School of

Communication
Studies

Submission to the
Ministry for Culture and Heritage
on

Digital Strategy 2.0

by
Jocelyn Williams & Peter A. Thompson
May 2008

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Digital Strategy 2.0: Preliminary Observations
The release of the government’s updated Digital Strategy 2.0 (hereafter DS2) represents an important and potentially
far-reaching set of policy initiatives which will influence New Zealand’s economic, political and cultural development
well into the future. The policy identifies three key dimensions of digital policy consideration identified as “enablers” in
relation to three spheres of society (business, government and community).

This submission will comment in turn on the issues

relating to these enablers (connection, content and
confidence), and also a fourth component identified in the
Strategy concerning the potential for collaboration among
various actors across government, market and public
sectors.

Although this submission will address some of the specific

questions raised by the section in the strategy requesting
feedback, the structure of the observations being made
here may not correspond directly with the feedback forms.

The comments in this submission are made in our

capacity as academic researchers with a professional
interest in policy issues relating to communication. As
such, the submission is independent from any business or
party political interests and informed by our own research
into media and ICT policy issues in New Zealand and
overseas.
Diagram from the Digital Strategy 2.0 Document

1 Policy assumptions and contextual considerations

The Digital Strategy 2.0 engages with a broad range of social issues that require policy initiatives across a range of
Ministerial portfolios. There is little doubt that digital infrastructures, implemented appropriately, can play a crucial role
in facilitating democratic participation, community formation and economic competitiveness. The recognition that there
is a need for a coherent strategy based on coordinated policy and collaboration among government, business and
communities in order to realise the ‘digital potential’ of New Zealand is evidently important. However, this raises
important questions regarding the shape and nature of cross-sector collaboration, policy coordination and also, the
technological, sociological and ideological assumptions underpinning the Digital Strategy 2.0. Consequently, there are
several considerations that policy makers should be aware of, in order to progress DS2. These are discussed below:

The policy framework underpinning DS2 can be characterised as a ‘third-way’ knowledge-economy/ cultural industries
approach which attempts to strike a balance between neoliberal-monetarist and social-democratic policy agendas.
Third way approaches therefore assume that cultural and democratic policy outcomes can be pursued primarily
through market mechanisms. Although modest government investment may be possible, by and large this must be
accomplished within the neoliberal macroeconomic framework which circumscribes government spending and
promotes private sector involvement in the provision of public services.

The significant recent decision to reregulate Telecom NZ’s operations and unbundle the local loop (LLU) is evidently a
prerequisite to many of the DS2 proposals relating to infrastructure development. This might suggest a move away
from the laissez-faire model of the 1990s and a (belated) concern to promote competition and consumer rights.
However, the motivation and legitimation of the government’s decision to intervene in this case has arisen primarily
from concern within the private sector that the near-monopoly arrangement had led (quite predictably) to under-
investment in infrastructure development, and raised barriers to market entry for would-be competitors to a point where
the low quality and high cost of communication services threatened the long-term competitiveness of other NZ
industries.

Although market mechanisms may sometimes deliver progressive cultural or democratic policy outcomes, at crucial
points, it typically transpires that these are subordinated to economic/ financial policy priorities, and the former ends up

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being pursued in whatever political space remains after the latter has been accommodated. There are several
illustrations of such processes.

For example, the privatisation of information / educational services in order to stimulate new business opportunities
conflicts with the notion of information and education as a public good which should be free to all citizens. Even
Statistics NZ now demands payment for many of its public information services which used to be available without
charge; also consider the case of public broadcasting policy especially in regard to the tensions that have emerged in
regard to TVNZ’s dual public service/ commercial remit.

