Oct 14 2009
Digital Czar: Internet will save us from depression
Britain’s Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox will lobby politicians to help get 4 million of the country’s poorest online. The Government-appointed spokesperson for web and digital issues wants MPs to get more involved in helping the remaining percentage of British people become ‘tech-savvy’.
According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, households can save upwards of £270 a year — and that’s “proper money, not the Monopoly money the Bank of England prints” — just by going online. Ms. Lane Fox, who commissioned the survey, explains how that cash could be put to better use.
The money you save online could fund a week’s worth — well, maybe an afternoon’s worth — of beer binges, bets on the horses or on a day’s supply of cigarettes, so in the long term it’s certainly more beneficial to learn what a web browser is. — Martha Lane Fox
Many libraries now provide an ‘Internet for poor people’ service, which includes 52k dialup connection, access to newsgroups and IRC chatrooms with lag of less than two minutes per message.
This is, however, made almost completely useless by the fact tramps aren’t allowed library cards as they have no fixed home address. Nevertheless, Ms. Fox is confident that greater Government emphasis on the benefits of the Internet will yield greater profit for the country as a whole.
I tried to explain to Gordon Brown why the Internet is so important to the country’s economic growth, and how it could possibly offer a resolution to the current recession we are having to deal with on a daily basis. However, he was more interested in playing spider solitaire and looking at videos of singing kittens on YouTube. — Martha Lane Fox
The study also found that approximately 10million Britons have never been online. Many questioned the integrity of the study, which polled over ten people coming out of the Salvation Army in Preston town centre, but PWC have assured members of the public that this figure is in fact closer to twenty.
