The Crawler Lane of the Information Superhighway

Before I started this blog I spent some time researching what could be described as Cumbria's presence on the web. The results were sobering: few enough sites either business or private, not many of them up to date or cutting-edge, and precious few blogs (see the sidebar to the right of this post for the good ones). But today I heard some figures about Cumbria's use of IT that were truly horrifying:

• 43% of Cumbrians have never used a PC
• 53% of Cumbrians have never surfed the net
• 25% of Cumbrian businesses use no IT at all
• 92% of Cumbrians would never consider using any of the e-government facilities

and worst of all

• 33% of Cumbrian teachers never use the laptop PCs they're issued with

There's a standard joke in the Lakes that a Cumbrian dual carriageway is any road wide enough for two cars to pass . . .