Mark McLaughlin
Edinburgh Evening News
October 19, 2009
IT WAS once regarded as the refuge of those looking for alien conspiracies and somewhere to share their thoughts on the latest Star Wars movie, but today the internet – and social networking sites in particular – have truly broken over into the mainstream.
We are logging on in our millions, with age and gender no barrier.
So-called "silver surfers" are the latest to smash through the digital divide, with a new Ofcom report showing one in four in the 45-54 age group now belong to a social networking site – more than double the number of two years ago.
These figures come on the back of a looming postal strike, but with the population e-mailing in their droves, it has to be asked whether the Post Office is history anyway, destined to be sidelined in the on-going march of technology.
Post Office figures show that the size of its average daily mailbag has decreased by around 10 per cent in the last year, to just over 75 million items a day.
Meanwhile, it is estimated that the UK is currently sending around three billion e-mails every single day.
Dr Alistair Duff, a reader in information and journalism at Edinburgh Napier University and a leading expert on how information systems shape our society, thinks the figures showing the rise of the silver surfers are "significant but not surprising".
He said: "One of the main fears about the rise of the information age was the generation gap, and if that is dissolving it shows that we're moving forward.
"The fact that we now have 45-54-year-olds using the internet more often is not that surprising to me.
"First of all, late 40s to early 50s is not that old, and it has to be remembered that this is the generation that invented the internet. I'd be more interested to find out how many over-70s have social networking sites."
Internet uptake has continued beyond middle age, with figures showing that 8 per cent of over-55s now have a social network page.
While this is great news for social inclusion, it has been welcomed with less enthusiasm in the traditional communication industries, such as the Post Office.
The Communication Workers Union claims that the Royal Mail has rejected its proposals for modernising its workload while maintaining the staff.
The Royal Mail claims that it is the CWU that is resistant to change, and it is driving customers such as Amazon away with its continuing strike action. However, Royal Mail may be right to hold off on buying huge banks of parcel-sorting machines for the moment, as the items currently sent by companies like Amazon, such as music, movies and books, are being increasingly digitised and traded online, without the bulky media of CDs, DVDs and bound volumes.
In the Information Society, the information itself is fast becoming the key tradable commodity.
Some have argued that we are on the verge of an information revolution, a 21st-century communist dream where all information – the new currency – will be equally distributed amongst the masses.
Dr Duff added: "Some have speculated that if Karl Marx were around today, he would be writing "Das Information", rather than Das Kapital.
"Information is a new currency.
Every new technology has been met with resistance from the beginning of history, and has brought a great deal of strife as well as benefits, so you will see strikes of this kind.
"However, I am sympathetic to some of this resistance, because change has to be managed sensitively. It is still possible to have full employment in a high-tech society.
"The future of the Royal Mail has got to be multimedia. New media does not always displace old media. They can co-exist in the same way that radio has continued to co-exist with television.
"As the philosopher Marshall McLuhan said, 'the medium is the message'. A handwritten, hand-delivered letter will always say much more than an e-mail, text or tweet ever could."
Nowhere is this co-existence more in evidence than the humble telephone. The use of phones for texting has rocketed from 22 billion texts in 2003 to over 85 billion texts last year.
Latest Ofcom figures show that, despite this breakthrough in telephone technology, it's still good to talk. UK land-line calls have dropped 17 per cent in the last five years, but they have been replaced by a near doubling of mobile calls, which means that the overall number of calls made in the UK, on both land-line and mobile, has risen by 10 per cent.
Dr Duff added: "It's too early to say where all of these developments are leading. As for the ability of the Information Society to spark a revolution, I'm going to go for the academic cop out – sit on the fence and wait and see which way the wind is blowing. Many Old Testament prophets who were proved false were stoned to death, and I wouldn't want that to happen to me."
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