Real-world drop-in closes, online drop-in starts soon

Meeting room at Whitmore Community Centre - no people, tables and chairs stacked

Real-world drop-in closed, not suspended

Our last session was 2 March. The 9 March drop-in was suspended. Today (16 March) we felt that it was unsafe even for a podcast session with only six people in the room — so that had to be cancelled too.

We cannot tell you when we will be open again.

Online drop-in, online learning

The whole point and purpose of the drop-in project is real-world social inclusion — not the social distancing of the virtual world. But now we have to consider the really serious effects of COVID-19 social distancing.

So we are fast-forwarding existing plans to offer an online drop-in and online learning to older people who are isolated at home. That might be all of us soon.

Many of you already have the basic resource — a GSuite account. More than 100 people have email accounts at seniors.org.uk, bold.org.uk, szs.net or agewell.org.uk. Those are all GSuite accounts, and they all provide immediate access to an online meeting room app named Meet. We could add about 450 more, and it’s all free for us.

If you have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or a desktop computer that is not too old — and an Internet connection at home, you should be able to use GSuite Meet. We expect that many of you will need help while you are using it, so we will recruit volunteers to join the sessions.

The online drop-ins will be group events, not conversations between 2 people — so you can expect to see familiar faces and hear familiar voices.

We still have many details to work out, and we still don’t know how we can include digital beginners and people with no Internet at home.

The 24/7 Online Drop-in

Everybody with one of the GSuite accounts has already received a link to the first experimental online drop-in. We are still testing it, so nothing much will happen for a few days. The information you need will be in your email and messages soon.

Our response to the COVID-19 coronavirus

Normal drop-in has been suspended

After the 2 March session, we suspended the weekly drop-in because Internet access had stopped — but we were expecting to return quite soon.

On the next day, it was obvious that Internet access had become irrelevant. We can’t restore the normal drop-in until the COVID-19 crisis is over.

That doesn’t mean we can’t do anything — but we would have to make substantial changes to ensure your safety. Here are some of the ideas and principles we are working on …

COVID-conscious etiquette and safety

  • High-visibility reminders of current guidelines and information — on the walls and on our screens.
  • Wash hands before entering or re-entering the meeting room, and again before leaving the building.
  • Keep at least 2m from every other person.
  • Don’t come if you feel the least bit unwell.
  • Don’t come if you live with, or care for, other people who are more vulnerable.

The equipment we use

  • Many people bring their own devices. We can insist that they should be clean — and not used by anyone else, not even volunteers.
  • Most people also use our laptops. We can ensure that each laptop is used by only one person during each session and cleaned after use. After that, they go back into the cupboard, and are not touched again until the following week.

Transport

  • Possibly the greatest risk.
  • Don’t use public transport unless you really must — and never during the rush hour.
  • We can adjust our opening and closing hours, eg- to finish at 4 instead of 5 pm.

Keeping in touch with you at home

  • We are giving a lot of thought to this, but there are no easy solutions.
  • We have email addresses and phone numbers of nearly everyone who has been to the drop-in recently — that’s you and about 300 others. So maintaining contact is not the main problem. Most people want real-world face-to-face help or support. That’s our speciality.
  • However, remote and online communication is well within our technical competence — and we expect to have at least one workable proposal soon.

Workshops instead of drop-in

  • We know there is a demand for short courses and workshops. We haven’t been able to meet it because the demand for open drop-in has been so much greater.
  • Last time we arranged Monday afternoon workshops was October 2019 (Google Photos 1 and Google Photos 2). We were instantly oversubscribed — but we were in control of the numbers. All we would have to do is reduce the maximum from 15 to 8, and repeat to prevent disappointment.

Audio activities

  • We haven’t done podcasting or Internet radio for a while — simply because we have been far too busy with the drop-in.
  • Both are suitable for small groups of people, and explicitly require you not to handle the equipment.

Your ideas, your preferences

It could be a very long time before we can get back to how it was last week. But what do you think we could do next week, next month, or the remainder of the year? If you  are a regular drop-in user, you probably know how to contact us quickly. The details are also on our Information page.

How we are coping with the loss of broadband Internet at Whitmore Community Centre

A temporary difficulty, hopefully

The Vodaphone contract has ended. Centre management are unable to renew it.

Our short-term workaround

We are using a portable wireless router with an upmarket 4G data plan. This is working quite well in the Meeting Room — but it won’t work at all for the desktop computers in the IT Room. Good, but not good enough.

Our long-term solution

We have a solution that will restore improved Internet access to the centre. We have put this totally-workable plan to centre management — and we will tell everybody else when we have their response.

