So we’re all familiar with the idea of the digital divide. In context of unions, around 70% of UK union members have access at home or work – most (but not all by any stretch) on broadband. This number is growing slightly all the time, but there’s a big chunk of the population that don’t have access to the intertubes, and hence to all the empowering and enfranchising goodness that flows from them.

Couple this with a drop off for those on the lowest incomes, and another for those over 60, and you see the danger of abandoning the offline path. Some of those least enfranchised in society are missing out disproportionally in the opportunities that easy access brings with it.

Now, the government is doing some interesting things to counter this, looking into ways of getting computer equipment and connectivity to some of those who need it most – low income families. Regular access in the home opens so many more doors than communal access, though that’s not to denigrate the work done in getting UK Online centres all over the country (there’s 5 within just a mile of our home for example), so every citizen can get free communal access and basic training.

I’m (as anyone who has read any of my monomaniac posts before will know) of the opinion that unions need to do more to find ways to engage with those members and potential members who wish to contribute activism, exercise their democratic prerogative, express their opinion, or just receive union services online. But one sometimes comes across the argument that doing new things online discriminates against those don’t have ready access or who don’t like computers.

This argument is still important to always bear in mind and to develop parallel routes to accommodate. We’re standing on one side of the divide and we must never forget those who can’t come across to us just yet. Sometimes though, it’s worth thinking about a different type of digital divide too.

If you’re as old as I am 🙁 you’ll be fairly used to the procedure of a good bureaucratic meeting with chairs and minutes and whatnot, be it union or political. You’ll be fairly used to delivering bags of leaflets in the rain, or talking to activists on street stalls whilst you wait for a much delayed demo to kick off. You may even have read (…shudder…) a union rulebook. You don’t need a computer for any of that.

I was talking with some representatives from Trades Councils the other day, when one lady confessed she wasn’t sure why her council should have to communicate online, when they were actually all comfortable with the way they did it already, and the key people there simply ‘didn’t get on’ with computers.

Now, It shouldn’t be underestimated how scary it can be to think about starting to learn to use the internet when others know so much more than you, or how inconvenient it is to drag yourself out to a neighbourhood UK Online Centre for half an hour’s surfing, or how much less of an experience you get when you have to use communal access facilities.

But neither should it be underestimated how scary it can be to think about trekking along to meetings where you know nobody, and everyone is utterly familiar with each other and with the byzantine rules of the occasion. It’s extremely inconvenient to give up your thursday night to travel to a meeting place in town, and frustrating when you really don’t seem to get as much out the meeting as the others, possibly because you don’t have a Mastermind specialist subject in left factionalism.

In such situations, if you’ve childcare issues, you could be disenfranchised. If you’re shy, you could be disenfranchised. But another thing that concerns me is that if you’re under 20, you could be disenfranchised. The generation now entering the workforce have new ways of their own in which they feel entirely natural organising their lives. Those ways are online – they’re open but ambiguous, connected but distributed, and immediate but asynchronous, and they’re ways some of us feel uncomfortable getting to grips with.

They’re the kind of people who mightn’t quite understand for example why an apparently obvious solution to a problem needs to wait another 18 months before SOC can even consider whether it’s fit for discussion, because you missed the submission date for the last biennial rule-change ADM. They’re the kind of people who would possibly decide to just sod off and fix it themselves. I don’t see how we can expect them to make the leap to our ways of organising, when we don’t offer any serious concession to theirs.

There’s another digital divide we need to consider. But for this one, we need to realise the people on the opposite bank are leaving us behind, not the other way around.