Helping the "Refusniks"
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Bob Holmes of DU, writes:
This BBC report on Martha Lane-Fox, led me to an item from the beginning of June that I missed because I was on holiday. It was entitled “Need to tackle ‘social’ notspots” and it made the point that quite a lot of people don’t use the Internet because they simply don’t want it.
There were very sensible comments about fear, lack of confidence and lack of help to learn to use the technology as factors behind the reply “it’s not for me”. We come across these all the time in our Digital Unite Community Programmes and we have a lot of success in helping people to overcome these issues and to see how computers and the Internet can make their lives richer, easier and more fun.
But we also meet people who, despite having learned the basic skills and seen for themselves what can be done, still say “Thanks, it was interesting, but it’s still not for me.”
That’s a rational decision for them. They would rather spend their time and effort on other things. And it should be respected.
That’s an important message for Ms Lane-Fox and (especially) her advisors. These people can chose to opt out from things like online shopping and social networking, because they can probably do their shopping and socialise in other ways.
What they must not be forced to opt out of is equal access to Government and local government services. So the example given of Coventry City Council making applications for social housing purely online is a nasty example of “The man in Whitehall knows best” (or in this case the person in City Hall).
The task for everyone involved in Digital Inclusion is to make sure that everyone is included, even if that means establishing processes that allow those who can’t or don’t want to use the technology themselves to gain the benefits through another person.
That should be the metric to judge the success of the Digital Champion, not a simplistic count of how many more people “online”.
Bob Holmes, Digital Unite.
July 17th, 2009 bobholmes | No Comments »
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