Happy New Year, Happy New Decade

2020 - Happy New Year

Our Community IT Drop-in, 2020

Every Monday afternoon is an IT drop-in afternoon – 2 to 5 pm as usual

  • The drop-in is a weekly grassroots event offering digital beginners and learners help and support with phones, tablets, laptops — and understanding the Internet so that we can use it safely and sensibly.
  • And of course, it’s a social event – so people who have no interest at all in digital technology are very welcome.
  • We have been quite busy for the last few weeks, but we always have space for a few more people.

Run entirely by older people

  • The drop-in is a free community asset run by local older people, for everyone.
  • We have no age limits. Current age range is 4 to 91 (though most are 60+).
    We do not recognise borough boundaries.
  • No targets. No questionnaires. No remote-control management. Nobody is a client. Everybody is an asset. Everybody can be a contributor.
  • All you have to do is come – and then hit the buzzer next to the front door.

You can use the large Meeting Room, best for …

  • Fast wifi connections.
  • Use our community laptops.
  • Or bring your own device (laptop, tablet, phone.
  • Do anything you want to do, online or offline.

You can use the smaller IT Room with desktop computers, best for …

  • Job search, applications, CVs, etc
  • Claiming benefits
  • Online forms of all kinds
  • Learning word-processing and other applications
  • Online courses
  • Anything else you need to do

When

  • Every Monday afternoon, 2 to 5 pm

Where

  • Whitmore Community Centre, 2-4 Phillipp St, N1 5NU

More information

Google Photos workshop, part 2 – Monday 28 Oct

How to manage your photo collection – in practice

The first of a new series of Agewell Mobile workshops

I have installed the Photos app on my device. What should I do next?

The workshop last week (Google Photos workshop part 1) was very successful — so successful that we didn’t have time to finish, and we didn’t even start on some of the most important points. We under-estimated the interest in this topic and the number of questions that would be asked. We will continue next week — and we have space for a few more people who are not complete beginners.

Where and when?

  • Whitmore Community Centre, 2-4 Phillipp St, N1 5NU
  • Monday 28 October, 2 to 5 pm (the door will be open at 1:30 pm).

How to get on the workshop or ask a question

  • We have now filled all available workshop spaces!

Workshop links

  1. About Google Photos
  2. Google Photos support
  3. 30 tricks to master Google Photos
  4. Beginner’s guide to Google Photos
  5. Wikipedia – Google Photos

Google Photos workshop, Monday 21 Oct

Is this the solution to your photo storage problem?

The first of a new series of Agewell Mobile workshops

How can I manage thousands of photos, and how do I get them off my phone?

Google Photos is Google’s considerable foothold in this particular world of digital confusion. It’s an app that works on all devices. It offers free and unlimited cloud storage for all your photos and videos. It automates the upload from your device to the cloud storage area. It helps you organise your photo collection, and it helps you share it with your friends – or keep it as a private library.

It’s surprisingly easy, so at the workshop we will all install the app, upload some photos (which we will provide), and admire our results and how Google has organised them.

Does Google really love us as much as that? Is there a catch?

There are certainly some issues that can’t be ignored. We can talk about those at the workshop.

What about other ways to store and organise our photos and videos?

We have plenty of choices – but few, if any, are as convenient as Google Photos. We can examine them at the workshop. For example …

  • Cloud storage that is not free.
  • Transferring your photos to an external hard drive.

Where and when?

  • Whitmore Community Centre, 2-4 Phillipp St, N1 5NU
  • Monday 21 October, 2 to 5 pm (the door will be open at 1:30 pm).

How to get on the workshop or ask a question

  • You can just turn up on Monday afternoon (just before 2 pm).
  • Better – because we have only 15 places – tell us you are coming.

The drop-in returns

Drop-in regulars Patricia and Irene have found something to laugh about

We were closed — entirely for funding reasons — April and May 2019. We haven’t solved the underlying problem, but Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing Association have given us a massive boost.

We started again Friday 7 June, 2 to 5 pm as usual.

Can you remember 1989?

How has the Web changed your World?

Slide 1
Then: Knowledge was hard to reach. Now: We have the world's information at our fingertips. #ForTheWeb
Slide 2
“Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which everything could be linked to everything.” – Tim Berners-Lee
Slide 3
Then: Waiting by the phone for your call. Now: You're always with me. #ForTheWeb
Slide 4
Then: Never more than a hobby. Now: the world is my marketplace. #ForTheWeb
Slide 5
Then: Feeling alone. Now: I meet others who have my diagnosis. #ForTheWeb
Slide 6
Then: Feeling like one voice. Now: I can connect with millions. #ForTheWeb
Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 3
Slide 4
Slide 5
Slide 6
previous arrow
next arrow

The World Wide Web is 30 years old this week

What difference has it made to your life?

30 years can change everything

The web has transformed our daily lives — from how we communicate with loved ones to how we work to how we learn. But right now more than half of the world’s population remains offline, and those of us who are online see unsettling stories each day about data breaches, so-called ‘fake news’, and other ways that technology is threatening our freedom and privacy. We need to change this by building a better web — one that works for everyone, everywhere.

