experiences of disconnection that sit across and between this binary. This is evident in the fact that households were not completely disconnected because connectivity was critical for the everyday functioning of the household. In this sense, financial barriers did not always produce involuntary disconnection in the simple sense of households being wholesale disconnected; rather they produced forms of negotiated dis/connection where households made difficult decisions about what to sacrifice to maximise whatever connectivity they could access. Similarly, a combination of voluntary and involuntary factors shaped participants’ disconnective acts relating to trust and security. These practices of non-use might be read as voluntary in the sense of being active choices designed to manage risk. However, in cases like Ahmed and Richard, these practices were also a product of involuntary exclusion, as a lack of familiarity with digital technologies lowered participants’ trust in online processes and/or their ability to navigate these correctly.

Overall, then, we argue that disconnections that may initially appear voluntary or involuntary can result from a complex interplay of agentic and structural factors. This is not an argument about rejecting these labels entirely; they highlight important differences in issues and experiences around disconnection. Rather, our point is that researchers working with voluntary or involuntary forms of disconnection should not allow those labels to obscure the more complex interplay of agentic and structural factors that shape experiences and practices of disconnection. In our study, for example, highlighting households’ practices of negotiated dis/connection makes visible their digital and financial literacies, which can be overlooked and under-appreciated in low-income populations. Our argument is also significant for disconnection studies given emerging debates over whether, or to what extent, disconnection is a meaningful form of resistance against capitalist digital platforms, particularly in a datafied society where even absence is a data point (Bucher, 2020; Hesselberth, 2018). By looking to low-income families, our work points to different dimensions of agency and resistance where disconnection is instead enacted to manage connectivity, risk, and family life.

Finally, our argument has practical implications for digital inclusion initiatives. One legacy of the voluntary/involuntary binary is that inclusion interventions have largely targeted populations that can be clearly categorised as involuntarily disconnected (e.g. national broadband infrastructure projects such as the NBN). However, our findings illustrate the importance of acknowledging those who might be nominally connected but for whom that connection is the result of significant sacrifices, and who might modulate their connectivity over time according to their changing resources. These households might be missed by inclusion initiatives yet have substantial needs that deserve attention. Their experiences also point to the need for flexible billing options that allow for periods of disconnection, or reduced connection, when circumstances require.

Further lessons for disconnection and inclusion studies

There have been recent calls for digital disconnection research to address a problematic ‘universalism’ in which disconnective practices have been described largely by looking at the experiences of educated, highly connected, middle-class populations (Treré et al., 2020). Our findings contribute to emerging evidence about more diverse populations by highlighting disconnective practices that are informed by experiences of digital exclusion and low-socioeconomic status. Several such practices have already been described earlier. In addition, we note that disconnective practices motivated by mistrust took very different forms to the mistrust-related practices usually described in disconnections research. These have typically focused on mistrust around the data privacy practices of platforms like Facebook, which have been expressed through quitting or reducing the use of social media platforms (Portwood-Stacer, 2013). In contrast, our participants’ privacy-related concerns focused on risks around the theft of personal information, or fraudulent financial transactions, and resulted in the non-use of online transactions including banking, shopping, and bill payment services. This reflects the reality that being subject to these crimes produces greater hardship and distress for lower income individuals as it is more difficult for them to absorb immediate costs or weather lengthy rectification processes (Greene, 2021; Li et al., 2018). This finding illustrates how experiences of disconnection are shaped by people’s ‘specific social circumstances’ including ‘status, social class and access to reliable technological infrastructure’ (Treré, 2021).

For inclusion research, our findings highlight the fact that increased access creates new challenges and thus inclusion research and programmes should not assume that there will be solely positive outcomes from increased connectivity. Existing research on this possibility has focused on risks around data privacy, government surveillance, scams and debt (Gangadharan, 2017; Humphry, 2022); our research indicates that people may also experience more ‘everyday’ concerns such as managing children’s time and reducing distraction. Significantly, our findings also show that participants in inclusion programmes may choose to voluntarily limit their use of the digital technologies they receive because of these kinds of concerns. It is important that these practices are seen as reasonable and legitimate outcomes for inclusion programmes as they reflect increased opportunities for people to consider how technology does and does not serve their needs, and to enact individual preferences around technology non-use. This is an important consideration for evaluating inclusion programmes; non-use is not necessarily a sign that an intervention has failed but may instead indicate positive outcomes. At the same time, these individualised practices of reflection and boundary-setting should not be taken as substitutes for inclusion programmes making their own efforts to understand and mitigate risks associated with increased inclusion.