Generally speaking, the specific policy outcomes which might be derived from the various enablers in relation to
government, business or community have not been clearly operationalised. There is a tendency to identify processes
or technical developments necessary (and presumably sufficient) for the realisation of desired policy outcomes (such
as a digitally literate workforce, well-connected communities, or digitally nimble, innovative businesses), but it is not
clear how one would ascertain whether those outcomes have been achieved. One concern here is that in the absence
of clearly-defined policy targets, there is the potential for the means of realising those outcomes to become
instrumentally substituted for them as an end in their own right. In this case, this would fetishise digital technology itself
as innately desirable without considering the purposes for which it is used. This is especially true when there are
multiple ministerial portfolios working alongside each other: it is important to be cognizant of the possibility that latent
policy tensions will be obscured by policy rhetoric and jingoism; i.e. strategic ambiguity involves the use of terminology
that sounds plausible and aligned to all ministerial / stakeholder agendas to achieve support for a policy in its initial
stages, but these terms can turn out to mean quite different things when concrete policy is subsequently formulated.
The DS2 document contains a number of buzz-words which connote positively but need to be operationalised. For
example, ‘content’, ‘confidence’ and ‘connection’, as well as terms like ‘digital literacy’, ‘digital inclusion’, and ‘digital
potential’ mean different things to different stakeholders.

The risk here is that lip-service may then be paid to some outcomes or stakeholder interests (typically the non-
economic / business ones) or that certain policy outcomes will be viewed merely as an instrumental means to an end
rather than an end in their own right (e.g. the emphasis on 'confidence' in the sense of increasing public competency
with digital media could be interpreted to mean supplying a hi-tech workforce to industry rather than facilitating greater
democratic participation; likewise, the desire for ‘lifelong learning’ might be seen as an admission that the
contemporary insecurity of long-term employment requires the individual to constantly re-train and take responsibility
for their own education and employability; similarly, the drive for digital literacy and community involvement may
become the rhetorical means through which individuals and communities become held responsible for their own
competent use of new media, conveniently allowing the government and private sector to wash their hands of any
social obligation). This may not be the intent of DS2, but without clear definition, progressive-sounding terminology can
easily be co-opted by and realigned to vested interests.

It is likely that different ministries will play a greater or lesser role in securing the policy outcomes in regard to content,
confidence and communication. Multilateral coordination across ministerial interests therefore becomes essential. If
the enablers of confidence, connection and content are pursued as parallel but otherwise independent policy
objectives, then there is a likelihood that different interpretations or assumptions about means-ends will either result in
tensions over prioritisation or the subordination of certain interpretations of these terms to others. For example, if you
divide aspects of these goals into their socio-cultural, political/democratic and economic dimensions, then some will
presuppose particular arrangements / conditions in other dimensions. If the connection goal is pursued purely in terms
of technical infrastructure designed for macro-economic objectives, then it is less likely that it will help facilitate
participatory democracy or social-capital development in rural / poor urban regions. Likewise, if you look at the content
goal primarily in terms of making government documentation available to everyone, this may have little positive
influence on economic growth or cultural reinforcement. These tensions need to be made explicit, and, where possible,
the minimum acceptable policy outcomes relating to all the enablers and social sectors need to be identified to ensure
that inter-ministerial tensions do not allow certain aspects of digital strategy to be subordinated (or eliminated) to others
in order to accommodate other political agendas. Indeed, insofar as DS2 is intended as a framework for medium to
long-term developments, it is likely that changes in government or shifts in the ICT market environment will lead to the
core concepts (including the enablers and terms like ‘digital potential’) being reinterpreted and harnessed to new policy
agendas which may or may not align with the outcomes that are envisaged here.

Collaboration across government, business and community sectors and indeed, a rearticulation of relations among
these sectors in order to ensure collaboration is taken to be an essential component of DS2. However, insofar as
communication systems help to shape the relations among these social sectors, an important consideration arises; if
DS2 assumes that new digital developments will facilitate a new, collaborative articulation of government, business and
community, but a prerequisite of those developments is precisely such a collaborative rearticulation, then it begs the
question of the centrality of digital technology as both cause and effect of such change. This may reflect a tendency
throughout DS2 to implicitly assume a technological determinist framework which presupposes that the social impact of
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new technologies is a) predictable and linear, b) uniform in shape / form, and c) innately progressive and equally
beneficial to all stakeholders.

Perhaps as a consequence, there is a tendency to conceive of the provision of digital technology / broadband access /
content availability / basic media training as a sufficient condition of realising the wider economic, political or socio-
cultural benefits DS2 envisages. Particularly in regard to community development, the strategy’s prescriptions are
largely top-down rather than being contingent on bottom-up grass-roots community needs. This may not be intentional,
and there are, of course, numerous references to community involvement. However, the scope and nature of that
involvement is not made clear, and the overall shape of the technical, political and economic conditions within which
such engagement is invited does not appear to be negotiable.

