Is digital inclusion just a big waste of money?
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in Digital Britain, mobile on
I was attending the Westminster eForum and listened to a talk from the head of the department of sociology Frank Webster at City University.
He was trying to say that government intervention in helping people get out of this digital divide between the ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ was inherently flawed, as set out in the Digital Britain report.
What his argument said was that we’ve never really cared about divides before - such as with cars,mobile phones and telephones - but what we should be thinking about was inequalities in society.
That’s fair enough as an argument I guess, but he called the the whole concept of digital inclusion ‘populism’ and ‘paternalism’. He said that we have long lived in an unequal society, using the example of the mobile phone where the rich got it first and the poor got them last.
He said: “There was no need for intervention - there was no need for bleeding hearts.”
He went on further to say that the television and entertainment was what would drive digital inclusion - there was no need for the government to get in a ‘huff’ about that.
As we were in a conference where we were promoting the whole concept of ‘broadband for all’, understandably some people were a bit shocked and needed to answer back.
One said that Webster missed an important point when it came to mobile phones - the government was one of the drivers of the original mobile phone monopoly, rolling out the original infrastructure to enable people to have mobile phones and drive competition.
Poor Webster said he agreed with this - putting a hole in his argument, but it was interesting to hear some of his ideas all the same!
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Gordon Brown trying to communicate digitally = FAIL
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in Digital Britain, Gordon Brown, Twitter on
Normally for speeches like Gordon Brown’s talk about Digital Britain today I would like to actually be there, but it is becoming more common for the press to view these talks on video.
I managed successfully to watch Salesforce.com’s keynote speech on the web a week ago, and I was encouraged by the possibilities of this. Perhaps I would never need to go to a big speech ever again!
So the Digital Britain summit arrived, and the organisers decided that it would be a good idea to showcase the government’s digital credentials by streaming it live on the Digital Britain forum website.
Unfortunately it didn’t work. Technical hitches meant I wasn’t able to listen to anything without it cutting out, and Gordon Brown was just a flicker on my MacBook screen.
Not good, but unfortunately it wasn’t as if I didn’t expect it. If Microsoft or Cisco were trying to set me up a video feed I would be shocked if there was any problems with it, but public sector wise I didn’t really have much of an expectation.
It is a bit worrying that the Digital Britain team, based in the Department for Business and the Department for Culture, couldn’t even get a simple video feed right.
Also had a problem with the Digital Britain Twitter feed. It was all well and good to be trendy as it is the new hip technological thing, but there was absolutely no point in many of the tweets with the owner of the feed spouting random messages.
The only way that Twitter can really work in speeches and talks like this is if there is the provision for links with more information, such as the material on their actual Digital Britain blog. Otherwise it’s just a selection of random messages anybody could do - even if they weren’t actually at the event. The live blogging was a nice touch though - that seemed to be the only thing that worked well.
Oh and next time guys - the joy of putting things on video means that you can record and post things for people to play at our pleasure. There were a lot of speakers I was interested in hearing (such as Stephen Fry) but couldn’t spend all day in front of the computer waiting for it to come up.
Do what kids do. Stick the individual speeches and talks up on YouTube. You might get a whole lot more of the internet generation actually understanding what the government is trying to do.
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