It’s strange how the UK keeps repeating the mistakes of the past. Digital poverty is the latest bane of the poor who are suffering from a digital divide.
Over 200 years ago the poet and artist William Blake wrote ‘Holy Thursday’. In it he blasted the UK’s callousness. “Is this a Holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and usurious hand?”
Fast forward to the 21st year of the 21st century and plus ca change. The International Red Cross has listed the UK as a poor nation due to the amount of food banks and the need to distribute aid to families.
Just as telling, many families do not have access to the internet, literally the highway to their future. In the UK, one in seven adults are in digital poverty. While around 1.4m children do not have internet access or the devices to connect.
In the ‘Digital Divide’, the ‘PassW0rd’ radio programme examines the growing gulf between the digital haves and have nots. We found during the pandemic some children have been forced to take turns on smart phones using data plans to attend school remotely. Others could not even log on.
It’s a situation that has led the charity Nesta, to warn in the programme of a lost generation. Another organisation the Social Mobility Foundation is asking for donations of un-used technology to help families connect via its Department for Opportunities. Hardly a creditable picture.
The invisible poor
But this issue cuts even deeper than that. If you cannot get onto the internet, you become invisible in our inter-connected age. Surveys and polls will not include you and you slip out of sight. A point made in ‘The Digital Divide’ by Reema Patel, one of the Ada Lovelace Institute’s research leaders. Something highlighted by a recent Lancet report. It had to adjust its survey of 17m people because many from ethnic minorities and deprived backgrounds did not show in its data.
So not only are you not well represented, but you are also blind because the Government use technology to get its messages out. If you are not online, you will have to wait for Government information to wait for the old postal service. A system the geeks and the techies dubbed ‘snail mail’ over a quarter of a century ago.
Need for internet inclusion
Many are now stating that it is a human right to be online. Covid underlined this for many families. As they had to make the choice between heating or broadband to keep children in touch with education. One of the PassW0rd programme’s interviewees, leading educationalist Professor Sugata Mitra, made the point that primary schools still teach about steam engines. Something that would have been on the syllabus since Victorian times and not about modern internet technology. The Victorian powers knew teaching children how the technology of their times works meant they would get employment in the future.
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