Roy Stringer Lecture: Democratising the Role of the Web
Roy Stringer Lecture: Democratising the Role of the Web @ FACT Liverpool, Tuesday 1 November 2011.
Chair: Herb Kim (Codeworks)
Martha Lane Fox (Race Online)
Peter Barron (Google)
Andy Miah (University of West Scotland)
John Egan (It’s Liverpool)
Natalie Gross (Amaze)
Patrick Fox (FACT/Arena Housing)
In England, 9 million people out of the 50 million population do not have access to the Internet.
In Liverpool, 70,000 out of the 450,000 plus population do not have access to the Internet.
These two sweeping facts set the backdrop for the annual Roy Stringer memorial lecture at FACT.
Keynote speaker and UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox opened the event, focusing on the amount of people who have no access to the internet. It is estimated that if the economic value of the 9 million people who are offline were harnessed through jobs, education or business purposes, it would equate to £22 billion. Lane Fox then spoke about her most famous venture Lastminute.com founded during the dot-com bubble in the late nineties. The rating systems featured on the site were, in her opinion, a vital tool in understanding the true potential of the internet at the time – even if she admitted she made up the majority of the ratings up at the beginning!
Chair Herb Kim quizzed Lane Fox on her role as the UK Digital Champion for the government, a role that she stressed she isn’t funded for. It was clear that Lane Fox cares deeply about reaching out to people who have no internet access. The boundaries that prevent people from getting online include the failure to see any benefit of themselves being online, the perception of the price and lack of technical skills. These factors often overlap and are linked to impoverished social conditions and areas were resources are limited. Lane Fox cited initiatives of bringing computer hubs to social and community centres, such as Post Offices and pubs. Partnerships that allow special reconditioned PCs and telephone packages for under £100 are practical methods of attempting to address this problem.
The GO ON Give an Hour campaign, to encourage active internet users to give an hour of their time to help to educate people who are offline, was widely discussed. It seems a good initiative. I’m sure there will be no shortage of people lining up to demonstrate the unrivalled procrastination powers of Facebook…
Patrick Fox, who has worked heavily with FACT’s in-house community orientated internet TV channel Tenantspin, discussed how the collaborative focus on content generation has enabled Tenantspin to successful impact on a wider community in the North West. Tenantspin is the oldest internet TV channel in the world and Fox spoke of how developments such as Skype have enabled projects to reach new social groups and evolve their way of reaching new audiences. (Below is a video from their project during Vancouver Winter Olympics last year.)
It was genuinely thought provoking to hear Kim’s figures that 3.5 million people don’t encounter another person in their daily life and that 1.5 million people can go up to a month without any real person-to-person contact. These statistics backed up his proposition that helping to widen the demographic of internet users, including the elderly, can help to make a social impact of the Give an Hour campaign.
Peter Barron, whose corporate rhetoric would have been labelled an ‘assured batting display’ if he had held the crease during a cricket match, represented the powerhouse that is Google. Barron and Kim held an engaging discussion about the rise of the smart phone and how it is reshaping how we access the internet. Android, Google’s mobile operating system, is the market leader in smartphones. Barron, in response to questions about the role of smartphones played recent Egyptian/Libyan revolutions, said Google always advocated access of information and freedom seen in these instances. This interestingly led into Kim’s clarification of the recurring theme of ‘walled garden’s’ defined as the few websites that harbour abnormal amounts of traffic such as Facebook and Amazon. When listing a few companies, he neglected to mention Google. If this were an oversight borne of politeness towards Barron, it would have been as safe chairing, which is a shame. Before he and Lane Fox left early to catch the Euston train, Barron did address this, commenting that it was Google wish to remove these online bastions. I think that Barron will have quite a large demolition job on your hands if that is the case…
John Egan spoke of the Go ON it’s Liverpool campaign, campaign commissioned by Liverpool Vision to create a new identity for Liverpool heavily routed in social content generation. It was clear Egan and his team have put together a quite forward thinking project driven by the brief, especially as there was no money to pay for the campaign.
The charismatic Andy Miah launched into his speech with a raised hands poll aimed at making everyone feel bad for not religiously poring over their Facebook privacy settings. Aside from detailing that you can amend the control that Facebook has over your information, Miah questioned if arts organisations should be on Twitter, attacking the inconsistency of ‘appropriate usage’ policies by organisations. His example that a specific Olympic planning department viewed a ‘re-tweet’ as an endorsement was interesting in showing that the ground is still being tested when it comes to defining the usage of Twitter. Personally, I think of course they should be. In most instances, the personality of the employee who runs the feed will inevitably shine through but I view this as a benefit and a possible selling point of a social media strategy. It can be a fine example of utilising staff resources, as long as that particular staff member in charge isn’t boring, inconsistent or irrelevant, of course. He elaborated on his involvement with the citizen journalism scheme for London 2012 and cited his previous work body of work on the matter at previous Summer and Winter games.
I did find the presentation of the event troubling. It would have been great to hear more from Lane Fox and Miah. Perhaps the event could be described as suffering from too many cooks, but no more so than when two of the head chefs had to leave half way through to catch their train.
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