### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 12th July 2024 ###
Dear Editor,
I read Emma Sheppard’s piece on digital exclusion (The Guardian, 3rd July 2024, link below) and for me it was a perfect example of reasons why we should be putting the brakes on rampant digitalisation … rather than encouraging it!
In the article we hear that 28% of households have difficulty affording a communication service, one in five children has no access to a device for learning, food-costs can be 50% higher for those without internet and 33% of people who are offline say it’s difficult to interact with the NHS. With older people missing out on savings of GBP 900 because they cannot access online deals.
That is all massively wrong but for me the conclusion is not to push for more speed (i.e. 5G) but rather to make sure that those who are not online, get a fair deal. Indeed, exactly those people may have problems because of a physical or mental handicap, which makes these disparities even more unjust.
Take for example children who cannot access the internet for learning: Here I would say that learning should be more analogue anyway, with internet training happening at school and (for example) in libraries. Indeed, children have far too much online-time anyway so analogue (e.g. hand-written) school-work would be the perfect antidote to that.
As for “deals” giving people an advantage online, this needs to be stopped with essential services costing the same for everyone. And those companies delivering cheap food (and other items) should be taxed heavily because those services are massively undermining physical shops who pay rates, rent, wages and form the fabric of our society with high-streets full of empty premises bearing witness to this tragedy.
Most importantly, essential services such as health should ALWAYS have the option of analogue access and/or should offer targeted assistance (e.g. at public libraries) to make sure that no one is left behind. Anything else is simply WRONG.
As for the 41% of people feeling stressed because of digital exclusion, yes, they certainly are stressed but this is because analogue options have been removed. The answer here should be to guarantee an “analogue access path”! And surely the stress, polarisation and de-humanisation of excessive social-media exposure (especially for children) should be a very real reason to “put the brakes” on?
Then we hear that deprived areas, rural communities and SMEs “need” 5G? Excuse me but how would that help? It would make poor people able to access even more online content with them paying out money unnecessarily to streaming services. On top of this, SMEs are currently already “being creamed” by online multinationals so the rolling out of ever-faster internet would surely put the most vulnerable companies at even more risk of bankruptcy (i.e. by giving the big-players even more advantage).
For me the key factor is that, if you have internet which is fast enough to send an email and fill in a form online, you are online. All those things could be done even with a modem-connection so my strong belief is that the current “frenzy for inernet-speed” is a path to distraction and dehumanisation with our lives being even more dominated by those tax-dodging, under-regulated, intrusive, online-multinationals.
God help us!
Yours,
Alan Mitcham
Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/a-matter-of-connection/article/2024/jul/03/isolated-couldnt-communicate-digital-exclusion-in-numbers
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