Saturday, January 19, 2013

Go on UK (ex Race online 2012) estimates for 3-3.5 million active resistors in the UK for online connectivity

Go on UK, the charity, which was formerly 'Race online 2012' and championed up by Martha Lane Fox to get everybody in the UK connected, shows on their website a diagram including statistics & persona information of who the target group is.
source: Go on UK
Go on UK concentrates their work on 'potential users' and 'narrow users' as they classify them.
An interesting point for me is the fact that they call a group of 3-3.5 million people "active resistors". In my research in statistics for numbers of Non-Internet users I found that there is a group of resisting internet users, but it wasn't as large as this. The Oxford Internet surveys with their 2011 report differentiated between ex-internet users (people who used to use a computer) and non-Internet users. With this not to be forgotten the group of proxi-users; people who don't use the computer themselves, but get their son / daughter / carer or grandchild to do it for them. Are they active resistors, or simply comfortable with the set-up their have? In the OXIS report 80% of the ex-users and 60% of the non-Internet users indicated that they have someone they know if they needed to go online. In my calculations at the time (in Jan 2012) I concluded that less than 2 millions people are really digitally disconnected.
Link to Go on UK Link to Oxford Internet Surveys