A fifth of the adult UK population has never used a computer or been online, says the new government-funded body UKOnlineCentres. According to the press release I received, one-in-ten of over 55s would rather do a bungee jump than use the Internet. They’re launching an initiative to try to overcome this.
I know about this, a little. My wonderful mum (71) is one of the disenfranchised. She has had potential access to the Internet for years, but she doesn’t use it for banking, shopping, entertainment, information, communication or news. Largely, she uses it because other people (me and my sister) want her to. I recall her telling me last year:
I go on the Internet once a week, just so I can remember how to do it. But once I’m there, I’ve no idea what I might want to do.
When it comes to the ‘fear factor’, she’s definitely worried about what it might do to her phone bill*. It took her 10 years to use an ATM, so I can’t see Internet banking on the cards in the near future. But more pertinently, she hasn’t really seen the point. She gets online; gets to MSN or whatever it is and there’s nothing there for her. I get that.
More recently, she’s joined a local library programme to learn more about computers and the Internet. She’s actually a lot happier about using their computers than the one she’s got at home: she can’t break anything and she can’t run-up a massive phone bill. The lessons have been a bit disappointing, though: apparently, copy-and-paste has been on the agenda three weeks running, without any indication why anyone would want to copy and paste anything. No one did that before, you see.
She sends me an email once a week on Wednesdays at 10am. I love that and always reply immediately, but by that point her allotted hour is finished.
And I’m sorry, but I do wonder what’s the point?
No shiny media campaign will make people like mum love the Web. Oh, I know there’s a gazillion silver surfers and online communities for the elderly and bingo and everything. But she’s happier with what she’s got and has always had. Our society is utterly selfish, self-serving and hateful to try to make her feel inadequate for not using the Web. Even more so when it makes it harder for her to access information and services because she doesn’t.
* she still says thing like ‘I know this is running up your bill, so I won’t be long’.
Today is my first day at Republic Publishing. It’s a social media publishing agency established by experienced journalists, in the belief that editorial insight and principles are a good foundation for compelling content. Current clients include Nokia, Five, Pricerunner, Vodafone and The Link.
My job is mainly to act as international managing editor (crikey!) on the Nokia Conversations blog, helping to establish and manage global editions. It’s all tremendously exciting. And I wonder what this red button here does…
Sports shoe brand Converse bought AdWords against popular searches from teenagers that aren’t currently being competed for, compiling the list using Google Zeitgeist. Things like ‘how to kiss’, ‘summer solstice’ and ‘spelling bee’. Then they created single-page websites against this whole series of terms — sometimes just funny one-liners, sometimes useful.
Here is the current list of sites, but they’ve no intention of stopping here. I like it because it combines some clever analytics with snappy creative, and because nobody else seems to have thought of it first. I also like it because it’s cheap: they don’t pay anything unless someone clicks the link, of course, and the mini-sites themselves are uncomplicated yet fun.
A number of leading bloggers have said that they’re deleting their Facebook profiles on account of its recent changes to the way it treats users’ privacy, reports Read/Write Web. The changes have actually turned out worse than I reported a couple of weeks ago, when you could opt out of appearing on the new community pages. Now, the only way you can opt out is to delete the information from your profile page.
Matt McKeon has created a great infographic to explain what is now automatically public for anyone using the default settings:
The bloggerati are incensed. Jason Calacanis writes:
Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are–simply put–not trustworthy.
The recent Pew/Internet Millennials report suggests that young people are far more connected than any other age group. They are 50% more likely to have created a social networking profile, 40% more likely to use Twitter and nearly four times as likely to have made a video of themselves. They’re also avidly mobile – with 41% of respondents only having a mobile as opposed to a landline and sending nearly twice as many texts and the next-oldest generational group.
Regular readers may recall that in February I reported on a Pingdom study that basically said the opposite of this research – that the majority of social network users were much older. The age splits in that study were much narrower than Pew’s and can’t be directly compared, but nonetheless suggested a much more even age distribution in social media usage than this does. One clue as to the disparity comes in a later graph that covers what respondents had done in the last 24 hours.
I haven’t got a lot of time for the ideas in Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four-Hour Work Week. In my humble opinion, they won’t work without a zillion-hour setup time and a considerable amount of luck. But I really did like his guest article about dealing with ‘haters’ for the technology coolhunting website Mashable earlier this week.
Ferriss’ stuff isn’t always popular. Like I just said, I find it hard to swallow myself. So he gets a lot of negative comments. In the article, he sets out seven principles or attitudes for avoiding getting affected by those:
It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.
10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it.
“Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.” (Colin Powell)
“If you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.” (Scott Boras)
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” (Epictetus)
“Living well is the best revenge.” (George Herbert)
Keep calm and carry on.
Great advice for anyone working on websites and living on the Web generally.
Social tools, devices and web evolution are creating epochal change in media, society and business. The plan is to hide under the floorboards till it’s all over document some of the interesting parts of that change. More….
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