When thinking about large organisations and their relationships to 'digital' a couple of concepts from other fields always pop into my head.
(That's some of the fun of doing something new - you get to appropriate language and ideas from other areas and see if it helps your understanding of what you're doing.)
Learned helplessness is the first. I thought I'd written about it on here before, but it turned out it was in Campaign.
The second is wilful blindness, an idea I first came across during the Enron trial. Wikipedia describes it as "a term used in law to describe a situation in which an individual seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting his or herself in a position where he or she will be unaware of facts that would render him or her liable."
ie people seek to avoid knowing the obvious, so they don't get the blame for it.
And clearly, in many instances (as described in this edition of Analysis) it describes more serious corporate failings than not grokking the internet - though the underlying dynamics seem similar.
It's somewhat akin to the famous Upton Sinclair quote:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
And is a nice companion to this cartoon.
But, really, in the end, I think we can agree that both Learned Helplessness and Wilful Blindness are just manifestations of the well-known Coates Snail Syndrome.