Everything you ever wanted to know about the UK’s digitally excluded

I have already written about the campaign that is sort of going on to get more people in the UK online.

Anyway, this week a report was published that quantified the economic benefit of getting everybody in the UK surfing and twittering. A tidy little sum of £22 Billion. My first thought was: “I wonder what the benefit would be of getting everybody in the UK able to read?” Don’t let’s start thinking about that subject….

The absolute amount of £s value doesn’t matter since that is pure speculation by the consultants (PWC). As an ex-consultant, I can tell that the writers of this report must have used copious amounts of wet seaweed/tea leaves/fingers in the air....

The point of telling you this is to point you to the report. I am not sure what you will do with it since it tells us what we already know about age and the Internet. Education/class/employment trumps age, when predicting Internet use and there are a large number of over-65 year olds who just don’t want to use the Web, as amazing as this fact is to the UK’s political class.

If you want lots of numbers about who is and who isn’t using the Internet then this is a good reference source. Dick Stroud