How the Queen embraced technology during her reign

When the Queen gave the first televised Christmas broadcast by a British monarch in 1957 she displayed a willingness to embrace technological shifts in how the institution was seen and interacted with the public.

Over the decades, that journey has included cooperating with fly-on-the-wall documentaries, establishing a Buckingham Palace website and, at the end, an outpouring of grief on social media platforms that the royal family too had embraced in recent years.

Broadcasting her Christmas message nearly 65 years ago, the Queen recognised the immediacy and connection that advanced technology could bring.

The first royal website was launched in 1997 and has gone through several iterations since then, including in 2009 when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world ide web, attended a relaunch. The @RoyalFamily Twitter account appeared in the same year, two years after an official YouTube channel was launched and an Instagram account followed in 2013. At present the royal family does not have an official TikTok account.

During lockdown, the Queen followed the rest of the country in using video links to communicate, for instance conducting a conference call with carers on Zoom.

Indeed, the Paddington clip appears to have struck a chord with various memes related to the famous bear and the Queen appearing around the internet since Thursday.

King Charles III will have to tread that same path between connection and distance.