Monday, November 16, 2015 shut up about the digital divide
'The future is already here,' one commentator once said. 'It's just unevenly distributed.' But in a challenging post about the digital divide one view is that surely much of the debate is now over?
I turn on the news this morning to hear that HMRC are going to be closing 137 offices and opening new regional centres.
How did I react to that? I said 'oh ok,' to myself and carried on eating my breakfast.
How did the BBC react? With an interview posing a number of questions, followed by the big hitter – but what about all those older people that can’t use the internet?
Seriously, can we all just get a grip?
We have to change our services; we have to become as efficient as possible. Neither central government nor local government have the funds to carry on as we are – added to this I think I’d be safe to say the majority of people don’t want us to carry on as we are.
We need to transform our services for the future, not for today. Between January and March this year, 86 per cent of adults in the UK had used the internet in the last three months. That’s staggering in my opinion.
Yes it is true that those over 75 have far lower use of the internet and it is also true that we should make sure our services are accessible to all. But, they are not not accessible because they have been moved online.
But older people can’t use the internet (if I read that one more time, I literally might dig out my old commodore 64 and sling it at the person who says it.) Do old people suddenly become useless? Did they not manage to be some of the most adaptable resilient people I have ever had the privilege of meeting, and yet somehow it’s acceptable to say they can’t use the internet?
Stop it, just stop it! My gran – in law, she is 94 and guess what, she uses the internet. She emails, she books her holidays and wait for it, even has an Instagram account which she loves. She does all this from her Hudl. Is she one of a kind, no – my mother and auntie (one an iPad fan, the other a Hudl) spend no end of hours on Pinterest, using messenger, twitter, shopping, booking doctors appointments, and using it even helped my mother quit smoking – so significant health benefits too!
And I don’t just have an amazing tech savvy family, I’m not one of a kind, I talk to friends who all have similar stories about their own families.
We need to stop getting hung up about the digital divide. It’s not that older people can’t use internet, yes of course there will be a few exceptions, but for christ sake, what we need to do is improve the way we help people access it and learn new skills.
Us slighter younger folk in my family have spent time showing how to use it, explaining the benefits and answering lots of their questions and why wouldn’t we? After all it was my mum who taught me to cook, drive, tie my shoe laces, how to wrap Christmas presents properly, so it’s no big deal for me to show her and take the time to help her learn something.
We were not all born with the skills we need to live in this amazing world, we learn them and are still learning them. So please, shut up about the digital divide and how older people can’t use the internet. Yes they can and what we need to do is concentrate on giving them the skills to do so, rather than discard them and put them into a box that has a big label ‘too old to learn something new!’
Rant over.
Natalie Corney is a communications manager in local government.
Reader Comments (4)
OK, I've decided to wade in. I've been considerably restrained for the last hour, but there's lots of issues with this.
I'd like to say firstly that I am fully with you that we need to be progressing towards digital by default and supporting people to do that.
However, that shouldn't be to the detriment to those who don't have access to the internet, either out of choice or circumstance. That way leads to widening inequality - particularly around health, where the difference between those who are most and those who are least well off can mean 20 years in life expectancy.
One of my big bug bears is when people fall into trap of personalising insight, using family members, friends, or themselves as sample group, often with a sample size of one. Or in this case, three. Are these three people representative or the wider community, which has hundreds of thousands of people? Are your friends' experiences?
We really need a lot more insight into access to digital channels, particularly for those in rural communities where mobile signal is non-existent, where broadband is patchy, where there are no longer libraries or community hubs, and where there people who don't even have a computer.
Training and support is needed, but that too can be expensive and there's still going to be people who are cut off from this.
They shouldn't be forgotten about - we would be failing in our duty of care to all people, if that was the case.
Digital should be default, but we also need to accept that people still need other forms of communication and engagement. We can't forget them.
I agree with Natalie. I've been in local gov since 2005 and this argument was raging back then. The problem is that local gov is notoriously risk-averse and councillors (and voters) are often elderly - so they carry on producing dreadful 'newspapers' because Ethel round the corner likes to see out of date pictures of kiddies in their new playground and Cllr Herbert enjoys seeing pictures of himself pointing at things. Meanwhile, digital is *STILL* regarded suspiciously as a dangerous interloper. We are well past the tipping point where digital should be the default mechanism, with limited print options as back up only if they are justified.
Case Study:
My ex district council employer produces a (dire) quarterly paper. Cost of production & distribution is around £50,000. That's aside of the £30k+ 'earned' by the pre-internet relic who spends most of his time cobbling the damn thing together. That's nearly £100k (including on-costs) that could be better spent. And has anyone ever carried out any research to determine if this dusty anachronism actually serves the community? Not since (iirc) 2008, and I should know because I carried out the survey. Even 7 years ago it was obvious that it meant bugger-all to anyone under 44. Strip out the bin info and service A-Z and it would be less than useless, but the wretched thing refuses to die.
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The digital divide is not just about older people. There are also a lot of SMEs who are still struggling with digital skills. A lot of people on low incomes also have poor digital access, some because of lack of skills, some because of lack of broadband access. A lot of rural communities have poor broadband access: that affects young people as well as old. As a trustee of a disability charity I am constantly seeing reports suggesting staggeringly poor internet access for many people with disabilities, and let's not forget that the Disability Discrimination Act and its successor the Equality Act put a duty on public services not to discriminate. I suggest anyone who thinks that there is no digital divide should look at the work being done by organisations such as Go On UK www.go-on.co.uk and The Tinder Foundation: www.tinderfoundation.org. The views expressed in this post are not just disappointing, especially coming from people working in local government, they are potentially advocating a level of discrimination which would be illegal. And Council newspapers are not the only alternative way to communicate with local residents, either.
I work for a Housing Association and the experience of our digital inclusion project indicates that the digital divide is still very real. There is a massive difference between someone being able to use social media or skype with the family, and being able to access and complete complex forms (like those for Universal Credit) online. We offer access, training, support and soon free wi-fi to all our residents. But we are still struggling with the journey from social ('the internet for fun') to practical ('the internet for convenience') to essential ('the internet for work and learning') and government approaches which are closer to channel shove than channel shift. Getting online for some people isn't about social networking or shopping - it's about how do I chase up my sharps bin collection when the council wants this to be done online and doesn't offer another option?