Today October 15th is Blog Action Day. Bloggers everywhere will unite (from sports blogs and tech blogs, to entertainment and cooking blogs) and publish posts that discuss poverty in some way. So I’ve chosen to raise awareness about an emerging type of poverty - digital exclusion.
Can you imagine life without your computer, blackberry, or iphone? And I’m not talking about just a day or a week, but what if you had never owned a computer, had internet access on your phone or even in your home? However, could you possibly live without this technology now in 2008?
For many of us it’s hard to imagine and life without Facebook, Myspace or even ASOS…however the internet has many more important uses that we take for granted. The internet has become an indispensible tool in looking for jobs online; searching for housing and assisting children in their studies, however 39% are still not online. That’s more than 1,000,000 households with children without the use of the internet.
Some of these people do not use the net out of choice, but the majority are e-marginalised due to poverty.
Digital exclusion is a socio-economic problem and there is a clear link between digital and social exclusion – 75% of people that are socially excluded are also digitally excluded and 64% people living in social housing don’t use the internet. Research has proven that the internet significantly changes the quality of lives. In a project conducted by UK Online Centres shows 97%of families in poverty who were given computers said that their lives had improved after six months.
Connecting people to the internet can connect them to new or better jobs, new forms of social interaction, government services, education, information, consumer power….and much more.
Thankfully, the government has woken up to this as in April we saw Paul Murphy MP, Wales Minister appointed the first ever minister for Digital Inclusion and at Labour Party Conference, Gordon Brown revealed that Ed Balls would announce plans to fund over a million extra families to get online. The Government will publish their first Digital Inclusion Action Plan later this month – hopefully this will be part of the answer to an emerging 21st century problem.
By Danielle Thomas
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Team Paralympic GB outstripped expectations in Beijing as they flew home with twice as many medals as their Olympic counterparts.
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adolfo
Internet Marketing
fter his appearance at AGI2007, Ed was approached by a professor from UCL about sponsoring summer research projects for students from their Master’s program in Geographic Information Science. I went along a few months ago to pitch our project ideas and I am happy to report that one student researcher has taken up our challenge.
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Brukewilliams
Internet Marketing
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