Leaving the digitally illiterate behind….
Thinking about the digitally wary in a digital-only world
I feel for the digitally illiterate and their plight in an increasingly digital-only post-Covid world.
My wife and children are twenty-four hours away from boarding a flight back home to the UK. We have just been through two hours of making sense of the rules and getting all the necessary paperwork in place. Their travel itinerary is straight forward. Point to point, between an amber-list country and the UK, no transits. They stayed with family overseas. No hotels involved. My wife is double-vaccinated, my children are not eligible. Quite a straightforward case.
Getting familiar with the rules for the first time, we navigated a labyrinth of websites — government and private — to get to a point where we think we are ready with the travel documentation required. Some of the questions we asked ourselves and ultimately found the responses to are:
- Are there any specific requirements for pre-departure tests prior to boarding a flight to the UK?
- For our specific case (presumably one of the simpler scenarios), is a day 2 test required? Or Day 2 and Day 8?
- Are children under the age of 18 (unvaccinated) required to undergo a pre-boarding and Day 2 (and Day 8) test?
- There are more than three hundred and fifty ‘vetted’ test providers on the government website. The pre-vetting was accompanied by a broad disclaimer. Which one should we choose? This evolving service is unregulated and there is no price capping in place. We tapped in our credit card details, with the sour taste that comes from knowing you’re being ripped off.
- Many providers list a Day 2 test for the ‘double-vaccinated’ and another one for the ‘unvaccinated’ — is there a difference in the test itself? And therefore, were we required to purchase the former for my wife and the latter for my children? It’s a different matter that the provider we settled on required us to complete two separate payment transactions that generated different booking reference numbers.
- The passenger locator form is 5 pages long and took us 15 minutes to fill. It required us to populate the booking reference number for the Day 2 test. It didn’t cater for families travelling with potentially different reference numbers.
- The Day 2 tests need to be administered between Day 0 (date of arrival) and Day 2. With the bank holiday weekend, would the test be delivered to us in time, we wondered.
We fretted and fumed through the process. But this is not a complaint.
Covid-19 has upended lives all around the globe. Ways of living that we took for granted, can no longer be afforded that luxury. As we inch our way back to some semblance of normality, governments and enterprises have had to react and adjust too. We, all of us, are doing the best we can.
I pondered about the sheer amount of data being collected through the process. We clicked our way through terms and conditions and provided our consent, without giving a second thought to how the data would be stored and used.
The experience did however leave me wondering about the digitally wary or illiterate. As governments and enterprises have had to stand up services overnight to cope with Covid, they have naturally adopted a digital-first approach. In our experience this morning, some of the services had taken this a step further and were ‘mobile-first’ — i.e. not optimised for access on a tablet or laptop. As new products and services are developed, it is looking increasingly likely that non-digital flavours will be an afterthought. This is understandable as vast swathes of the population are digitally-literate at least, if not digitally-savvy. In fact, were it not for the convenience of our mobile devices, I shudder to think how different our experience this morning would have been.
But let’s not forget those that might be clinging on to the digital fringes, who might not be as nimble with their mobile phones or laptop computers as the rest of us, who might not be familiar with intricacies of downloading the latest version of the app or OS or tinkering around with privacy and user settings. Or there are others who might just prefer the more historical ways of transacting, borne perhaps out of distrust, insecurity, or disability.
I am reminded of my mother. Proficient in the use of Facebook, Whatsapp, You-tube, mobile clicks and flicks, she is by no measure a digital lightweight. Besides the myriad sites she would have had to wade through, online service registrations (with yet another username and password), online payments (with memorable words and OTPs), Covid apps and QR codes, are but a few of the digital hurdles she would have had to contend with — just to take the flight. An assured and capable woman, while apprehensive at first, I’m sure she would have been up to the task. There are many others who are daunted by digital to a lesser or greater extent and might lack the confidence to tackle the onslaught of new and transformed experiences in every facet of their lives.
Access to public products and services should be universal. This is cumbersome and costly to manage. However, this is an obligation that government has to citizens and residents. I welcome a transition to a digital-only future. If we usher in this future without the establishment of universal digital literacy and robust security, we risk excluding and shutting out those at the outskirts.
