2011 · Study · 2010–2013
The real-world cost of being left offline
Our first research question was not abstract. It asked what a household loses when the form, the shift, and the appointment have already moved onto a screen.
In 2010 we were a small consortium of educators, technologists, and civic organisations, and we shared one observation: formal education still treated computer skills as optional, while employers, councils, and clinics had already made them essential. The earliest studies tried to price that gap in ordinary terms. Missed shifts. Unread messages. A benefit form abandoned halfway through because the file would not upload.
We worked with libraries, community centres, and adult-education providers, and we listened before we counted. Older adults described shame more often than ignorance. Low-income households described a single shared phone and a broadband contract that had lapsed. Communities with limited connectivity described a journey across town for a task that a neighbour could finish in the kitchen.
The finding we still quote is simple. Exclusion is not a lack of interest. It is a sequence of small blocks, and the first block is usually the one a confident person no longer notices: switching the machine on, finding the file, knowing the message has actually been sent.
That study set the charity programme. Free and heavily subsidised Computing Literacy, in the rooms people already trusted, with an assessment that asked candidates to perform the task rather than describe it.