Evaluating Information Technologies Against the Criteria of Autonomous Control and the Enhancement of Self Esteem as Integral Features of Collaborative Content Creation
Mutuality
With a discussion of mutuality I now come to the heart of my presentation.
8.1 Mutuality Rights
You will recall that I defined the mutuality right as follows:
"These three rights - communication, reach, access - arise because of our nature as social beings with a right to mutuality.
Not surprisingly with such a complex concept, there is a negative and a positive aspect. First I will deal with the positive aspects of mutuality; these are the right to:
- Democracy
- Know what is
- Propose amendment
- Participate in debate
- Be part of the decision
- Life chances
- Know what is
- Know what terms
- Seek consideration
- Self fulfilment
- Know what is
- Make patterns and extrapolate
- Compare, contrast, collate
- Express
This is a formidable array of mutuality rights and I could extend far beyond this; but I will only do so to make a special case for the capacity for
- Collaboration
which will be the subject of the next Section.
Note that all three of my groups of mutuality rights in communications systems begin with the right to know what is. I emphasise this because in our current climate of post romantic egalitarianism we are far too apt to emphasise rights of expression which are, of course, intrinsically important but rely for their enjoyment (in both the legal and human sense) on knowledge.
8.2 Mutuality Barriers
When it comes to barriers to mutuality in ICT systems, I have very little to add to my discussion in sub-section 7.1 on communication except to say that what I have done now is to take a set of considerations which were initially expressed as problems for an individual confronted by an ICT system and have elevated this to a discussion on politics and citizenship. My central contention, then, is that the way in which ICT systems are produced has a detrimental effect upon a large sector of the population. Why do I say this?
There are three major factors which have to be taken into consideration:
- First, a substantial proportion of the population is being shut out of networked information systems not just because they are poor or poorly educated, although this is bad enough, but because the systems themselves are perverse
- Secondly, however, because ICT systems have reached a critical uptake point for the economically and socially better off, social organisation is increasingly predicated upon ICT systems access
- Thirdly, this means that existing socio-economic disadvantages are being exacerbated by information and citizenship disadvantages
There is, however, a further and very worrying factor which I need to address and that is the paradoxical effect ICT has on many people whose needs it is supposed to meet.
Since 1997 there has been a good deal of government enthusiasm, though waning now, to remedy social exclusion through the introduction of ICT. Now all of the initiatives have been well meant but most of them have been wasteful and some plain silly. Perhaps the silliest projects are those which try to tackle those alienated by formal education through pressing them into places called "Learning Centres" but we will leave that to one side. The key point I want to emphasise here is the extent to which ICT systems have been promoted as empowering when what they have actually brought about is a lowering of self esteem. Much of what passes for ICT training is actually procedural instruction to bypass the negative consequences of bad design. People are told that when they emerge from training they will be employable because they now possess all the basic skills. Yet in many cases the training has been worse than neutral, it has been negative.
For me, the axis on which all key social questions turn is self esteem and because of the kind of society we are, self esteem is based on self determination within a collaborative framework. This does not mean total autonomic activity or freedom from rules, it simply means that people want to feel that they are in control of their situation and can negotiate the terms of mutuality. It is my experience that ICT systems are the opposite of empowering for many people, they are disempowering, reducing the sense of autonomy, control, self determination and self esteem. They emphasise the gap between the bewildered beginner and the competent user and so they add a sense of failure to an existing sense of disadvantage.