Digital inclusion: how do you tell?

The 5th National Digital Inclusion Conference kicks off later this morning – with live video available free (though with all three main party leaders appearing in recordings, some will be more live than others).  Their presence – albeit ghostly – is an indicator of how much more visible this has become over the last year,  […]

Bridge to the future

Yesterday’s my Public Services conference, organised by the redoubtable Patient Opinion, started with an arresting analogy from James Munro. It is well known that the iron bridge of Ironbridge was the first of its kind in the world.  It was less well known (at least to me), that it was assembled as if the pieces […]

Travelling slowly

Back in the big city, life is speeding up again. I don’t have to get into a car to buy a newspaper.   The nearest station is ten minutes’ walk away, not fifteen miles of twisty roads away.  And my downstream speed is 5.7 Mbps, just over a hundred times faster than the 56kbps I could […]

Hobson’s channel choice

There is – for good reason – no let up in the drive to add to and deepen the range of government services available online, most recently expressed in the Digital Britain report.  But it’s important to remember that that assumes a level of choice and opportunity not open to everyone. As a useful reminder, […]

Digital divide: cause or effect?

It is beyond challenge that there is a digital divide.  It has been less clear to me whether the existence of that divide is is something to be concerned about in its own right or whether it is an indicator of broader social problems – and so whether it is the symptom or the cause […]

Digital exclusion – Michael Jackson memorial edition

Hard on Martha Lane Fox’s speech at Reboot Britain yesterday – with a fuller account in today’s FT – comes a piece by Eszter Hargittai on the tacit social exclusion in access to tickets for the Michael Jackson memorial service: Having the chance to win a ticket … required Internet access at several levels. First, […]