Now it seems like a long time ago, but it was not so long ago that covid entered our lives and suddenly we had to learn to use the Zoom and other remote conversation tools, and the children had to follow the lesson with a tutorial on a laptop, the one at home. The families, the ones who had telecommuting, they took turns using the screen. A primary school teacher told how much it cost to get a computer for a girl in her class who had no resources: she shared her home with other families and lived with her nucleus in a single room. When he got the computer, the task was to teach him to use it, to find the moment for training. He was one of the thousands and thousands of victims of the digital divide, which deepened to the abyss.
These months we have seen, as in fast motion, another disturbing phenomenon. Bank offices of all kinds have accelerated the closure of their spaces and ATMs have become a rarity in the geography of our streets. Already delivered to consumption via credit card, we touch upon personal catastrophe in each operation, given the rise of cybercrime.
It is known to all that the vulnerable in the system are children, the elderly and immigrants. Also those who do not have economic resources. All vulnerable should have a more protected environment due to their condition, but this is not the case: the new regulations of life do not guarantee that objective, and thus we see how the authorities urge to delegate to family members or call for citizen solidarity to help the underprivileged before the most recent obligation to have access to a covid passport. The new scares and costs at advanced ages and in people with little digital culture, a good that is not universal. Because really, is digital culture as essential in these moments as we want it to be? We are turning an important sector of the population into digital illiterates, not only because we do not provide them with the material and training that their use requires, but also because we make the daily management of their lives a path of technological obstacles that we have deliberately put in their way. Was it really so difficult to activate physical points to print the vaccination certificates of those who need them? Is it necessary to activate pandemic control instruments that pass exclusively through the 5.0 universe?
Families and civil society have begun to organize to put cables in the neighborhoods. They are the same entities and initiatives that helped to collect food in the worst of the covid crisis, those who made purchases and took them to the neighbors who were identified as most in need.
But many months, a year and a half have passed since the pandemic bomb, and the first measures and decisions should not be left to the spontaneous. The collapse of lamevasalut for days, due to the requirement of the certificate issued by the web, left many patients in limbo when requesting a medical appointment or consulting medications. There was no face-to-face network in the face of the ruling, beyond postponing the restrictive measure itself.
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Also the private sphere should make that reflection, of corporate responsibility. Or legislators start with firm hand: the brand new law on customer service, from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, has finally put the bell on the cat and prohibits companies with more than 250 employees from providing customer service through an answering machine. More people to serve people. That is correcting a course to approach, now yes, towards a world of digital conciliation.
Only if the scenario that is drawn after the express unfolding of digital life is analyzed from empathy and common sense will it be possible to see its edges, each time deeper, and that they increase the isolation of a significant part of our population.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com