Concomitant with this, there is also a tendency to assume a linear transmission model of communication (particularly in
respect to content provision) that overstates the directness of the relation between access to digital services and
ensuing socio-economic benefits. e.g. The initiatives involving making government data more easy to access through
website design and metadata are laudable, but on its own, such provisions will not motivate or enable those likely to
benefit the most from such information to seek it out. Again, there may be a tension between the economic imperative
to use digital technologies to improve the efficiency of services (typically by reducing human involvement and the
accompanying costs) and the imperative to encourage community or democratic participation (which likely requires
active human facilitation as well as provision of technological infrastructure).

The theorisation underpinning the strategy therefore understates the complexity of ensuring that particular
implementations of new technologies or training in digital media usage actually deliver the anticipated social outcomes.
What works may vary across social contexts, and there is no guarantee that what benefits business or middle class
suburbia would benefit impoverished working class areas or rural communities in the same way. There is potential here
for the 'digital divide' to widen rather than close, especially if it is assumed that progressive social development will
automatically result from throwing more computers and bandwidth at everyone without actually looking at the social-
economic priorities of people in different socio-economic and demographic contexts.

2 Connection

There is a strong emphasis in DS2 on the development of broadband infrastructure. However, there is relatively little
explanation of the specific rationales for its development, other than a broad generic agreement that it is essential for
the realisation of New Zealand’s digital potential. The targets for ‘high speed’ broadband (a relative term which could
include 256k or 512k compared with dial-up) need to be linked to the anticipated functions and uses of such
connections. It also needs to take into account the crucial distinction between notional infrastructure capacity and
actual performance; internet access at peak times when the networks are stretched to full capacity should be the
starting point for comparison, and the actual public reach of connections across regions should be considered, not just
the notional number of connections per capita. New Zealand’s position as 20th out of 30 OECD countries does not take
full account of issues such as these.

If consideration is given to the specific policy outcomes envisioned by DS2, it is clear that efficient telecommunications
services are essentially a means to other ends, some of which will already be met by existing provisions. The expense
of infrastructure development relative to social benefit has to be considered carefully here. The mythology surrounding
digital technology did not expire once people discovered that digital watches were for all intents and purposes no better
at telling the time than the analogue variety. The implicit expectation of much of the discourse on digital technology is
that it will somehow usher in a wonderful new information age. Such notions require deconstruction. Without denying
that there can be potentially significant benefits to government, businesses or communities when new media are
implemented appropriately to address specific needs, the ideological assumption of the innately progressive nature of
new, faster, higher technological forms can- and should- be queried. Technological determinist assumptions are
dangerous when ICT policies are being formulated, since the expectation of direct conferral of benefits stemming from
new technical forms underestimates the complication of ensuring appropriate technological systems are made
available and implemented in the most appropriate manner. This requires that end-user needs be identified and
consideration be given to how infrastructure developments can best be implemented in ways that allow different
stakeholders in different contexts to maximise the benefits that accrue from those technologies.

DS2 determines that widespread broadband availability will lead to the achievement of a national “digital potential” (p.
16, p. 42, p. 46). The document currently does not specify what this outcome comprises, although digital potential is
instead loosely equated with an increase in innovation, higher productivity and closer integration with the “global
community” (p. 16). In terms of the questions provided on the submission form, the new connection goal (“widespread
availability”) certainly seems ambitious enough, at least because it avoids the term ubiquitous. Yet ubiquity is assumed
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elsewhere in the document: “an entire generation now having grown up with the internet” (p. 12), a statement
overlooking the fact that “the digital revolution is not being shared equally…” (p. 20).

As is acknowledged under the Confidence enabler (p. 20), and evidenced in NZ research (Williams, 2008), some
individuals “avoid….opt out, or simply lack the confidence and skills to use” digital technologies. Therefore care should
be taken in assuming widespread uptake and sustained use of broadband will follow the series of connection actions
(p. 19) focused on infrastructure. It is gratifying to see that DS2, in citing the e-Government Strategy (p. 38), reiterates
this point that “government must remain inclusive, making sure that those who cannot or will not use these new
technologies can still be engaged”.

