Do you remember your first time – the trepidation, the expectation, the rite of passage? Mine was in 1997 – "things can only get better" – opening up the heavy black Mac Powerbook I'd just unwrapped, going through the unintelligible process of account creation with a patient BT support desk, plugging in various fat cables and listening as the dial-up connection went through its slow motions: the little digital jingle of the phone number and then the long expectant screech and babble of static as your machine attempted to connect, an electric chatter in which I could imagine – that first time – I heard all the world's voices talking to one another, the ultimate party line. It was, I guess, the closest most of my generation came to tuning in and turning on. This was seven years before Facebook, eight before YouTube. Amazon was still a river in south America, Google was an unlikely algorithm in the minds of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, which they were then thinking of calling "BackRub".

In the dozen years since – can that really be all it is? – it has become harder and harder to imagine the world without the internet. It fast became our marketplace and our playground, our library and our collective memory. Sitting here, in front of my screen, as usual, I find it genuinely difficult to imagine my own pre-1997, pre-keypad world. What on earth did I do with my time? Researching a story as a journalist routinely involved trekking up to the newspaper library in Colindale, an obscure corner of north London, and poring over microfiche of old newspapers; finding a job or a place to live or a holiday might have meant catching a bus and then schlepping along the high street and peering at pieces of cardboard in shop windows. Correspondence required addresses and yours faithfullys and a hunt for envelopes and second-class stamps. A foreign country.

Most of the subsequent debate we have had about our online lives has asked whether we are too much in thrall to the great invention of our age, whether we are becoming extensions of our keyboards, bloggers not talkers, twitterers not thinkers. In all of this chatter, though, it is easy to forget one startling fact: there are, in 2009, 10 million people in the UK who have never gone online, who would not recognise a homepage or a bookmark, for whom http and www are still weird unknowns; they are, to use the inevitable coinages, the e-bandoned and e-solated, a predigital tribe.

This one-in-six population might have avoided the addictions of browsing and the despond of "you have no new mail" but they are also increasingly excluded from the opportunities and conversations of the world. A quick Google search is enough to provide plenty of vital statistics to support this observation. There are, for a start, the balder economic figures: those who shop online and pay their bills through the internet, make "average savings of £560 a year"; the 1.6 million children in Britain who do not use the internet would increase their lifetime earnings by a collective £10.8bn were they to log on tomorrow; currently unemployed people who learn to find their way in the virtual world will on average increase their lifetime earnings by more than £12,000; if everyone was connected the Treasury would make overnight efficiencies of £1.77bn, and so on – the web never runs short of statistics.

It is not just for these kinds of reasons, however, that some governments are suggesting that broadband connections must be a right and not a privilege (Finland, last week, was the first to make that commitment to its citizens). There are also more intangible benefits. Since its widespread adoption, the internet has often been charged with increasing alienation in society, making each of us self-absorbed in an abstracted world wide web which caters to our every whim. A good deal of recent research, however, suggests that the converse is true. Technology has the ability to create links that societies increasingly lack.

Access to the internet, and the ability to navigate the web has, for example, been shown to produce a significant rise in social confidence among 60 per cent of those who had previously been excluded, while in recent studies of internet usage among individuals who considered themselves to be depressed, "feelings of loneliness" decreased in 80 per cent of cases once people got online, and depressive symptoms were "cured" in 20 per cent of cases. Virtual conversations and interactions are now widely argued to be just as important as "real world" encounters in making people feel attached to a community, or part of a network.

Among the 10 million people in Britain who have never used the internet are about 4 million whom we think of as being excluded from society in other ways also: through poverty and an absence of support, or because of disability or old age. The government's "champion" of these people, at least in digital terms, is Martha Lane Fox, who did as much as anyone to popularise the first wave of dot.commery. Having spent several subsequent years, the first of them in hospitalised isolation, recovering from a near-fatal car accident, she also had some experience of what it feels like to be disconnected from the world. Her brief is to highlight the ways in which the internet can enhance lives and to try to provide a focus for the many schemes that attempt to bring the information superhighway to the people and places from which it seems most remote.

Her job began, she suggests to me, with the vague notion that "you might begin to solve some aspects of the knottier social problems with a mobile phone application" and went on from there. It all comes down to educating the e-bandoned in the possibilities of a computer, and after that, the hope is that all sorts of other connections will start to form. (There is some research to suggest that these beneficial connections might be physical as well as ethereal: a report from the UCLA medical centre last week concluded that older adults who learn to use the internet to search for information experience a surge of activity in "key decision-making and reasoning centres of the brain, increasing cognitive processes and slowing the decline in brain function".)

It is often fear, however, as much as absence of opportunity that holds people back. "It is," Lane Fox suggests, "so easy for most of us to sit here and take the functions of a computer for granted, but for many people they are still entirely alien." One of the most common reactions she sees among those who experience connectedness for the first time is a paralysing anxiety. It's always, "Why do you press the start button to turn it off?" or, "What on earth do 'alt' and 'ctrl' mean?" In the end it always takes some kind of personal connection to get people going, an insight into a hobby – a gardener's page, say – or the ability to find local history or family records.

You have to make the encounter an emotional one, Lane Fox suggests, "whether it is looking at photographs of grandchildren on Flickr or realising that Tesco will deliver your groceries to your door". Anecdote is the best educator; peers are the best teachers. And, as we all know, after that first time, there is no looking back.

