19 May 2010
Dear Sir,
In her column on the NHS’s summary care record scheme (The Observer, May 16) Catherine Bennett is right to point out that the Government’s record of harnessing the web has been far from exemplary.
She would find many of her concerns echoed in the Government’s own review into data-sharing (2008 Thomas/Walport), especially around those rare but high-profile losses of citizens’ personal data that have eroded public trust in such programmes.
She is also right to point out the large scale of Britain’s digital divide, and to highlight the fact that this skills gap disproportionately impacts the disadvantaged: the poor, the unemployed and the old. Our numbers show that 10 million people in the UK today have never used the internet and of this figure 4 million are from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.
However, I think Ms Bennett draws the wrong conclusions by arguing that Government plans to deliver some public services online “disenfranchises” those who remain offline.
On the contrary, I’d argue that it is Government failure to accelerate the online delivery of public services that is disenfranchising: by serving to perpetuate a divide in the UK that is unacceptable in a modern and increasingly networked nation.
The offline population of the UK is already missing out on a vast array of consumer savings, information and educational tools, and stands to miss out more and more as media and industry expand ever faster into digital-only services. When 77% of the jobs today require basic computing skills, arguing that Government should not do everything in its power to address this skills gap is akin to saying it should allow some people to exercise the freedom of choice to go through life without literacy and numeracy. Possible? Certainly. Desirable? Hardly.
Government can either support people to exist in this information-poor environment – or it can advertise the benefits of technology and offer people the support they might need – via community centres, libraries, schools and colleges – to equip themselves with the knowhow to swim in the same pool as the rest of us. (While ensuring that intermediaries exist for that fraction of the population who will never be able to get online.)
Government’s role – to enforce and enable – is vital here, but some of this work – to inspire and excite – requires other skills and organizations. All of us – from chief exec, frontline worker, right down to the individual citizen – have a part to play if we are to succeed in creating a truly networked nation. If you go to our website, www.RaceOnline2012.org you’ll see that the first wave of our partners have already pledged to get another 880,000 people online.
Today’s economic climate lends both urgency and inevitability to the reform of public services. Rapidly accelerating its use of technology will allow government to realize the same efficiency and productivity upswings every other sector has seized as a result of the information revolution and to deliver the kind of responsive, user-friendly and joined-up services citizens expect of every other interaction in the 21st century.
I believe none of us should be satisfied with a wasteful public sector nor – having repeatedly seen for myself what a force for good technology can be in disadvantaged communities – with a sizeable proportion of the population unable to use the defining tool of our age.
Martha Lane Fox
UK Digital Champion, founder Race Online 2012 coalition
Coincidentally Martha, the case for the socially excluded being disenfrannchised in the Information Age was a theme from our founding paper on economic inclusion:
“We are at the very beginning of a new type of society and civilization, the Information Age. Historically, this is only the third distinct age of civilization. We lived in an agricultural age for thousands of years, which gave way to the Industrial Revolution and Industrial Age during the last three hundred years. The Industrial Age is now giving way to the Information Revolution, which is giving rise to the Information Age. Understanding this, it is appropriate to be concerned with the impact this transition is having and will continue to have on the lives of all of us. In that it is a fundamental predicate of “people-centered” economic development that no person is disposable, it follows that close attention be paid to those in the waning Industrial Age who are not equipped and prepared to take active and productive roles in an Information Age. Many, in fact, are scared, angry, and deeply resentful that they are being left out, ignored, effectively disenfranchised, discarded, thrown away as human flotsam in the name of human and social progress. We have only to ask ourselves individually whether or not this is the sort of progress we want, where we accept consciously and intentionally that human progress allows for disposing of other human beings.”
http://www.p-ced.com/1/about/history/
14 years on and we’re made little progress. At a recent public meeting on the dismal broadband performance we experience in a rural area I described our work in Eastern Europe where we’d made the case for national scale broadband deployment as part of a comprehensive mix of social reforms to tackle poverty.
http://www.p-ced.com/1/projects/ukraine/national/
In spite of the obstacles of government corruption and organised crime the message hit the make and national rollout began a year later. In 2004 in the UK the advocacy we offered was less than welcome, we became ourselves disenfranchised. I remarked at the meeting that overcoming vested interests of Eastern Europe’s mafia had proven to be less of aan obstacle than our own controlling government.
The case we’d made for inclusion made sense to them after the credit crisis and we were to observe it all being regurgitated in the costly showcase of Reboot Britain.
When at that local meeting I described our work in making both the social and economic case for broadband, I might well have arrived from another planet.
Last year I’d attempted to secure funding for a skills development centre and Wimax network for our community, without success. It was the usual matter of begging for the lightly scattered funds made available by the Big Lottery.
Jeff Mowatt
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for your post it is great to hear your views.
I can understand where you are coming from.
It certainly has been a challenge for our campaign to get noticed-the whole team has worked very hard to get to this stage.
