Regular readers of this blog will know that at TalkTalk we’re strongly committed to encouraging greater digital inclusion. One great new website that helps bring young and old people together online is called Historypin. We asked Historypin’s managing director, Nick Stanhope, to blog for us about the site and its aims . . .
Historypin.com, launched in partnership with Google in June 2010, is the latest creation of our social company, We Are What We Do. It’s a place where everyone can come together around old photos and share the stories behind them and sits at the heart of our big campaign to bring different generations together in interesting, mutual ways.
When we first starting looking at the inter-generational problems in communities and across society, two big issues kept on coming up. First, the perceptions across generations are more negative than ever before: older people seeing younger people as lazy and troublesome; younger people see older people as useless and out of touch. Second, as TalkTalk knows well, the digital divide still makes a major contribution to inter-generational dislocation, with 4.6 million people over 65 still off-line and 90% of communication among 11-18 year olds now using digital channels.
Historypin attempts to make a difference to both of these. On the site, the magic of old photos and stories is there for all to see and has already driven 1000s of young people to reach out to older friends and relatives to help them dig out and share their collections. It is also driving new older users to the internet for the first time, to be part of a crowd sourcing project that, finally, is exactly what they’ve been looking for online.
After the first few weeks, we’ve just reached 2 million page views and 10,000 pieces of history shared, which is an exciting start. Next? A digital history of the world…
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