Several months ago successful entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox was “appointed the government’s first Champion for Digital Inclusion”. I can see some logic here: as the founder of LastMinute.com, Lane Fox was the poster child for internet business. She still carries that history with her and is known to the public as somebody who does the Internet well. In terms of digital inclusion she is, if not a household name, then at least a garden shed one (to paraphrase Eddie Izzard)
I happened to take a look at her website today, and was a little surprised by what I found. It’s a slick looking site, but it seems to lack some understanding of the digital world which Lane Fox is selling to the public. I find this a little worrying. There are two issues which I’d like to pick up on: technical problems and voice.
Technical Difficulties
We need to be clear that digital inclusion doesn’t equal getting people blogging. However, I think we all understand that blogging is part of the digital inclusion agenda. Blogging might be the tool that makes the digitally excluded want to join in with digital technology. It’s also a key activity in terms of shaping debates around digital participation, and indeed in shaping any other debates we might wish active citizens to take part in. I’d expect Lane Fox to be blogging a lot, yet marthalanefox.com is something of a demi-blog. Is it a diary of Lane Fox’s public appearances, a news page, or a blog? It’s not clear.
The site employs blogging language such as “read entire blogpost”, but comments are not available which diminishes the blog post to the status of a press release. My key disappointment with the website is the lack of RSS. I’d like to keep track of the Champion for Digital Inclusion’s thoughts, but I’m not likely to remember to come back regularly hoping for more: an option to subscribe to the site would seem to me to be an obviously desirable feature for this website.
Who’s Speaking Please?
Actually there is a feed for marthalanefox.com, if you know where to look (http://www.marthalanefox.com/rss). This brings me on to the second difficulty I have with the Champion’s web presence: the feed suggests that she’s not writing the blog posts herself. The feed shows that Martha has a team – Theo Park and Tim Van Damme – that are speaking on her behalf, authoring, or at least uploading, the blog entries for her. Park is Lane Fox’s “Executive Assistant” while Van Damme appears to be her web designer.
The message? You too can be a champion of the digital world, all you need is the budget to buy a web designer’s time. And an executive assistant.
Of course we know this isn’t true. You could just swing by a social media surgery and get free advice from an expert, who will get you blogging on wordpress in half hour (with RSS and comments enabled). Feel free to pop in to the next one, Martha.
#1 by Jon Bounds at September 1st, 2009
Of course “blogging” isn’t the main thrust of digital inclusion — although I’ve yet to see anyone “official” attempt to define the term properly (I’ve had a go – http://wesharestuff.org/blog/2009/08/24/is-this-digital-inclusion/ ) — and it does depend on who MLF is supposed to be championing to (if she’s championing to politicians then blogging wouldn’t be a huge part of it, if to the main stream media, then… hmmm… I don’t know who it is).
I’d expect a digital inclusion champion to be blogging a lot as well, I’d expect them to be doing it almost ostentatiously themselves — proving that it’s easy and doesn’t take significant time. Which a quick chat to anyone who does it would prove (and yes that’s one of the main things we find ourselves reassuring people of at the Social Media Surgeries).
Looking at the @Marthalanefox twitter feed – it does seem a “blog” is promised for September (http://twitter.com/Marthalanefox/status/3404267844) but given the amount of time the appointment took to announce one would expect something more substantial to be up and running already. Time isn’t an excuse, and although speed isn’t necessarily a virtue, slowness isnt’ a good message.
#2 by Nick Booth at September 1st, 2009
Thanks for mentioning the social media surgeries. The reason I’m here and commenting is you linked to me, which meant I knew you were talking about me.
Certainly blogging isn’t what we mean by (digital) social inclusion, but being able to be more than a passive consumer of content fits on my hierarchy of inclusion.
So using the conversational tools that exists on the web (including the trackback/pingack which brought me to this blog post) would be a good start for any team keen to embrace issues connected with digital inclusion.
#3 by paulbradshaw at September 4th, 2009
Liking @jonhickman’s critical assessment of Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox’s “demi-blog” http://bit.ly/3yJhNf #masocialmedia
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
#4 by MrRickWaghorn at September 4th, 2009
Watching: @paulbradshaw @jonhickman’s critical assessment of Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox’s “demi-blog” http://bit.ly/3yJhNf
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
#5 by Mike at September 8th, 2009
You could credit the lady with setting out a clear objective of seeing what it takes to get 6m people connected who may neither have the inclination nor the means to do so.
You could be shallow and put a web site with all the published research on the matter, and links to every public body claiming to ‘do’ or have a digital inclusion ‘activity’ or point to a company with a digital inclusion champion. It is not hard to find those with good intentions. It is trickier to get to actual numbers and results.
Getting an elderly neighbour going on chat (IM) to stay connected means you open your wifi connection and fix them up with an old pc to get going, – a breech of your BT contract.
Ex-cons (at the local church) seem to have good sources to acquire kit, but need a more regular connectivity. Whether they are looking for work, ebay trading or looking at porn is none of our business, but our surveillance mad government could easily justify a ‘turnkey’ sevice if you are cynical about re-offend rates and the need to collect evidence.
The lady needs a plan but at least she is not pretending to have one, and if one does appear, it will be told through the individual stories by the people themselves and what it means to them, one by one if needs be!
#6 by David K Babb at October 14th, 2009
She now has a feed!
http://feed43.com/marthalanefox.xml
Courtesy of me…..and Feed43. Pity they couldn’t stretch to do it themselves
DK