In this focus area, an explicit commitment to investing in longer-term research should be a priority in the DS “upgrade”.
Research assessing the extent to which the connection goal is being met is vital because meta-analyses of community
ICT schemes worldwide (Loader & Keeble, 2004; Gaved & Anderson, 2006) show increasing agreement that
community ICT implementation follows a pattern of phases, in a life cycle effect. It follows therefore that outcomes are
difficult to determine, certainly within a short time frame; Gaved and Anderson recommend research be conducted in
community settings over a minimum of five years and possibly longer, since “it is the stage in the lifecycle of the
community at which data is gathered that will determine how successful the community [ICT scheme] appears to be”
(ibid., p. 28). This implies that different initiatives undertaken as part of DS2 will require different criteria and different
periodicities of evaluation.

A further priority is that the current (DS2) focus on infrastructure – most explicitly in the Connection section, but also
throughout - be balanced with investment in IT expertise to support community ICT. As NZ research shows (Williams,
2008) a key element in what is termed “internet transience” is the tendency for “internet poor” individuals to be unwilling
to seek assistance, and the need for ongoing hands-on technical support. To an extent, such support can be made
available in the form of peer mentoring, but this is often insufficient and can in fact undermine social capital, since
mentoring can be a negative experience eroding people’s motivation to help one another. Additionally, while DS2
asserts that “communities can play a central role” and voluntary sector organisations (DS2, p. 21) can be a source of
the cultural capital required to establish digital literacy, this seems to us to be an abrogation of public sector
responsibility for adequate investment in a sustainable “digital revolution” (p. 15). Sustainability is a key issue for
community ICT, addressed elsewhere in this submission and based on the previously cited NZ research (Williams,
2008).

New digital infrastructures are, of course, strongly promoted by those in the business of selling the hardware and
software, and the obsession with having the new and the latest often precludes reflection on whether the purported
benefits are proportional to the expense- a question the ICT industries are not inclined to posit. A strong argument
could be made that the costs of incremental increases in bandwidth capacity, computing power, and the
variety/sophistication of functions of digital media are rarely commensurate with the improvements in service / function.
The vicious circle of increased computing power, and the increased complexity and system demands of the software
that develops to match it, quickly reach a point of diminishing returns for the vast majority of end-user functions. While
some hard-core gamers may not be satisfied until they can jack in their brains and live in the virtual worlds of William
Gibson, everyone else is wondering why they need Windows Vista and a quad-core processor when their own
personal needs would still be largely met by Windows 95 and a first generation Pentium. The constant development of
new improved technical standards perpetuates a potentially dysfunctional need for never-ending upgrades of
hardware, software and skills, requiring significant investment of time, money and other resources from businesses,
governments and individuals in order to ensure their systems remain compatible with the latest industry standard.
Considering the ITC costs in many organisations (with some obvious exceptions in the design, graphics and
multimedia industry) , one does not need to be a neo-luddite to argue that the constant upgrades of hardware and
software faced by many organisations merely represent a massive increase in expenditure and inconvenience without
conferring proportional functional benefits.

Without consideration of the real needs of different stakeholders and the specific outcomes that DS2 is intended to
deliver, policy makers should be cautious of blindly committing New Zealand to a relentless drive to future-proof
infrastructure developments to meet exponentially increasing advances in expectations for hardware capacity and
technical / software standards. Benefits should not be presumed on the basis of digital mythology. (On that point, it is
worth considering how far the much-touted advantages of HDTV genuinely represent a meaningful improvement in the
viewing experience for most people. Also consider that in the case of some audio-visual developments, the objective
quality of reproduction has declined as technology has ‘advanced’; CDs do not sample the same range of audio
frequencies as analogue, and MP3s compromise fidelity in favour of compressibility and transmissibility). Social
development requires appropriate technologies to be made available to different end-users and that those technologies
are implemented in an manner appropriate to end-user needs.

