Working from Home and Digital Divides: Resilience during the Pandemic

This article offers a new perspective on telecommuting from the viewpoint of the complex web of digital divides. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, this article studies how the quality and reliability of Internet services, as reflected in experienced Internet upload speeds during the spring 2020 lockdown, might reinforce or redress the spatial and social dimensions of digital divisions. Fast, reliable Internet connections are necessary for the population to be able to work from home. Although not every place hosts individuals in occupations that allow for telecommuting or with the necessary skills to effectively use the Internet to telecommute, good Internet connectivity is also essential to local economic resilience in a period like the current pandemic. Employing data on individual broadband speed tests and state-of-the-art time series clustering methods, we create clusters of UK local authorities with similar temporal signatures of experienced upload speeds. We then associate these clusters of local authorities with their socioeconomic and geographic characteristics to explore how they overlap with or diverge from the existing economic and digital geography of the United Kingdom. Our analysis enables us to better understand how the spatial and social distributions of both occupations and online accessibility intersect to enable or hinder the practice of telecommuting at a time of extreme demand.

本文从数字鸿沟复杂网络的视角，为远程办公（telecommuting）研究提供了全新的分析维度。本文以英国为案例研究对象，探讨了2020年春季新冠封锁期间，实测互联网上传速率所反映的互联网服务质量与可靠性，如何对数字鸿沟的空间与社会维度产生强化或弥合作用。

可靠且高速的互联网连接是民众实现居家办公的必要前提。尽管并非所有地区都存在适配远程办公的职业类型，或是具备有效利用互联网开展远程办公所需技能的人群，但在疫情这类特殊时期，优质的互联网连通性对于地方经济韧性同样至关重要。

本研究依托个人宽带速度测试数据与前沿的时间序列聚类方法，将英国各地方行政区按照实测上传速率的时序特征进行聚类分组。随后，我们将这些地方行政区聚类组与其社会经济与地理特征进行关联分析，以探究其与英国既有经济与数字地理格局的重合与差异之处。

本研究的分析有助于我们更深入地理解：在极端需求激增的时期，职业类型与在线可及性的空间与社会分布如何相互交织，进而推动或阻碍远程办公的实践开展。