When I’m talking at events or to meetings of people within an organisation about the benefits of moving communications and engagement activity online, I often have someone put their hands up and say:
I totally get what you are saying, Dave, but the problem is that we can’t move all this stuff online, because not everyone has access to the web.
Which of course is true, and something I experience more and more these days, living in a rural area myself.
There are two responses I usually give here. One is the most obvious and slightly boring, which is that online engagement is an as-well-as, and not an instead-of. Keep doing the offline stuff for the offline people!
I might also ask at this point, however, ‘what are you doing to fix this?’. In other words, if a large number of people in an area haven’t the access or the skills to use the internet – what are local public services doing to get this fixed?
The second response is the title of this post. Just as not everyone is accessible online, the reverse is also true – but few people seem to consider that!
Take me as an example. I don’t have time to go to meetings. I’d rather read a book than a council leaflet when I’m sat on the loo. I have an aversion to surveys or questionnaires.
I know lots of people like me. It’s not that we don’t care, or that we’re lazy. Our lives just don’t really have any room for some of these traditional mediums. I guess we’re into micro-participation territory again.
So people who are concerned about excluding those who don’t have online access might also want to think about how the way they do things now excludes people who find offline a turn off.
There’s too much binary thinking about digital inclusion/exclusion.
Think of connectedness as a product of your ability to connect at any point in time, the speed of your connection when you do and your skill at using the network when you are (including, most importantly, your general language skills as well as tech skills).
This puts individuals on a continuum from totally connected to totally disconnected.
But as you say, at any given moment in time, the connectedness of an individual might be very different from their average over time.
“if a large number of people in an area haven’t the access or the skills to use the internet – what are local public services doing to get this fixed?”
Never mind local public services, what are you doing to get this fixed? I ask for experiences in running a free public wifi access point today at http://www.news.software.coop/standing-for-election-times-2-or-3/1072/ and would welcome any comments from those who have gone before.
Totally agree, wonderful point.
Offline engagement usually requires travel, organisation eg childcare, missing work, queueing and cost.
Offline engagement takes a lot of time and is therefore at the expense of other activities, be they fun, necessary, or even other worthy activities to be engaged in.
Online engagement can be done quickly, with no cost, at your convenience and allows time for interests in other things. It also has huge opportunities for quick clickable links to related activities.
Don’t pay overdue attention to people who cry that we must all turn up physically at the Town Hall to have our say, I and others who want to express opinions but can’t turn up for whatever reason will have our say by other means. Democracy should allow all eligible parties to have equal voice.