Offering direct, personal support to the public, it consisted of a display of engaging imagery and thought-provoking content arranged around an Internet Station where visitors could drop in and be guided and assisted by volunteers. Using internet enabled computers, visitors were shown how to obtain the skills and tools to get online in a meaningful and sustained way.
‘Our Digital Planet’ toured across the UK after its launch in Brighton in the Summer of 2012. It went on to visit Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow.
The exhibition filled a vital gap in the Digital Inclusion landscape. There was no one else consistently taking digital inclusion to where people are, gently coaxing them along a route to inclusion based on their interests with no hidden agenda.
Ron Gibbons – Artist and Photographer
“The first customer into the unit was Ron, who happily told us he was 84 and had no interest in the internet at all.
But he was interested in photography, and had been looking at some of the photos in the exhibition, particularly the image of old Bristol, and reminiscing about the trams in Croydon where he used to live so he was shown some online images of the trams.
Ron was pretty amazed about how easy it was to find such things, and, within minutes he was asking us to look for some pictures of himself dancing in a nightclub, which he had been told were on Facebook. We didn’t manage to find them, but we did find images of some of the places where he was due to go on holiday and trip advisor ratings for them, which he found fascinating.
Ron’s a photographer and a painter, and, when he realised that he could upload photos and images of his paintings, he left bubbling with enthusiasm and promising to come back.
At the age of 84, Ron went from being an internet sceptic to a total convert. He came back to the internet station 5 times. We ended up creating a Flickr site for him, which he will, hopefully use in the future to showcase his paintings to the world. On the last day in Bristol, Ron returned for his final visit, during which we spent time looking for images of the farm that he worked on at the age of 13-and-a-half during the Second World War.
Meeting and helping Ron made the whole Our Digital Planet experience worthwhile for me. It fills me with the kind of “Social Glow” that we experience from Social Media Surgeries”
John Popham, Our Digital Planet facilitator
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