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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