One of the things I became very interested about whilst at the BBC was ‘e-literacy’ – basically how the various demographics of the UK have adopted and use technology, especially the Internet. (The BBC has a mandate to improve e-literacy (‘driving digital’, it’s called!), and must consider how it’s projects help promote the cause)
I think a lot us in Web2.0-world forget that only a tiny percentage of society are really getting what we’re doing. Ask some people outside your social and demographic circle whether they use Flickr and the chances are they’ve never even heard of it. Of course, what we’re doing is significant because it’s indicating future ‘mainstream usage behaviour’ (hmmm, sometimes anyway).
Anyway a number of British universities (UCL, Leicester and Nottingham) have conducted an ‘E-Society’ survey, rating every postcode in a metric between 1 and 23 (23 being most e-literate). For those who don’t know, a UK postcode is like a US Zipcode but shared by just 15 or so individuals addresses or a single apartment block.
From the Spatial Literacy E-Society website:
Our E-Society Classification is a detailed classification of all of Great Britain’s neighbourhoods, based on information about levels of awareness of information and communications technologies, usage patterns, and attitudes to their effects upon quality of life.
There is also an academic paper detailing the project.
Here are the 22 classifications:
But perhaps the coolest part is that you can search for your own UK post-code:
My postcode is H22 – E-Experts/E-committed (Confident in their abilities to undertake on-line transactions and to make full use of electronic technologies. These are the types of people who are able to make use of personalisation and configuration options.), although interestingly nearby neighbourhoods are listed as B09 – E-marginalised/Cable TV heartland (not necessarily averse to the use of electronic technologies but often lack the disposable income to equip themselves with it).
What’s yours?
I’m ‘H22 – E-Experts/E-committed’ too, which sounds about right for Dulwich.
One correction though – the site only classifies according to the first bit of the postcode (eg SE21), rather than the full postcode, which is a few degrees less granular than you suggest above.
It does look like that from the results (it just mentions the first part of the postcode).
However that would be very inaccurate — some of the most poorest illiterate people in the UK and some of the most richest and technically advanced people in the UK live in E2 (my postcode).
Having tested a few postcodes, it’s actually accurate down to the individual postcode. Just try a postcode and then iterate up…
Or, check out:
E2 0QB – A01: E-unengaged/Low technologists, vs
E2 9NA – G21: E-business users/Electronic orderers
this shows some quite interesting results
For my current house
TW7 – Group C : Becoming engaged, which is totally correct for my house mates.
My parents
LE2 – Group F : Instrumental E-users, which is totally correct for them.
Although they found flickr this weekend, they started to use it but I think it freaked them out slightly.
My flat at uni from September doesn’t even have an entry. I always thought people in Sheffield were slightly behide the times
Apparently where I live is “We are very sorry but we do not have a classification for the postcode ‘*hidden*’ in our database.”, and the same applies for where I lived on campus while at uni last year. They have a nice definition of every postcode.
I live in the Forth Valley in Scotland and the result for my postcode is very low… infact, it’s the lowest – Group A: E-unengaged. While many of my neighbours may not know about web 2.0, Flickr or be developing the next killer RoR app I think it’s pretty unfair to label them as ‘unengaged’.
Sure, I live in an area that was once dominated by the shipping and mining industries, and large number of the population may be over 40 or retired, but it’s just crass to use an image of an overweight balding man eating chips…
or an ageing pensioner, carrying a polythene bag (no doubt filled with tesco value cheese, the Daily Record and a few tins of Tennents special)
to describe our collective level of e-society literacy. It’s more than crass actually, it’s offensive.
I did include the images described above in the last comment, but WordPress seems to have stripped them out.
http://www.spatial-literacy.org/esocietyprofiler/image/class/Aa.jpg
http://www.spatial-literacy.org/esocietyprofiler/image/class/Ab.jpg
I’m in an area that is rated as A : E-unengaged and type A05 : Too old to be bothered. Which makes sense as many of the people are elderly council tenants.
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