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Irrespective of the above caveats, encouraging significant investment in infrastructure development is necessary. This
needs to be premised on a clear set of anticipated outcomes and a recognition of the conditions and interventions
which might be required to ensure that those outcomes are realised. It is therefore important to ensure that future
demands and evolving technological standards are anticipated, especially since the size of the NZ market means many
technical issues will be largely determined overseas. However, insofar as ambiguity over future standards can inhibit
investor confidence (consider recent debates over MPEG-4 or Blu-ray DVD), government should help facilitate industry
commitment to the development of compatible systems in order to reduce the risk of significant investment. Insofar as
government lacks the capital to develop a national state-owned infrastructure, it is also important to consider measures
to induce the private ICT industry to invest proportionally across different regions, rather than cherry-picking the most
lucrative zones for development and leaving less commercially-attractive ones to the state to provide for. One solution
to this is imposing conditions on contracts to build and operate new networks. Such conditions could include cross-
system compatibility with competitors, price controls, and coupling the most lucrative contracts for key urban centres
with less attractive contracts in remote, rural areas.

3 Content

In regard to content for digital broadcasting or broadcasting-like services, please refer to the submission made by Peter
Thompson to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on the Future of Content Regulation.

Otherwise, the DS2 documentation identifies a range of cultural, political and economic functions of digital content.
There are two broad issues which require careful consideration here. Firstly, there is a need to ensure that cultural
production is not subordinated to economic production. Although some cultural forms (such as music and movies) may
be amenable to commodification and constitute substantial industries, there are many valuable cultural forms which do
not (either because they cannot generate commercial revenue through advertising / sales or because they are
rendered inauthentic when commodified). The third way approach assumed in DS2 may overstate the extent to which
cultural-democratic policy outcomes are compatible with economic ones, and in some cases, these imperatives will
become contradictory. For example, the provision of cultural archives or information services to the public maximise
cultural and democratic potential if they are made available freely as public goods, but they maximise economic
potential if they are sold as private goods. Additionally, Statistics NZ provides some information about New Zealand
free of charge, but some data is only accessible by paying users. Achieving the desired improvements in productivity,
community and sustainability will not always be simultaneously possible.

Secondly, some of the initiatives outlines in DS2 to promote the availability of content seem to assume a linear
transmission-model of communication i.e. that making the information available is sufficient to ensure that stakeholders
receive and are able to use it. Providing cultural or political resources to NZ citizens in user-friendly formats is a
positive development. However, the groups most likely to avail themselves of such resources are typically those who
are well-educated, with a pre-existing interest, who already have the motivation and the knowledge of where to look
and how to make use of those resources (which goes into issues of user competence / confidence). Particularly in
regard to community development, this seems to reflect a top-down approach which fails to take into account the
actual priorities of grass-roots users and the need for access to be facilitated. The DS2 plans cannot ensure ‘digital
inclusion’ on the basis of content provision alone. In that regard, without forging meaningful relations between
communities and state organisations, the aspirations for e-government could easily serve to increase the remoteness
and obscurity of political process and reduce/ inhibit participation.

In another vein, one might consider that automation of information provision in many organisations dealing with the
public, whether through the internet (how many websites deliberately obscure the ‘contact us’ link or fail to provide a
phone number / address?), automated telephone answering services (“To speak to a human being please press 34…
Thank you for waiting- your call is important to us. You are… *eighteenth*… in the queue”) or call centres (“I’m sorry,
we don’t have that information here… No, I’m afraid I can’t put you through to the manager - we’re just the call centre”)
has often increased the ‘efficiency’ of those services only in the sense of reducing costs for the organisation. Familiar
frustrations aside, there is an important point here; i.e. the provision of content through digital platforms does not
always enhance or extend existing services, but becomes a cheap substitute for them, often with a reduction in the
quality of those services for end users.

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4 Confidence

This is a curious term, since it seems to refer primarily to capability/competence in regard to having the requisite skills
and knowledge to make use of digital connections and content. If the term has been used to denote more than
technical capability and include psychological dispositions (such as ‘business confidence’) then the term will become
very difficult to operationalise. There is no doubt a need for a more highly-educated and technically capable workforce
to facilitate the gradual transition from an agricultural to an informational economy. However, it is also important to be
aware of the extent to which the prominence of ICT hardware, software and staffing may impose significant costs on
organisations without generating proportional increases in efficiency/ productivity.

