[Air-l] Down to the Wire

[Ben Anderson]

On 3 May 2005, at 07:36, Ellis Godard wrote:
> Eh... Is there good data (heck, *any* data) that broadband increases
> growth, productivity, or quality of life?

Not yet at the 'everyday life' level. There may have been macro- 
economic studies....

There is some evidence that it makes little difference to people's  
lives in the short to medium (6-12 months) term. This is from  
longitudinal studies of people who switch from narrow to broadband  
carried out in 6 'European' countries by the e-Living project. That  
said we found a negative effect on 'perceived quality of life' in  
Norway for those who switched. Probably a spurious result :-)

Rich sent the url yesterday - http://www.eurescom.de/e-living. Some  
of the results are now finding their way out into the literature.

Like many others the Pew report Irina mentions uses one-off cross- 
sectional data from which it is merely apparent that early bb users  
are 'different' - it says rather less about how bb might make a  
_difference_ to everyday life. If it does. Our work suggests that bb  
users were heavier net users/online buyers etc before they switched -  
so the cross-sectional results probably reflect this. We hope to have  
a draft chapter out any day on this.

IMHO the key is evolution not revolution - most people's lives are  
quite tightly run with little scope for revolutionary shifts in time  
or behaviour. So we should not expect to see or measure 'impacts' at  
this micro time scale. Its like the fossil record (look up  
'punctuated equilibrium') - from close up in time life changes  
little, from a way off in time it looks like revolutionary change.

re Quality of Life specifically there is a huge amount of rhetoric in  
the EU now with respect to this concept and ICT (and especially  
broadband). I'd direct you to the e-Europe agenda and the current EU  
IST/ICT research programmes. As part of that the project Rich  
mentioned (SOCQUIT) is looking specifically at quality of life and  
ICTs. The threads that might link these are quite tenuous. We're  
developing the 'ICTs -> social capital <- ICTs -> quality of life'  
argument but equally if broadband creates new (better?) jobs then  
that counts as better 'quality of life' for the EU!

Ben





----
Dr Ben Anderson
Chimera, University of Essex, UK
t: +44 (0) 7710 187 806
f: +44 (0) 1473 614 936
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~benander