Helen Milner, OBE, Chief Executive, Good Things Foundation
Having a smartphone and only using it for social media does not make someone digitally literate. In the UK, 11.7 million people lack essential digital skills and therefore cannot function in all of the five core areas of internet use, as set out by the Government’s Essential Digital Skills Framework: communicating, handling information and content, transacting, and problem solving, underpinned by being able to keep yourself safe online. At Good Things Foundation, our goal is that everyone should have these core digital skills so that they can function in what is now a digital society.
As the UK’s leading digital inclusion charity we see our role as a champion for digital - but an honest and realistic one. Our vision is a world where everyone benefits from digital and we are both a social change and educational charity at our core, aiming to equip people with the digital skills they need to be happier, healthier and better off. Yet, encouraging people to get online or learn new digital skills whilst simultaneously highlighting the potential for harm can be a difficult balance. This is especially true when it comes to social media.
We realise that for a lot of people, getting online involves engaging with social media of some form and, like other aspects of the digital world, it has the potential to both help and harm. But as a digital inclusion charity that provides digital skills support in informal educational settings, some of the people we support through our community partners are amongst the most vulnerable in society, and therefore we feel that we need to present the opportunities and risks in the simplest terms possible. Several of our free online courses on Learn My Way are focused specifically on social media, and embedded within are foundations of internet safety in plain English with an accessible reading age of 9 years. Whilst terms like misinformation might be common in policy circles and the tech regulation space, they mean little to many.
Let’s bust some myths:
- Everyone in the UK has the internet at home: No, there are 1.9 million households that lack access to the internet, primarily due to affordability.
- The digital divide is just about old people: No, 44% of the people who are offline are under the age of 60.
- In 2017, there were 79.17 million mobile subscriptions in the UK, and a population of 66 million people, so everyone has a smartphone right? Wrong, there are 11.5 million adults without a smartphone.
- The more you earn the more you use the internet and the better off you are. Correct. People with an annual household income of £50,000 or more are 40% more likely to have Foundation digital skills, than those earning less than £17,499, and 4-in-10 benefit claimants have very low digital engagement. Compared to people with no or very low skills, digitally enabled manual workers are earning an average of £2,160 extra per annum.
Both during and before lockdown we have seen our community partners utilise social media to bring awareness to their work in their communities, bring people together and keep connected at a time where a sense of connection is crucial. We see our networked community model as a “big club with a shared vision” and social media really enables us to build a positive online community around our mission - which has been especially key during this challenging time filled with uncertainty for community organisations and the community sector.
We have seen the power that social media can have when people do develop their digital skills and get online - most importantly, allowing people to connect with loved ones. At the same time, we are all aware that social media can cause great harm to an individual’s mental health, spread inaccurate information and act as a platform for anonymised harassment. When it comes to these issues, more accountability is required from individuals, from regulators, from social media companies and government. We are not always successful at navigating the waters of where citizen, corporate, and regulatory responsibilities start and end. As a charity, we are actively seeking to explore our work in the online harms and digital media literacy space as it is increasingly evident that more is needed.
I was delighted to give evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies earlier this year. Their report was published in June and I was pleased to read that
“a country’s education system needs to prepare its people for their role as citizens. In the digital world, this means they need to be empowered to be critical, digitally literate consumers of information. .. We recommend that in order to secure democracy, people of all ages need to be taught critical digital media literacy skills suitable for a digital age.”
I hope that in our post Covid world, now we realise that a digitally included nation is not a nice to have but a need to have, and that we can work together across business, Government, and the charity sectors to build a digitally powered and safe society for everyone.