Boosting Take Up means Ensuring Access for All
Self esteem / control
The first thing that most of us do when we have a problem is email all the people who might be able to solve it for us; indeed there is a credible management theory which says that no entity which cannot solve a problem should bother with it. This is far distant from the mental environment of the socially excluded. They are poor because they are poor askers. Most of them, though not all, think that asking diminishes the already low esteem in which they are held. So to expect such people to work with exploratory, collaborative, non-intuitive technologies is to expect too much. The converse side of this problem is that of control and self esteem. I used to look at ICT and exclusion from all sorts of angles but now I think it boils down to these two inter-linked ideas. If ICT is going to work for socially excluded people and boost take up then it must enhance rather than diminish autonomous control and its use must in turn increase self esteem. Throwing a clapped out 386 and 5% of a community development worker at each case is just not enough. In some work that we undertook in Newcastle we found that people needed about 20% of a development worker's time. One solution to this is training; but we should be designing devices that require no training. Another solution is the participation of intermediaries but this is complex and hardly boosts autonomy. A third solution is to introduce intensive NGO marketing and mentoring but there is no sign that the public sector is prepared to pay an economic rate for this.
Linked to the uptake issue - but not a major part of this presentation - is the idea of incentive; if we think that well off people need incentives, what makes us think that poor people do not? Why should they slave over a non-intuitive ICT system to save the Government some money when many of them are alienated from society because they think, quite rightly, that there is nothing in it for them? We wouldn't do it; why should they? At the very least we will have to simplify all our systems to boost uptake; the financial justice may have to be a little rougher but if there really is cost saving this should allow for rounding up in marginal cases. What is clear is that if we do not solve some of these problems ICT will continue to widen rather than narrow the socio-economic divide.
Here we need to learn from television, from the history of the apparently clunky VCR, from the growth of multi channel television and its accompanying remote controllers and electronic programme guides.