Meanwhile, the notion of ‘digital literacy’ requires clearer definition, since it could potentially mean different things to
various stakeholders. A key question that emerges here concerns whose interests/ agendas will come to operationalise
the term in respect to policy initiatives. The sorts of capability that allow people to use digital technologies to express
themselves culturally, become better-informed citizens, or gain employment in hi-tech industries are not identical.
There is therefore potential for different ministerial policy agendas to diverge significantly on this issue. Likewise,
developing ‘confidence’ in an economically underprivileged areas with a view to promoting stronger community identity,
and developing ‘confidence’ in the sense of increasing the number of graduates with ICT-related degrees involves very
different forms of training and infrastructure requirements.

Insofar as DS2’s notion of digital literacy is primarily conceived in terms of ICT skills related to employment, then it is
important to address the question of whose responsibility it is to ensure that the workforce has those skills. The
commodification of education as a private rather than public good (evidenced by the introduction of student loans even
for socially vital programmes such as medicine) and the rhetoric of the need for ‘life-long learning’ (which reflects the
limited shelf-life of many skills in a rapidly evolving workplace - especially in the ICT sector) aligns with the neoliberal
notion that it is the responsibility of the individual citizen to render themselves employable by purchasing the requisite
training. That may not be the intention of DS2, but the role of state and the private sector in providing training needs to
be clarified, since both businesses and some government ministries will have economic or political motivations to try
and minimise fiscal obligations.

As alluded to earlier, DS2 places a strong emphasis on infrastructure and non-specific ideals such as “digitally capable
and confident New Zealanders”, but pays little attention to the way in which the interplay between internet use and
community capital should be approached and understood within what is known as the ecology (Altheide, 1994; Kim,
Jung, Cohen & Ball-Rokeach, 2004) of community. Ecology implies that community comprises a complex set of
interdependent and inter-related dimensions, so that any assessment of internet use should take a situated approach
(Merkel, 2003, 2005), moving beyond the limitations of binary understandings of social marginalisation and
communications media access such as was present in the early Digital Divide literature; i.e. “ensure access and use
will follow” (Novak & Hoffman, 1998). Elements of a technology-centric, binary worldview are present in the 2008 DS2
draft; yet addressing connection issues is merely the beginning of achieving that ambitious new Confidence goal.

The insistence in this section of the DS2 Draft that digital capability will “build more cohesive communities” (p. 20)
needs to be critically examined because evidence in respect of a causal relationship between internet use and stronger
communities is at best contradictory. Early community internet research raised concerns that internet use reduced
social involvement and psychological wellbeing (Kraut, Patterson, Lundmark, Kiesler, Mukhopadhyay, & Scherlis,
1998), a finding that was overturned in a follow-up study. Numerous assessments with diverse results have appeared
over the last decade, with a trend towards a much more nuanced consideration of a role for internet use in
reconstituting community (Afnann-Mans & Dorr, 2002). For example, there is broad academic agreement that there
are several dimensions to access issues alone. However these more recent studies emphasise that establishing
confident, sustainable community ICT is a highly complex matter and challenging to determine. Early enthusiasm for
ICT interventions among participants is common, along with increased civic engagement, but research shows that this
is often a ‘honeymoon effect’. Depending on the stage of the life cycle of an ICT initiative at which an assessment is
made, misleading conclusions about its efficacy could be drawn.

The NZ study (Williams, 2008) found that the agenda driving a community ICT initiative is linked to sustainability, in the
sense that a project / initiative continues to be effective in delivering outcomes beyond the period of initial intervention
(this reinforces the conclusions of a broad review of research into community ICT projects by Gaved and Anderson,
2006). Agendas may be exogenous (top down) or endogenous (grass roots). Evidence points towards grass roots
initiatives being more sustainable; it is clear that successful implementation of ICT interventions will occur only where
objectives are aligned with the host community. Consequently, DS2’s Confidence goal, especially in its assumption of
building community cohesion, needs to address (that is, fund) actions that will facilitate local, participative approaches.
Research offers policy-makers and practitioners models that may be adopted to enhance sustainability for community
ICT; for example, Williams’ (2008) internet user typology provides a means by which existing community capital may
be harnessed and strengthened. Importantly, these processes are merely assumed in DS2, rather than being
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embodied in any explicit way in the “Capability Actions” (p. 22). The need to respond to such imperatives – that is, the
variety of complex issues inherent in facilitating community cohesion - should be operationalised. Here, we have
itemised only a few of the available means of understanding how to do so. The key issue in this Confidence enabler is
the lack of evident recognition of how to achieve it, yet much can be learned from the research.