Visit World Wide Web Foundation – ‘For The Web’

Social media, loneliness, older people

A grey-haired woman sits alone with a phone. Accompanying text: “… use social media to keep in contact with the people we already know, and contact with people that we would like to meet in real life”

Loneliness, social media and friendship

Some results from the BBC survey –

A year ago, we encouraged everybody to take part in the BBC Loneliness Experiment. The BBC reported back in January, and you can listen to the results as a podcast at …

  • Health Check Loneliness Part 1
    “How does social media and friendship influence the development of loneliness? Claudia Hammond analyses the results of the BBC Loneliness Experiment.”
  • Health Check Loneliness Part 2
    “In the last special programme about loneliness, Claudia Hammond looks at the role of health, society and culture and finds out about England’s new strategy for tackling it.”

If you can’t log in to the podcast, you can listen to the downloads on our computers at Whitmore Community Centre. If you are in a hurry, you can read our partial transcript below.

Part 1 touches briefly on something that is very relevant to the IT drop-in — the role of social media. The experiment and the report are journalism, not research — but the conclusions support our own observations that social media …

  • are most beneficial for people who have a functioning social network in the real world
  • can be addictive and damaging for people who are socially isolated

Transcript

This is a transcript of a 6 minute excerpt from Part 1 (27 minutes)

Claudia Hammond

Now when people hear that some young people feel lonely, the next thing they say to me is “it must be social media”. Those I’ve interviewed for this series from the ages of 14 to 96 have all been using technology to communicate. But the relationship between social media and loneliness isn’t straightforward.

Madeleine

I’m a drama teacher and I became a carer because my husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer when he was thirty-six. It was a complete shock. I’m probably not the epitome of what you would think of when you think of loneliness – mid thirties, active social life. But there were times at the worst moments of his treatment when I was alone. And it was very difficult. I couldn’t really explain to people. We used social media – we use Facebook – to update people on what is happening, mostly because it was just a very quick and easy way — you just say it once and it’s out there, and everybody knows.

The response that we got back from people – hundreds, literally hundreds of messages – it did make us laugh, and it did make us as positive about it as possible, just knowing that people were there and knew what was happening— was really helpful. I think it’s a bit of a double edged sword – the sense that it has its positives, through blogging and stuff like that, people have been in touch. And that’s great but I do think when I’m feeling at my lowest, going on social media – Instagram in particular – and seeing people seemingly having these amazing lives and enjoying themselves – and it does make me feel – why can’t I have that?

Claudia Hammond

We did ask questions about Facebook usage in our study and I asked Rebecca Nowland – research fellow at the University of Central Lancashire, who has done extensive research into social media – what she made of our data.

Rebecca Nowland

Loneliness was associated with using this kind of negative self-disclosure and also being motivated to use social media to make friends – in contrast to non-lonely people who aren’t really feeling the need to use social media to do that. If you’re using online sources as the only mechanism for making contact with people, that’s not going to give you the quality and the intimacy, or even the touch that you get when you’re with somebody. That’s actually quite important to make a difference from the mental health and how you feel about yourself and your own self-worth.

Claudia Hammond

But don’t some people make really good friends online and say that this is the place that they can find someone who really understands what life is like for them, and they may be living somewhere relatively isolated where they are not going to find someone and find some of the things in common.

Rebecca Nowland

You’re absolutely right, and there’s an awful lot of literature out there to show that having a blog helps you connect with people and social media helps you to connect with people. But when we are talking about people that are lonely, and their social media use, you are talking about people that are unhappy with their current situation in relation to how connected they feel with other people.

Claudia Hammond

I see what you mean. So what it suggests is they may be looking for friends online, but not finding those relationships, those meaningful relationships and connections that they want to have that would alleviate the loneliness.

Rebecca Nowland

It’s more how you use it, not the using, that’s the problem. So for some people if they feel lonely – and it might be because their family lives far away – to communicate with them online would actually reduce the loneliness.

Claudia Hammond

You mentioned at one of the things that people who expressed higher loneliness in the survey do is to use more negative evaluation.

Rebecca Nowland

What that really means is that people put negative things that are happening to them on social media. That type of behaviour we find in people are quite high in loneliness – that when they do interact with people, they tend to say things that are quite negative. And that then makes people less likely to connect with them. Again this is very general.

Claudia Hammond

It’s a shame it might make it harder to connect.

Rebecca Nowland

I think there might be an unfortunate thing of human nature. There are two ways of looking at the data. There’s an association there – so if you use social media in a way that is very positive – use it more to get information rather than try to connect with other people, it would reduce loneliness. It’s all about how you use it. So you see here, we get the relationship between loneliness and entertainment, and the people that are not as lonely are using it more for information – so they’re going online to check what’s happening, having a look around and maybe find out what’s going on with people.

