Rethinking Digital Technology and Infrastructures in a Pandemic: Towards Digital Equity

The Covid-19 pandemic highlights and heightens the importance of ensuring equitable and inclusive access to digital infrastructures for global citizens. Digital infrastructures, built into the fabric of technologies and technological work in interrelated sociotechnical systems, increasingly implicate crucial issues of equity and social inclusion, race and racialisation, intersectionality and privacy rights. Focusing on North America, this chapter first reviews pandemic risk factors for those unconnected to the Internet and then provides a case study on digital inclusion initiatives in Toronto, Canada. Notably, the City of Toronto’s Digital Infrastructure Plan includes a digital equity policy to create inclusive, equitable and resilient access to technology and the Internet including a municipal broadband plan for high-speed Internet to serve vulnerable and underserved populations. The chapter concludes by arguing that existing and extenuating data and digital divides require robust interdisciplinary and intersectional policy responses at the local, national and global levels to foster public infrastructure that can reinforce digital equity.