What’s eating Martha Lane Fox? The reason why the UK is useless at being digital

September 2nd, 2011 by Tim Greenhalgh

Martha Lane Fox, the UK Digital Champion, spoke out on BBC Radio 4 this week. She said: “It’s still disappointing and depressing and I find shocking the number of people who have never been online once.”

MLF is not alone; she has a personal champion right here. The UK is a currently a complete #digitalfail. Why she bothers, I do not know.

There are deeply entrenched, conservative and fundamentally opposed interests in our country that do not want, nor will not seek, the full inclusion of the whole UK population in the digital social and political economy that Martha is passionately working towards.

Martha was responding to data published by the Office of National Statistics on Wednesday (31^st August 2011). The ONS has an incredibly busy website and so you would be forgiven for missing the data links. I had to trawl through six full, and frankly incredibly boring, pages to find them, and here they are:

Internet Access - Households and Individuals, 2011

Internet Access Quarterly Update, 2011 Q2

You should spend some time reading the data because it is, to use a much abused word, shocking. These ONS figures, which provoked Martha to speak out, show that 8.73 million Britons say that they have never used the internet.

Say that again. 8.73 million. That is 17.4 per cent of the UK adult population – this is a disgrace.

Even worse in Digital Britain 2011, only 77 per cent of UK homes have internet access.

At the same time, the ONS says that the use of mobile phones to access the web has doubled ‘in recent years’. Well, put out the flags.

How long have we been working on this Digital Britain shtick? Nicholas Negroponte defined the terrain in 1996 and it ‘don’t take a freeking genius’ to understand that Total Connectivity = GDP uplift, sales, ideas, economic and social transformation.

Martha Lane Fox lives this ideal but is struggling against a conscious lack of will in the social, political and economic spheres.

At the social level, millions of UK citizens are denied access to the digital social economy through lack of confidence, knowledge and education, punitive cost, lack of connection and fears over being connected.

At the political level, there is an atavistic distrust of the internet among the political class and a desire to limit and control the IP networks that can deliver new forms of economic, political and social power to the constituencies they seek to control, manage and direct. The only thing that reins them in is the simple fact that the UK economy is digital.

At the economic level, there is a pile of mess. No company wants to spend billions on a socially-focused project that delivers broadband connectivity to every last yard of the UK. It would be, given current markets conditions, commercial suicide.

There is no town or city in the UK that currently does not have a number of areas where internet and mobile connectivity is either unavailable or inadequate. Put simply, the UK is not digitally connected and yet we live with the myth of Digital Britain. This is sad beyond belief.

The solution is social and in our hands. We should take the provision of building Digital Britain out of the tied hands of the commercial sector and build, with all speed, an all-inclusive broadband network that exceeds potential current total demand and prepares the UK for the next generation’s needs.

Martha Lane Fox has the worst digital job in Britain right now – it’s official and backed by the statistics. She, and we, deserve much better.

      

Tags: Digital Britain, Martha Lane Fox, ONS, UK digital fail, UK digital future

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2011 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Blog, Digital communications, Trends and research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.