You’re Not My E-Type

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Which isn’t to say that government shouldn’t have big ideas and want to see them implemented. It is great that Connecting the UK was published. It is a piece of ‘joined up thinking’, bringing together areas that are dealt with by different parts of the government machine, and giving guidance on how to make things better.

But isn’t the digital divide a lot more complex than these kinds of top-down initiatives can encapsulate? Think about your friends and family. Some probably don’t have a computer but might have a mobile phone. Some might have a computer and no Internet connection; or a connection but on dial-up rather than broadband. Some might have Freeview TV, others cable, others a plain terrestrial channels only box, some no TV at all. And what about how they use all this kit? In many different ways, I am sure.

Plans to wire up whole communities, such as, to give one example, the [linkout:Milton Keynes project http://www.briteyellow.com/NewsBritezoneinMiltonKeynes/tabid/165/Default.aspx] are a superb way of opening up access and I definitely want a scheme like that in my area. But then I have plenty of Wi-Fi kit. If you don’t have the kit to use the system, it is about as good as a chocolate teapot.

University College London has recently completed a project which classifies all UK households into an ‘e-type’. It has taken each of the 1.7 million postcodes in Britain, and, by using information from the electoral role, the last Census and data from the credit referencing company Experian, categorised them by the nature of their access to digital technologies.

It is a large scale, complex exercise in spatial geography, sitting in a fascinating and huge area known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that plays a part in planning education and healthcare provision and plenty more.

As compelling as the exercise itself and the whole GIS area is, the classification that UCL came up with is very complex. There are eight major classifications, subdivided into 23 e-types.

These e-types don’t sit along a line with ‘haves’ at one end and ‘have nots’ at the other. It is an altogether less straightforward picture than that. The classification is below, and if you go to it online, you can follow links to get to detailed definitions of each.

You can also pop along to the Web site housing the project and slap in your postcode to find out where it thinks you fit into the picture. If you disagree with the classification, you can even let the researchers know.

Cluster the information and you can doubtless come up with some hotspots for the policy makers to focus attention and effort in bridging the ‘digital divide’. But dig into the data and things become incredibly complex. If the classifications and their application to postcodes are right, policy development aimed at making us as individuals and as a nation more IT literate just got a whole lot more complicated.

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