Using Fiction Writing Workshops to Understand Everyday Experiences of Digital Exclusion
Many people today experience forms of digital exclusion. There are persistent barriers that impact whether people can access, afford and confidently use digital technologies and the internet. These include the costs of connection, the infrastructure and opportunities required for access, and people’s digital skills and literacies. They also include how people feel about digital change.
To better understand the impacts of digital exclusion, we need to know more about why people feel that they do, or do not, belong in our increasingly digitised social world.
To explore people’s sense of digital belonging, this library-based study – a partnership with Randwick City Library – invited participants to attend two storytelling workshops. The first workshop involved group discussions on digital change and some introductory creative writing activities. The second workshop guided participants to create their own short stories about the impacts of digital technology.
This presentation will share some of these stories, and reflect on what we can learn from these participants’ voices about the kinds of futures people do and do not want, and why. It will also share the research methodology as a model for understanding local issues of digital inclusion and belonging.
