Last week I went to a masterclass on the digital landscape run by the Oxford Internet Institute. The focus was on how people will use digital to communicate with government in the future. They gave us some interesting stats and made some fascinating predictions:
- 78% of people used the internet in UK in 2013. 61% of those used social networks
- Digital exclusion is not as widespread as some people may think. Most people who don’t have internet access know someone who can go online for them. Less than 10% of people don’t have any way of accessing the internet
- There will never be a time when 100% of people use the internet. There will always be people who just aren’t interested even if they have access
- In the future government will be perceived as its online presence, a bit like Amazon is. In other words, people will see gov.uk as the government
- Government will abandon surveys in favour of social media monitoring and engagement
- Political movements won’t have leaders because they’ll be organised on social media and will take off without needing a person or group to lead them. This could be a good thing because more people can get involved in creating change, but a bad thing because once that change has happened there’s no one there to work out the details
- However, 99% of gov.uk petitions fail to get 100,000 signatures. This is the number needed for the petition to be eligible to be debated in the House of Commons. If a petition hasn’t made it in 10 hours it’ll probably fail. So although the internet gives us tools to help mobilise a community around an issue, it doesn’t necessarily make it easy
What do you think of the predictions? I like the idea of government making better use of social media for engagement rather than just broadcast. I’m not so sure about government being seen as a big website, like Amazon!
Alexis Bailey's blog 
Alexis
I think the idea that people’s perception of and contact with Government will be through the Internet is increasingly already happening. How far that will go – Government making decisions based on online interaction with citizens for example – is a more difficult question. I wouldn’t under-estimate the scale of digital exclusion – 10% is still 6 million people, and they are probably the ones that use Government services more than the 90%.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think that eventually government will make more decisions based on online interactions, but this raises some ethical questions. One example they talked about in the masterclass is online courses. The university they looked at could tell, with almost 100% accuracy, whether someone will drop out before the end of the course based on their online behaviour during the course. But should they invest more in the students who are likely to drop out, or less?
With digital exclusion I guess we need to keep encouraging more people to get online but make sure there’s always an alternative for those who can’t.
LikeLike
Correction: A petition needs 100,000 signatures to be debated in the House of Commons, not 10,000. I have changed the figure above.
LikeLike