Social not-working
The British government wants you to know it's so hip and with-it that it's going to try to push the unemployment struggle off the streets and online instead.
Employment minister Jim Knight has been widely reported to have said his agency plans to dole out PCs to the jobless, along with their very own personalised website to show off their CVs to prospective employers. Because, even though the British government is totally technologically groovy, it still hasn't heard of LinkedIn, apparently.
The government is making the move as part of an overall overhaul of its unemployment strategy, in which it seems to want to make brick and mortar job centre staff redundant in favour of online FAQs and forums.
The overhaul will also apparently include IT training for out-of-workers looking to brush up on their middle management PowerPoint skills and for those who can't afford broadband, the government is purportedly willing to foot the bill in some cases.
The government must have quite a hefty chunk of change in its wallet then, considering that out of the approx. 2.46 million unemployed people in the UK at the moment, Forty per cent have neither a computer nor Internet.
But Knight was adamant, saying "Access to the internet is crucial for low income families. We don't want to live in a society where people are disadvantaged because they don't have a computer."