• To find out more about the Race Online 2012, call 0800 771234 go to raceonline2012.org

Four refuseniks go online for the first time…



The Builder: Russ Flaherty, 32, Sheffield



Builder Russ Flaherty with his new laptop, Sheffield. Photograph: Gary Calton

Russ Flaherty's girlfriend must be relieved that he's finally familiarised himself with the internet: up until now she has, as he puts it, "sorted it all out".

"To be fair," he admits, "I'm a bit lazy really. But obviously it's got to the stage now where I need to do it myself." His work as a builder has meant he didn't have much cause to use the internet. But recently he started his own business and realised that it was impossible to get by without it. "Everything's online now, isn't it? Your bills, your account, your tax and everything. It's all geared up for it."

The first thing he did online was look for a van: "You can compare prices so it saves time and everything's there for you to see so you don't have to mess about visiting garages." More recently, he's been designing flyers online for his business and looking up resorts in Bulgaria for a skiing holiday at Christmas. Now, he says, "whenever I need anything or want anything [the internet's] the first place I'll go."

Does he wish he'd got online earlier? "Yeah because you feel like you're behind the times. It's like with Facebook, all my friends are on it and I used to think 'bloody hell, haven't you got anything better to do?' but it's an addiction isn't it, once you start it you're there." So has the internet changed his life? "It's helped," he laughs, "put it that way!"

The single dad: Pete Tayor, 48, full-time carer, Bristol



Pete Taylor at home in Bristol. He was helped to get on to the internet by the South Bristol Digital Neighbourhoods Programme. Photograph: Stephen Shepherd

Joining Facebook was a priority for single-parent Pete Taylor when he went online for the first time last week. As a full-time carer for his 27-year-old son Russell, who suffers with a rare terminal illness, adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), he's found that his "social life has gone out of the window. But since I put myself on Facebook, people I haven't seen for over 20 years are now phoning me up, I've met new friends and can arrange dates. It sounds daft but [having the internet] gives you something to look forward to."

He's a self-confessed technology-phobe but in less than a week has learnt how to post items online: "I don't mess about! I've already stuck pictures of a recent weekend at Butlins on Facebook."

In addition to enjoying the "bit of escapism" which the social-networking aspects of the web offer, Pete has also been using it to help with his caring responsibilities and has joined online ALD support groups. "There's no cure for Russ's illness and it's really rare but now I can stay in touch with other people in the same boat, share advice," he explains. "Every day I keep thinking of things I can do online to make my life easier. If I get a letter from the hospital, for instance, I can just reply by email. I've even been shopping online. I need to buy a bed and was about to put my coat on and run around the shops when I thought 'Hang about, I've got a computer here.'"

Pete had been considering getting the internet installed for a while but feared it would be complicated and expensive. So when a local initiative, the Knowle West Web Project funded by Bristol city council, offered him a free computer, wireless and training he was delighted. "It was a lucky day, to say the least. I'll be on the internet every day now. It's already a necessity."

The grandmother: Caroline Williams, 79, retired, Guildford

79 year old Caroline Williams at home in Guildford with her laptop. Photograph: Richard Saker

Juggling fitness classes, choir practice, collecting grandchildren from school and visiting family across the UK, until last week Caroline Williams had the hectic lifestyle of a teenager, minus the internet habit. "I'd been resisting going online for years, I'm so busy and just thought, well I've done without it for 79 years!"

But after some coaxing from her four internet-savvy children and grandchildren and a laptop donated by her daughter, she's now online and has completed two training sessions at her local Age Concern centre, which, together with Help the Aged, is running national online training programmes. She's found it a good learning environment for a nervous beginner: "The volunteers are all retired people who've learnt to use computers so they're very comforting and helpful. It's ridiculous I've put it off so long because it's really easy."

Keen to facilitate her regular cross-country visits to family, Caroline has so far mastered buying cut-price train tickets online and finding maps, "My oldest granddaughter has just started at Royal Holloway college and I wanted to go and take her out for lunch. I was able to find a map of her local area online and which trains and buses went there." She's already planning her next steps: "An email account is the next job. I also listen a lot to Radio 4 and often miss bits of programmes so I want to learn to use 'listen again' online." Would she say that her family have successfully converted her to the internet then? "Oh yes, I can see it will be jolly useful. I hope I don't get addicted to it!"

The young person: Anthony Fisher, 20, student, Sunderland



Anthony Fisher, who has just started using the internet thanks to the Pennywell Youth Project, Sunderland. Photograph: Gary Calton

Up until last week Anthony hadn't sent an email, which, for a 20-year-old, certainly puts him in a minority among his peers. He explains that the internet has, "sort of gone over my head the past couple of years, probably just because of confidence". Now, though, staff at Pennywell Youth Project, where Anthony volunteers and is training to be a youth worker, have helped him set up an email account and get to grips with Google, YouTube and the rest.

"I thought it was about time I started learning," he admits. "It was holding me back quite a lot because as a youth worker you need to have IT skills so you can plan trips and do risk assessments and that sort of thing." And other than a "few glitches with the dongle" he says he's been "sort of 70% OK". Getting lost seems to account for the other 30%: "The internet's such a big place so if you type in the wrong thing you get on to a whole different site."

Though it's already proved useful in terms of research for his NVQ in youth work, the possibilities for fun haven't eluded Anthony either: his best online find so far is an episode of CSI on YouTube that hasn't aired yet here. "I'd definitely say I've been missing out," he says. "This has opened up a whole new world really." So will he be introducing any friends to YouTube and the rest? "Yeah, the two I've got left who aren't online!"

Interviews by Hermione Hoby and Imogen Carter