Telling stories online

As David mentioned in a previous posting, our reporting on this week’s Digital Inclusion Conference for DC10plus was hugely rewarding for us, and will hopefully be a great way of providing the flavour of the event for those that weren’t there – or will remind people who were there about some of the great stuff that was going on.

The use of social media to report on events is a great way of telling the stories that emerged from it: capturing moments which might have been witnessed by only a few people and make them available to all. In many ways, it is what inclusion is all about.

Of course, when dealing with a medium like video, it helps when those one is talking to are adept at telling stories themselves. This is why I was so pleased with the following effort, featuring Bob Holmes of Digital Unite, who are encouraging ’silver surfers’ to get online and make the most of what the web has to offer. Towards the end of the clip, Bob recounts the example of a grandparent sharing in the process of their grandchild learning to read through online video calls.

Here Bob manages to make the question of why older people might want to engage with online technology very human and understandable. He also does a great job earlier in the film of explaining why older people might feel excluded from digital advances – my thanks to him for taking the time to talk to the camera.

Such stories are what make events – often the most value at a conference can be extracted from the coffee breaks when folk can get together and just have a natter – sharing problems, solutions and experiences. But the value in those conversations can be lost to the vast majority – unless you have a social reporter hanging around with a video camera and a quick wifi link to YouTube.

Dave Briggs