Planning to maintain the status quo? A comparative study of digital equity plans of four large US cities

This study examines how municipal governments have constructed the concept of digital equity through textual evidence, the digital equity plans of Kansas City (MO), Portland (OR), San Francisco (CA), and Seattle (WA). Adopting an approach from critical discourse studies, comparative analysis of the texts demonstrates how digital equity plans conceive of digital equity, characterize current problematic circumstances, and prescribe actions to make change. Despite the opportunities that discursive construction of digital equity offers for newsy interpreting the relationship between inequality and technology, the four plans examined herein demonstrate few departures from earlier approaches to addressing digital inequality. The plans have strikingly little to say about why digital inequality has emerged; however, they prescribe actions that indicate a more complex understanding of the problem than they articulate.