Date of Award
8-1-2025
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Geography and Environmental Resources
First Advisor
Li, Ruopu
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure systems, highlighting how communities with limited broadband access and slow adoption of smart services struggled to maintain essential functions. As educational institutions transitioned to remote learning, healthcare shifted to telehealth platforms, and government services moved online, communities lacking robust digital infrastructure found themselves unable to access basic services that had become digitally dependent overnight. This crisis highlighted the emergence of the “smart divide,” a multifaceted concept representing disparities in smart infrastructure penetration, variations in smart service adoption, and entrenched digital inequalities across communities. This study examined the underlying factors of this divide quantitatively from the lens of a socio-technical system (STS), emphasizing the interwoven roles of social and technological factors. A theoretical model explaining the interplay between digital infrastructures, social infrastructures, socio-economic factors and smart divide is developed and evaluated using structural equation modeling (SEM). The model tests three relationships: insufficient digital connectivity and disadvantaged human factors proportionately correlate to smart divide occurrence, and social infrastructure acts as a mediator, reducing the negative impact of these two. A total of 262 data points were collected via mail survey from two remote towns in southern Illinois- Carbondale and Cairo. Findings reveal that human factors and social infrastructure have a significant influence on the smart divide, accounting for 38.2% of its variance. Human factors had the strongest positive effect (β = 0.371, p < 0.05). However, digital connectivity showed no significant effect, highlighting that access alone is insufficient to bridge the smart divide without addressing broader social dimensions. Social infrastructure showed a significant negative direct effect (β = -0.273, p < 0.05) which underscores its role in reducing the smart divide. However, social infrastructure did not significantly mediate the effects of digital connectivity or human factors as originally hypothesized.Moreover, broadband infrastructure can play a crucial role in bridging the smart divide. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how deeply society relies on broadband connectivity and how vulnerable that infrastructure can be to disruption. Building resilient broadband systems ensures reliable access during future crises. This study argues that the resilience of the broadband infrastructure system should consider the interconnected nexus of social and technical dimensions which is broadly framed as “socio-technical resilience”. Socio-technical resilience refers to the ability of the interconnected social and technical components of a system to recover from or respond positively to crises. While this concept has been extensively explored within the context of physical infrastructures such as power systems, transportation networks, and organizational contexts, it has not yet been extended to broadband infrastructure systems. This study aims to examine how resilience emerges from the integration of social and technical aspects of a broadband infrastructure system drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Using case studies from Carbondale and Cairo, this study examines how broadband infrastructures interacted with broadband-dependent communities to counteract external impacts and shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings reveal that Carbondale demonstrated stronger resilience thanks to its strong technological and social support. Conversely, Cairo exhibited partial resilience, struggling primarily due to technological gaps despite having similar social infrastructure and digital capabilities as Carbondale.
Access
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