Kinura are providing live streaming for the Opening Ceremony and Inaugural Summit of One Young World on Feb. 8-10, 2010.

Join the webcast and connect via YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter here.

One Young World, nicknamed Young Davos by some media outlets, is the world’s first global youth leadership summit. Bringing together several hundred delegates age 25 and under from the world’s 192 countries, One Young World combines the social power of the Internet with the energy and ideas of global youth to address the most challenging issues of today. Founded by David Jones, global CEO of Havas Worldwide, and Kate Robertson, Euro RSCG group chairman, One Young World focuses on plenary sessions at which delegates are guided by a group of international luminaries including Kofi Annan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bob Geldof. The inaugural London summit on Feb. 8-10, 2010, will be open to the entire globe and people of all ages through online streaming and real-time updates.

Here’s a link to a piece I wrote for the C&binet Forum blog

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.

I’ve been following the renewed interest in the digital divide since the publication of the Digital Britain report and also following Martha Lane Fox on twitter since she was appointed the government’s first Champion for Digital Inclusion.

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.

I think it’s about time this happened. Good news for the ‘Digital Divide’ and those left behind.
Read an article in MarketingWeek here and expect more on Digital Britain from me soon.

#digitalbritain on Twitter if you want to follow the discussion.

Back in 2006 I visited the European Parliament with thirty or so other hopeful representatives whose companies were invited to tender for the enormous and complex EuroParl webTV project, which was then just a twinkle in the eye of the teams at Brussells and Strasbourg HQs. If the tender documentation and requirements were complex, then imagine the technological resources and brain power required to put a project like this together. So now it’s launched, and It’s hats off to my esteemed friend Phil Haggar, Director of TwoFour Digital who has no doubt applied his razor sharp mind to the job with his usual calm integrity; and to Paul Tarplee, MD of TwoFour Digital, who I ate lunch with in Strasbourg back on those site visits, and I imagine has had some sleepless nights since on this one. But hopefully not.

This is a pretty significant moment in webTV world. It demonstrates the all pervasive use of video and how pretty much anything is possible if you have the right team and the right brains on a project. The complexity of streaming video in 20 odd languages – live and on-demand – is mind boggling. But I have no doubt it will be a success.

There will be four channels for four different types of audience: Your Parliament, Your Voice, Young Europe and Parliament Live. The parliament apparently said the project was inspired by the public’s “right to know” about what happens and hopes that it will bring “the life of the institution to its citizens in a modern and creative format.” I don’t want to get into a debate here about politics and EU regulations, the shape of bananas, etc. here, suffice to say it’s a great achievement to get this channel off the ground, and it will be really interesting to know how many people tune in. There’s an essay in all this somewhere I’m sure about the public sphere versus the political media agenda. But I haven’t got time to re-read Noam Chomsky et al just now…

From Wednesday 17th Sept 08, the channel will be online at : www.europarltv.europa.eu

I’ll definitely be watching and may report further on the content of the site, stats and so on, until the next episode of Tudors or Mock the Week on BBC iPlayer distract me that is. :)