Whereas people using it probably to distract themselves from the feeling of loneliness – so using social media a lot because it’s something I can do that makes me for temporarily connected to people.

Claudia Hammond

I was really struck by the findings on whether people’s friends overlapped on Facebook and in real life. So can you explain what we were looking at and what we found?

Rebecca Nowland

Basically you’re asking people to say – how many of your friends that you have online are people that you actually know in real life – and lonely people had fewer overlapping friends. So they had fewer friends offline than they did online.

Claudia Hammond

And is that surprising?

Rebecca Nowland

It’s not surprising in a sense that has been shown before, but not in such large scale surveys covering such a vast age group. It shows that this is really a consistent thing.

Claudia Hammond

And what does that tell us about people’s lives, do you think?

Rebecca Nowland

It tells us that when we use social media in a way that we have less people that we know in real life on Facebook, then it’s associated with loneliness. So really, to utilise social media in the best way, we need to use it to keep in contact with the people we already know, and contact with people that we would like to meet in real life – and have friendships that way. If we end up in a virtual world where a lot of our friends are, we not really connecting with them in an intimate way and that’s associated with loneliness.


Photo by Bernard Hermant

What we did – 8 March 2019

Hardeep checking her phone, with help from volunteer Nick

As usual, both spaces were full ten minutes after opening. 35 people received or contributed help during the afternoon — 35 stories that we didn’t have time to capture, but there will be just as many next week. Of course, we could not have done it without volunteers Gene, Margaret, Nick and Tom.

With a little more funding, we could occupy the third space at Whitmore Community Centre, and help 50 people at the Friday afternoon session. With an extra top-up, we could be in the centre all day, and aim for 100.

TEDx Hackney Libraries

Inspiring talks about things that matter

TEDx video talks in the library – Thursdays in March

TEDx Hackney Libraries is a wonderful opportunity for local residents to get together to listen to experts talk about subjects that matter to us all. These events aren’t just about listening; the open discussion at each session encourages conversation about how these topics affect our everyday lives, inspire us to see things from a different perspective and could even spark change!

The 7 March TEDx videos

TEDx Hackney Libraries has returned with a series of Thursday evening events that we think everybody should go to. The next event (7 March) is especially interesting, as three of the four video talks are directly relevant to what we do at the Friday afternoon drop-in and the Monday afternoon podcast.

Of course, you could watch them now — but that would miss the point completely. The conversation after the talks is the most important part, and you can’t do that on your own.

Where and when

  • Stoke Newington Library, 182 Stoke Newington Church St, N16 0JL (map: goo.gl/maps/7YAjt6JGPTm)
  • Thursday 7 March, 6 to 8 pm

We’re building a building a dystopia just to make people click on ads

We’re building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren’t even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us — and what we can do in response.


How we need to remake the Internet

In the early days of digital culture, Jaron Lanier helped craft a vision for the internet as public commons where humanity could share its knowledge — but even then, this vision was haunted by the dark side of how it could turn out: with personal devices that control our lives, monitor our data and feed us stimuli. (Sound familiar?) In this visionary talk, Lanier reflects on a “globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake” companies like Google and Facebook made at the foundation of digital culture — and how we can undo it. “We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them,” he says.


How to tame your wandering mind

Amishi Jha studies how we pay attention: the process by which our brain decides what’s important out of the constant stream of information it receives. Both external distractions (like stress) and internal ones (like mind-wandering) diminish our attention’s power, Jha says — but some simple techniques can boost it. “Pay attention to your attention,” Jha says.


Why you should talk to strangers

“When you talk to strangers, you’re making beautiful interruptions into the expected narrative of your daily life — and theirs,” says Kio Stark. In this delightful talk, Stark explores the overlooked benefits of pushing past our default discomfort when it comes to strangers and embracing those fleeting but profoundly beautiful moments of genuine connection.

BBC iPlayer on your computer, tablet or phone

How to watch catch-up BBC TV

This post is prompted by people asking how they can watch the BBC 4 series Soon Gone on a laptop, tablet or phone.

Answer — you can watch it in a web browser, or you can install the BBC iPlayer app — but first you have to register your email address, so that you can log in to iPlayer with a password. It’s very easy …

BBC registration page

Watching iPlayer on the drop-in computers

  • You can login to your BBC account and watch iPlayer in a web browser on any computer connected to the Internet.
  • But please use headphones — don’t force your neighbour to listen 🙂

What we did – 8 February 2019

Horrible weather outside, but it’s always sunny inside Whitmore Community Centre on Friday afternoon — so we were full. Special thanks for a great afternoon — to volunteers Paul, Chris, Adam and Ashraf from  Financial Conduct Authority via Benefacto – plus regular volunteers Gene, Margaret, Stephen and Tom.