Evaluating Information Technologies Against the Criteria of Autonomous Control and the Enhancement of Self Esteem as Integral Features of Collaborative Content Creation
ICT and Communications Rights
Now let us take a typical ICT system and compare it with the four rights I indicated are essential in a communications environment. At this point I want to define an ICT system as one where private citizens control the means of expression and have access to publication and reception of the expression of others. This would typically be a telephone networked personal computer
Looking at the four rights which I defined and which I summarised in the words communication, reach, access and mutuality. In this Section I will deal briefly with the first three before going on in a separate section to deal more extensively with mutuality.
I should first concede that all of these rights are theoretically recognised by society in general and by ICT systems suppliers but they are all problematic.
7.1 Communication
The right to communication is limited both by educational and economic inequalities but this is exacerbated by the sheer perverseness of our systems. In failing to discuss the first two problems I do not want you to think that I do not accept them as valid but I want who concentrate on the third.
In a recent experiment where elderly people were introduced to PCs for the first time there was considerable amazement that the machine was stopped by pressing the "Start" button. The language of 'fatal errors' and 'illegal operations' is not just intimidating, which it is, it is also opaque. Imagine that I was marking your assignments resulting from this lecture and wrote such comments as: "irrelevant", "meaningless", "illogical" without giving you any reasons for my conclusions or any description of how I drew them. If I behaved in that way you would quite rightly call me irresponsible and it is on that basis that I call ICT system producers irresponsible. There are LOCs of scientific research about the way in which people learn and communicate and yet all this information has apparently been ignored by producers. One outstanding example of this is our derivation of the rule for optimal choice of (7 + or - 2), i.e. if you are making a choice between a large number of entities, if these are grouped into fewer than five classes the classes are too broad and if they are grouped into more than nine classes then there are too many classes. Just ask yourself when you went onto a web site or saw a PC applications menu with fewer than nine options. We know from the user's point of view that occluding what we do not want, enabling us to concentrate on a single task, is a learned skill and that defining searches is a learned skill; and we also know from the producer's point of view that taxonomy is a very complex, learned skill; and yet we ignore all of this information so that producers pour out masses of poorly classified information and users are overwhelmed. I was recently involved in a major piece of research on web sites which is not yet published but my personal experience was that the reason why I could not complete a task in the overwhelming number of cases was poor taxonomy. You would have thought that in a world which has been celebrating hypertext for more than a decade that producers could have given some thought to the matter.
We might also want to mention the perversity of maintaining the qwerty keyboard, invented to avoid keystroke clashes on manual typewriters, the idiocy of configuration systems, the obscurity of customising facilities, the failure to make clear statements on the safe use of screens; and that is only the user interface. In many ways the customisation issue, the ability to configure a system so that it most closely accords with individual requirements, is the most serious problem and the easiest to remedy. There has been a great deal said about customising print size and font, colour, foreground and background etc but very little on the customisation for simplicity and complexity. This attribute is not only valuable to people who are defined or who define themselves as having a learning, cognitive or developmental disability but also a large number of people whose natural orientation is to a single task performed in a simple environment. ICT producers are failing to resolve the conflict between most designers who love the complex and most users who need the simple. If this cannot be resolved in favour of the users then the answer has to be customisation.
So, in summary, although there is a basic, theoretical right to communication, the current situation presents a large number of citizens, approximately half, with barriers which are intrinsic to the system, not simply economic more educational.
7.2 Reach
I think that in the case of reach - the right to define who receives what we express and to define what reaches us - the situation is one of uniform failure.
If we look at the first half of the proposition, our ability to define our receivership, or audience, it is safest to assume nowadays that nothing we commit to the Internet is private. I set aside the irresistible temptation to forward information marked "Confidential" to friends and colleagues; I simply mean that the systems that we currently use are not fit to honour any audience definition we care to make. A recent virus took my mailbox and tipped its contents all over the planet. Now you might argue that those who make viruses are a nasty, even evil, tiny minority and that there is not much that can be done about them; but you could say the same thing about murderers. So far I have tried desperately hard to be generic but it is impossible at this point to avoid the observation that with its overwhelming global position Microsoft could and should have done more about the virus problem. We are now in the uncomfortable situation that it is all too easy to believe that anti virus software companies are manufacturing viruses. Now I don't believe this for a moment; it is a piece of cynicism, of conspiracy theory run riot, but it has enough adherents to demonstrate a lack of faith in the system. There have been encryption fads and now the privacy issue has been made more complex because of anti terrorist legislation; but the idea that you cannot design an audience limiting system is not credible.
I want to make a slight detour here to deal with an issue which I believe most of us have got out of proportion and which makes rational discussion difficult. How private do we want anything to be and what is it that we want to keep private to ourselves and a very narrowly defined audience? I personally think that privacy is a very contemporary middle class issue linked very closely to tax evasion and fear of being envied. Its secondary cause is the breakdown of community which means that we find it strange that other people should know our medical or sexual history. Where I grew up everybody knew everybody else's income, medical and sexual history. I make this point because it would be easier to preserve privacy of communication if we were more stringent in defining what we wanted to be kept private. Nonetheless, the crucial point to bear in mind is that it is technically possible to guarantee much securer audience definition; and it ought to be possible for citizens and governments to reach a much more mutual settlement on privacy than we have currently.
Conversely, when it comes to defining who reaches us, it is technically possible to design much more secure front doors for our digital space. The problem, however, with secure front doors is that they are anti capitalist and our ICT systems have developed in an era where capitalism is freer than it has been since the deplorable 1830s in the UK and the 1890s in the USA. The economic controls brought about by philanthropy, global war and aspirations to social engineering have been substantially swept away. So it is not in the interests of the global economy that we should be able to secure our front doors; or, at least, it was not until recently. The situation which we now face is one in which the bad capitalists are swamping the good capitalists; we are being submerged by spam largely concerned with pornography, tobacco, viagra and fraud. If you want to see what unregulated capitalism looks like, just log in.
At this point we need to acknowledge the rather strange, chequered history of encryption, lucidly described in Simon Singh’s book “The Code Book”. I personally have no problem with universal encryption with the Government having a right, under certain conditions, to use its master key. What is not defensible is Governments legislating against encryption. Then again, if the major players had decided that we should have encryption we would all have it by now.
It can be concluded from this that the area of who we reach and who reaches us is in a complete mess.
7.3 Access
On the subject of access I will, atypically, be mercifully brief. By access I mean the right to information in the public domain or information specifically intended to an audience of which an individual is a part. The main barrier to access, other than the educational and economic barriers I have ruled myself out from discussing, results from an abnormally wide functionality gap between a person and a system. I put it this way because the usual definition puts all the emphasis on the functional limitation of the human component of the algorithm, generally described as "disability" and does not put enough emphasis on the poor functionality of the machine. You might say that a totally blind person like me presents information systems designers with insuperable problems and I would concede that there are insuperable problems in accessing some kinds of moving and static images; but the fact that most machine code is difficult or impossible for screen readers to interpret is a design fault which could easily be corrected. Ten years after the birth of the World Wide Web, and in spite of legislation on access in most economically prosperous countries, a pattern is emerging of web accessibility running at about 10%.
Of itself this kind of inaccessibility is extremely annoying but the stage is rapidly being reached where Internet information is a substitute for not an adjunct to other information systems, goods and services. Just to take the everyday example of banking. It will not be long before on line banking replaces most transactions in bank branches; so a disabled person may then be faced with an inaccessible banking web site and a very long journey to a bank branch.