Which part of the digital divide do you fall on? A rhetorical question I know as you are reading this blog but are you digitally excluded or are you included? Are you a digital native, born with a keyboard or a touch screen at your fingertips, or are you an immigrant who has had to learn the hard way and pick up the digital skills on the fly.
There is a lot of focus on this question: who is or how many people are going to be excluded from using services online either by way of educational attainment, lack of exposure, age or one of several other possible reasons. People more clever than me have tried to identify these groups though there are no universal truths in any of these classifications. It is generally acknowledged however that two main groups, the older age groups and people in areas of high deprivation are the ones that we should consider most when trying to address this social divide. Or are they?
There is another group that gets overlooked but is equally likely to fall foul of any drive to improve the take up of online services but they are much harder to spot. On the outside they look reasonably well off with access to all of the digital paraphernalia that you would come to expect these days, smartphones, home PCs and even tablets. But in truth it is all a façade. They have the ability, they have the equipment but they use it only to the limits of their comfort, they don’t push themselves, they don’t stretch to learn more about where the technology could take them and in the main this is down to one reason, embarrassment. They don’t want to be shown up in front of their colleagues and so they restrain themselves and stick to what they know. They are the digitally embarrassed.
They are probably the most worrying group to address because they have no real excuse, no real issue that the digital inclusion people can get their teeth into. In many ways it is this group that is the key to digital success as they have a responsibility to drive services online. Only by creating new services, fostering new online demands and encouraging suppliers and providers to address service delivery in a new way will digital markets mature. We cannot rely upon those who are outside the game to set the rules and those who have the ability need to raise their game. When the digitally embarrassed realise their full potential and make the most of the fabulous technology at their disposal they will have the greatest of impacts upon the digital economy and will be the greatest of help all of those who are on the wrong side of the divide.
If you’re one of them, one of the digitally embarrassed, you have the countries competitiveness in your hands, the economy is relying on you and so please come out from the shadows, put your own difficulties behind you and learn to get the most from the digital technologies. Stop worrying about what the digital age is doing for you, instead worry about what you can do to help shape the digital age.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 