We are at the beginning of a long road, developing awareness and understanding of the issues like the ones you mention in your message, we are always exploring new solutions to these challenges and hope to improve as the journey continues and grows.
Now more than ever we need the help of people like yourself who are clearly passionate and help us to inspire industry and Government to make a positive change. We believe linked up thinking will create a stronger voice, therefore if you are able to help in any capacity let me know as we are looking for people to help us by becoming advocates as well as businesses joining the campaign by making a digital promise.
All my Best,
Caroline
Oh Jeff, how I hope they read your comment, because you are speaking on behalf of a third of so called ‘digitalbritain’. A full third, by BT’s own admission currently have very poor or no broadband at all, and will be last on the list and may never get Next Generation Broadband. Do join http://www.finalthirdfirst.org and help lobby the policy makers who still don’t understand the benefits of ubiquitous access despite the spin that tumbles from their lips at press conferences. The most embarrassing TED talk I ever saw was Gordon Brown saying that we ‘lead the world’ with ‘high speed broadband’. What a joke. The only way we will lead is if someone stops the copper cabal patching up the obsolete victorian copper phone network and lights the fibre to the people, schools and businesses of this country. The digital revolution won’t wait for us to play catch up. We led the world in the industrial age. It doesn’t mean everyone has to drive a machine, but it does mean those machines and jobs have to be there if people want to harvest the benefits. Same with the internet, it has to be available wherever the people are.
chris
Helping folk use the internet is good. Perhaps that objective might be supported by ensuring adults and teenagers are adequately fluent in their reading and writing skills too?
Plainly reading skills – and being able to search for information requires those skills – are an essential element.
Many children are brought up in homes where their parents are unable to read and write fluently, and are thereby unable to support their children’s education. Those disadvantages may also inhibit the use of IT skills too.
Perhaps some information sharing with the Sutton Trust might be helpful?
I agree with Martha. But New Labour failed the UK. They should have got us all online for free over the last 13 years. But paid for wars instead.
One of the conditions of the war should have been low cost oil from Iraq for the UK for the next 5 years. Also with Afghanistan why haven’t we destroyed the Poppy crops. The UK drugs, crime problems lead from Poppy growth in Afghanistan.
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hear, hear, Martha.
ultimately Government has shown over 13 years that it has little or no positive influence or effect on the speed of broadband uptake, which is entirely driven by the snail’s pace of teleco capital investment against truly staggering consumer demand.
broadband inclusion therefore needs to come through new channels, and those channels need to bypass the traditional data-over-copper providers, and it needs to come through new business models that don’t treat data like water or sewerage. those victorian business models clearly do not work fast enough to permit broadband roll-out (though they did work well enough to create over 100,000 miles of railroad in victorian times!).
I’ve seen first hand how digital inclusion benefits rural and semi-rural areas (in the UK, India and Eastern Europe) and have seen the huge benefits to places like the UAE, Singapore and Korea from forward thinking and adventurous policy. I’m not saying we can just copy their methods (the UK is far more diverse, complex and expensive to cable), but we can copy their enthusiasm at least.
It is also clear that massive advantages are available at 2Mb/s, but that real ‘game changing’ societal and work forces come into play at the 20Mb/s and up level. telepresence, telechirics, remote medicine, interactive entertainment, real group conferencing, advanced cloud based services? all of these need really powerful networks, and the Digital Britain Report (which I have criticised very publicly before) simply does not get anywhere near what is needed.
And then we have the urgent need to repeal the Digital Economy Bill #debill – a truly nasty piece of legislation cooked up by Labour trying to court favour with the music industry and the Murdoch family. With #debill in place, where are the incentives to introduce new networks, and who would accept the legal risk?
Dear David,
Thank you for taking the time to engage with our Raceonline2012.org blog, there are a lot of issues which are presented to us from followers such as yourself and we take each one incredibly seriously, so lets keep the interest and debate alive, as many voices coming together will get heard. Raceonline2012.org is about the 10 million people, of which 4 million are socially and economically excluded who do not have the same options in terms of access to skills and resource which will enable them to get online-we are working hard to resolve this issue.
Believing that the internet is a basic right and not a luxury we carry on with our campaign, and are fortunate in doing so to be supported by fantastic private, public and third sector organisations. Please visit http://www.raceonline2012.org/partners to find out more.
It would be really wonderful if you felt that you could spare some time and get involved with our campaign via our advocates page(soon to go live).
Whether that be sharing your thoughts or recommending our blog, twitter, linkedin or facebook pages we would love to hear from you and your colleagues/friends/family.
We believe that the superb opportunities that the internet provides should be made available to all people. We are not enforcing rather liberating, and creating choice and hopefully support with resources that are already out there. Thank you all for your comments and if you want to find out more about the reasons for Raceonline2012.org existing and see how you can help shape the campaign please do go to http://raceonline2012.org/why-get-involved
Best Wishes,
Caroline