Citizensheep

At three o’clock this morning I finished a frantic flurry of blog posts and Twitter tweets, and tried to sleep. Instead I began to panic.

When this happens – and it happens a lot these days – I feel that I’m on an irreversible and rapid ascent to the peak of my sanity, at which point I shall burn-out: not from work but from trying to keep abreast with technology (and currently with today’s hot potato of ’social media’). I feel like I’m constantly trying to catch-up, desparate not to fall behind. The world is changing incredibly fast; I already feel as though it’s running away and I no longer have the energy to keep up.

It’s inevitable that I (and all of my contemporaries) will eventually become part of the technologically disenfranchised section of society, that we will slip over to the wrong side of the digital divide. Doubtless some of us will fight it off longer than others; but it will happen, as technology develops in ways that we are unable to comprehend within the confines of our experience.

My understanding of the world is already inconcievably different to that of my nieces, whose world has always been inhabited by the internet and mobile phones. My understanding of those technologies was shaped by experience of more than 20 years without them, whereas Vicky and Rebecca are starting from a very different place; consequently they will have a much more profound awareness of technology than I. As with every generation gap, they will have no way of appreciating my understanding of the world and I will have no way of appreciating theirs.

And things are changing more quickly than ever. Life online is much faster than life offline, and that pace is increasing. Yesterday I replied to a tweet (a message via Twitter) ten hours after it was posted because I hadn’t been in front of the internet in that time. I felt I should apologise for the delay, because ten hours is a long time on Twitter.

Although that can happen offline too, it is much easier online to flick back through your messages and catch up with conversations, giving a perspective on the rapid progress of what you’ve missed; while this at least keeps you in the loop, it can also leave you feeling as though you’ll eventually run out of the energy to keep up.

So how do we tackle this problem of a growing digital divide? (And I believe it is growing, and always will: not just access to and understanding of technology, but pace of life, social development and personal education.) Should we be providing people with access to technology? Should we be educating people on how to use it meaningfully? Do we really want offline and online interactions to fuse?

In short, should we be educating to tackle the digital divide or accepting that it’s always going to be there?

The Prime Minister recently pledged £300m to provide internet access to the technologically disadvantaged. There is a ripple of debate around the futility of that, and a suggestion that the money would be better spent on ‘digital mentors‘. Stuart Parker argues: ‘It’s not about the access. The ongoing evolution of the Internet … means that people who are still to use the technology or have limited experience, are being left behind at an unacceptable rate’.

But plenty of people I know want to be left behind. They don’t want to embrace technology completely. They may feel frightened of it, and a little more understanding may even exacerbate that. I may well be one of them. And I suspect the limits of experience and understanding will prevent them (and eventually us, including those charged with the educating) from progressing past a given point.

This isn’t to say that I don’t agree about education being more important than mere access to technology. But I do think we need to think carefully about what that education is. For me it should be as much about understanding how we all live together in a ‘multi-technical’ society as about anything else.

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