We’re excited to be working with the Arts Council and BBC Academy, who have joined forces on a project called Digital Capacity for the Arts, which offers training and guidance for arts organisations around creating and distributing content and reaching audiences via mobile, IPTV and online platforms.

There are a series of practical seminars and workshops until August 2012 and a growing base of online resources, including webcasts, short films, presentations and podcasts.

You can watch all the seminar sessions from the Seminar on Audio and Audiovisual Content online here:
http://digitalcapacity.artscouncil.org.uk/videos-seminar-2/ plus a ‘Seminar in 200 seconds’ highlights video that the Kinura crew edited in lightning time.

The next event is in London in October, and it’s all about Creative Use of Archives

The twitter hashtag is #digicaparts if you want to keep up to date.

This year’s One Young World was a resounding success and paves the way for all the young people involved to get their projects and ideas off the ground. If you haven’t heard about One Young World, you can read the ‘about’ info on their site here, but in a nutshell, it’s a gathering of young people from every single country on our planet, where ideas are shared and resolutions declared – all with a view to making the world a better place.

The live stream got over 30,000 hits from 155 countries across the 3 day event, all tuning in to watch presentations from high profile figures such as Bob Geldof, Desmond Tutu, Jamie Oliver and Joss Stone.

Videos from the event are on the One Young World YouTube channel and you can follow the conversations on twitter via @oneyoungworld

The speeches are now available on FILMCLUB’s YouTube channel. One of my favourites was from Beeban Kidron, co-founder of FILMCLUB.

As a bit of background, AmbITion is a change programme now funded by the Arts Council Soctland that aims to facilitate the longer-term sustainability of cultural organisations by helping them make best use of IT and digital media. They run lots of events and webinars and there’s a wealth of recources on their site.

The report is full of advice on low-budget webcasting (kit, connectivity, platforms, etc) plus cost/quality considerations for higher budget productions. It also covers measuring ROI, planning content and curating audiences. A good read for anyone interested in live streaming events, training and communications.

twitter links:

@getambition
@hannahrudman

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It’s called In a video-led world we all need to be creators and I thought this lovely image from WhiteAfrican on Flickr summed it up nicely. (pic licensed under Creative Commons).

Also – the sessions are all archived now and being streamed in Flash for your viewing pleasure. Watch or listen here.

The reason I’m interested in all this is not just because I work in digital media, but also because I researched this whole area from an academic perspective whilst at university. I thought it might be a good idea to publish my dissertation now, although it’s nearly 10 years old I’m sure some of the references and ideas will still be relevant. You can download it here. It’s 28 pages long, and there’s a good bibliography, which I’ve reproduced below for easy access.

I also produced a radio programme about this issue, and I remember interviewing 80 year olds learning how to use computers and going out on the street to get vox pops from a cross section of people living in London’s poorest boroughs. I was struck back then how many people didn’t even know what the internet was. Obviously a lot has changed but we still have 17 million disconnected and obviously this ties in with our less than acceptable literacy levels and the poverty we all see daily.

I hope that people like Martha and her team and Sugata Mitra who I blogged about before do help to make a real difference. As I say in closing line of my essay. The digitisation of life has only just begun, and as Langdon Winner reminds us in “This process amounts to a vast, ongoing experiment whose long term ramifications no one fully
comprehends.”

Here’s a video from the digital inclusion team too:

[This video ‘Think about it’ has been created by the Digital Inclusion Team. It sets out how they can take the opportunity to use technology as a tool for improving lives and life chances or face the risk of increasing economic and social costs. This presentation is available for anyone to place on their website or use when needing to explain the benefits of ICT in tackling social exclusion. Please email movies@digiteam.org.uk.]

DIGITAL DIVIDE – BIBLIOGRAPHY
• New Media and Politics, B. Axford and R. Huggins, Eds, Sage, 2001.
• Demos – Divided By Information: The Digital Divide and the Implications of the New Meritocracy, Perri 6
with Ben Jupp, 2001. www.demos.co.uk
• Theories of the Information Society, Frank Webster, Routledge, 1995.
• War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality, Mark Slouka, New York:
Basic Books,1995.
• Understanding Media Culture, Douglas Kellner, Routledge, 1995.
• Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community, Steven G Jones, Ed. Sage 1995.
• Power Without Responsibility, Curran and Seaton, Routledge, 1997.
• N.Negroponte 1995. Being Digital. Hodder & Stoughton
• D.Rushkoff 1994. Cyberia*. Flamingo
• C.Stoll 1995. Silicon Snake Oil.* Macmillan
• The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens, Stanford University Press, 1990.
• The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, Zone Books, 1994.
• Digital Divide Network –
• Content and the Digital Divide: What Do People Want? By Kade L Twist
• Is closing the Digital Divide more important than providing healthcare? By Mugo Macharia.
• The Arts Online: The Role of the Arts in Bridging the Digital Divide by Victoria Bernal
• Cyber-Tricksters and Cyber-Shamen: The Other Side of The Digital Divide by Kade L Twist.
• www.digitaldividenetwork.org/mugo.adp
• Working together to deliver Information Age Government – Speech by Mo Mowlam MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office at the
LGA/IdeA Information Age Government Conference, 24 November 1999.
• Which? Online Annual Internet Survey 2000 – 11/07/2000 – www.which.net/whatsnew/pr/jul00/general/survey.html
• Broadband Proliferation in Europe: Bring on the Competition, Keith Waller, September 20, 2000 – www.streamingmedia.com

DIGITAL DIVIDE DISSERTATION: MAY 2001 by SARAH PLATT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.