CandidCapital

Is the digital divide really about access to the internet or is it more about what you do when you get there?

I had a week's holiday on South Uist (one of the Scottish Western Isles) earlier this month.

Alice, my 16 year old daughter, was vocal in her fear of finding no internet access when we arrived. Fortunately our hosts turned out to be subscribers to Hebrides.Net - the ISP for the Western Isles that uses fixed wireless links to provide a 2Mbps DSL-like broadband service. I also was relieved to find that we would be connected.

On our first morning after arriving, and despite having half killed myself on the Ben Kenneth hill race the previous evening, I sat down in our hosts' sitting room, with its beautiful view over a loch to blue mountains beyond, and got on my laptop to check email and do some other outstanding tasks. Alice, of course, was on her laptop checking Facebook, Twitter, Perez Hilton and other sites critical to keeping in touch.

One of the tasks that I was keen to get done during the holiday was using Alice's skills to set up a Facebook group for my start-up, Psonar. My overriding objective is to develop a Psonar Community that is passionate about the service and which will be the starting point for viral adoption.

Alice and I spent part of an evening setting up the group and she then invited all her Facebook friends to join. Within 24 hours we had 100 members, within 72 hours 200 and with a week almost 300 - and all on the promise of the Psonar service, since we're currently soliciting pre-registrations. To reinforce this burst of social activity, we reinvigorated the Psonar Twitter profile and started tweeting.

I don't think we realised the impact all this activity had on our hosts - it wasn't that we were anti-social: we took part in all the walks, expeditions and other activities arranged and we broke for meals and did spend time socialising with everyone else. I just think that they found so much focus on the web, and the frequent sight of us on our laptops, uncomfortable. Although they use the internet, it's a kind of discrete tool for single transactions that originate offline (e.g. "must book a ferry ticket.." or "what events are on the calendar at x arts centre..."). They don't see the web as either synchronous or the source of stimuli that require reaction and response as the start of an online conversation (not just through chat services but through blogging, writing on people's walls, commenting on their photos or tweeting).

The digital divide is less about access to the internet or web than about how one interracts with them when they are available (admittedly, the latter is predicated on the former). So, does promiscuous browsing and blogging mean the end of face-to-face communication and a future of pasty faced geeks forever tapping into their ghastly glowing laptops (the anathema seen by our hosts) or is it the start of a new age of communication where the written word (no matter ungrammatically used) is king and where individuals have the opportunity to communicate with hundreds and thousands of people daily, rather then the handful of people, at best, that previous generations interracted with?

11 August 2009