As in our comments on Connection (above), we are pleased to see a stated recognition that “many New
Zealanders…avoid, opt out, or simply lack the confidence and skills…” to use digital technologies. Yet the draft does
go far enough in identifying practical actions to address this issue, despite the fact that the document recalls that the
question “How can the digital divide be bridged?” was a challenge posed by the 2007 Digital Futures Summit. DS2
answers that question primarily by addressing access. We argue that such an approach has clearly been superseded
by research since mid to late 1990s research that focused on documenting and interpreting a continuously widening
gap between information haves and have-nots. Theorisation is beginning to become apparent in a relatively novel
field, based on themes from large numbers of studies seeking to assess in what ways the internet can play a role in
reconstituting community if it is understood as a socially situated, complex process. Being an internet user is not a
steady state, and internet transience (Williams, 2008) is characterised by a variety of causes that can and should be
identified as quickly as possible in a community ICT scheme so that “low-connectors” do not necessarily become
internet drop-outs. These are processes about which much has been learned; there should be no need to gloss over
them with ambiguous clichés about “democratic participation” and the like, as we now have the research that can fill
the gaps in DS2.

5 Collaboration
DS2 makes it clear that collaboration is fundamental, a point on which we agree. It has already played a strong role in
the thinking behind earlier incarnations of the 2005 DS, in that collaboration was already implied between state,
business and community sectors in the concept of “Three Enablers”. The principle of aligning the interests of
government, business and communities is eminently sensible, but the evidence would suggest that this is easier said
than done. Third way policy approaches tend to emphasise areas of converging interest among diverse stakeholders,
and this can carry the risk of underestimating divergences and outright contradictions.

For example, if one considers environmental politics, there is almost universal agreement that climate change could
lead to potentially disastrous consequences which nobody wants, but very little agreement on how to bring about the
social, political and economic changes needed to avert such a scenario. Wide-ranging cross-sector strategies such as
DS2 involve a wide range of interests within different sectors. Although there is recognition of the need to include
stakeholders from government, business and communities, a wide range of interests, agendas and motivations within
as well as between those sectors exists. For example, although the government is typically regarded as a monolithic
entity, in practice there are a multitude of priorities being negotiated across multiple ministries at any given time. The
formulation of DS2 as a government strategy evidently involves a range of political interests even before the diverse
(and in some cases, competing) interests of businesses and communities. The most recent research concurs on the
point that successful implementation of ICT interventions will occur only where objectives are aligned with the host
community (Gaved & Anderson, 2006; Williams, 2008). An example of this latter point is the way in which a no doubt
well-intentioned Housing NZ Community Renewal project in South Auckland created complex management problems
for a local school community attempting to implement Computers in Homes, in 2003-2004 (Williams, 2008).

One of the key policy challenges here is generating consensus on strategic direction. The deployment of key
organising concepts to develop agreement on initial directions and desired outcomes is eminently sensible, but such
‘strategic ambiguity’ may result in different stakeholders interpreting those concepts in the context of their own priorities
and agendas. This can result in emergent tensions when policy is made concrete and latent divergences of interest
become explicit. One possible solution to this is to ensure that the intended policy outcomes are defined as clearly as
possible, and that the minimally-acceptable outcomes required to secure the buy-in of all key stakeholders are
identified and (as far as possible) accommodated. This at least helps to ensure that the strategy cannot be co-opted
and harnessed to one set of stakeholder imperatives at the expense of addressing the others. In other cases, it is likely
that strategic outcomes in different contexts (e.g. urban vs. rural, high/low economic deciles, etc.) will vary according to
the particular needs of stakeholders in those contexts.

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References

Afnan-Manns, S., & Dorr, A. (2002). Re-evaluating the bridge! An expanded framework for crossing the digital divide through
connectivity, capability and content: UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.

Altheide, D. L. (1994). An ecology of communication: Toward a mapping of the effective environment. The Sociological Quarterly,
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