Cultural Norms in the Age of Cyberspace
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Presentation to "Designing an Inclusive e-Future"
Date: 26/04/2001
Venue: Design Council, London, UK
Article
Our culture is imprisoned by two most unlikely Gaolers who, as far as I can tell, never exchange a single word. They are the Protestant work ethic and high romanticism. The first, the curse of our economic life in particular, values input much more highly than output, promoting process over product. The second gives us an altogether too grand notion of the uniqueness and importance of what we individually, as opposed to collectively, produce. Where the two come into conflict the process overcomes the product, the dour outflanks the high-flown and of course, the value we place on what a chap produces depends on what sort of chap he is. Let it never be forgotten that the greatest genius that this country produced in the 20th Century, the man who, after Churchill, was responsible for our victory in the Second World War, was humiliated in a British Court and driven to suicide; Alan Turing's development of modern computing was nothing compared with his homosexuality.
This is not a good start in an increasingly egalitarian world where output is what matters and where it cannot be efficiently achieved without collaboration. Instead of bragging about Shakespeare and Dickens, Jane Austen and George Eliot, the start of any enquiry into the prospects for our prosperity in the information age should be our relative failure in the 20th Century in the collaborative enterprises of moving pictures and television.
My starting point is that the teaching and examination of solo achievement, with the examination hall as icon, is totally unsuited to our wired world and that the people who lose out most from this rigid autonomy are those with relatively narrow skills bases; people who find it difficult to read, express themselves clearly, who are timid or bewildered; people with short attention spans and long records of failure; people who can't manage long sentences or unusual words; people who do not hear or see very well, who cannot manipulate a mouse or distinguish a smile from a grimace.
Together, these people, solidly based on the bedrock of a 25% illiteracy rate in this country, constitute half the population. Humanity requires that we should not write them off but their demographics are not so bleak; many of them are rich and most of them are economically significant enough to command a significant place in the market. Of course there are very poor and/or very disabled people who might require public sector assistance to secure their place in the market but public expenditure is rising in real terms and so, on that score, too, people who cannot effectively use generic ICT systems have a significant economic potential.
The problem created by the input obsession is that it belittles the use of tools; somehow it is cheating to run a spelling or grammar checker. We still expect children to write essays in long hand and to be forbidden the use of pocket calculators. This is, arguably, educationally sound, but it is not sound in terms of training whose purpose is to enable the effective delivery of an output. Of course, the first consequence of this shortcoming is that people do not fulfil their potential; they struggle, they flounder, they guess. Part of this is simply because ICT systems are badly designed which is, in effect, a cost transfer to consumers but it is also in part because we have tended to divide ourselves between the minority who are disabled and the majority who do not need special features whereas, in reality, disability is a spectrum which stretches from severe, chronic, seriously disabling conditions through to very mild, intermittent functional limitations.
Here are two bits of information:
- 15% of the working population cannot read Times New Roman 10-point print which is the standard default on most office computers
- 15% of the population, not the same 15%, would be in the market for light fiction if they could access text without proportionate spacing and right hand justification.
Oddly, for Britain, the aesthetic in this second case overrides functionality.
The main point, however, is that people produce better and quicker output with tools and we have a poor tradition in this sphere but, equally important, we are importers of architecture, tools, applications and content. In an information age we will be an economic basket case if we are massive importers of information and ICT digital infrastructure.
Interestingly, when I recently undertook a tools analysis to see how systems matched up to the 28 different ICT literacy skills which we have identified, there were hardly any tools for collaborative content creation. This sphere is important because it allows a variety of people, some with very low skill levels, to contribute to collective enterprises where they would be helpless if they had to work alone. Enter Berlioz, or Goethe, or some other high romantic. The digital age allows us to make potentially timeless but eternally provisional material but we are still wedded to the high art, analogue artefact.
Our culture has, in these respects, fabricated a huge edifice of exclusion. Our traditional, exclusive, literacy model might be descrbed as:
the more complex the system, the fewer people who can operate effectively at any level.
Whereas the Cyber, inclusive literacy model should be:
The more complex a system, the greater the number of those who can contribute something to it.
You only have to think of a film to understand the relevance of the second model and the anachronism of the first.
And so, we need to take a fresh look at what we do.
- First, we are moving from the technology of the past 20 years based on regular hardware and software upgrades for the rich and the corporate, towards technological ubiquity based upon the digital regeneration of the television and telephone. Design should be inclusive because that makes economic sense in a universal market. In fact, if you are an advocate of performance related pay, as I am, the pay of executives who approve of products only available to half the population should have their salaries halved.
- Secondly, this universal market is not split between the abled and disabled, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, it has a whole series of individual needs. Meeting these both through tools and through heuristics is the route to satisfaction but, equally, it is a necessary pre-requisite of the economical viability of narrowcasting.
- Thirdly, there is much more to good design than drawing. If you want to set up a large website and you don't know how to classify items and set up simple navigation systems then no amount of art will compensate for the ineffectiveness of the access.
- Fourthly, we need collaborative tools as well as individual heuristics, particularly so that we can work asynchronously. There are millions of people who feel alienated from office blocks, not just because they do not have the necessary vocational skills but also because of social codes, dress codes, prejudice or intimidation. There are those addicted to drugs or alcohol, people who can't get out of bed in the morning but are effective at midnight. Networking and the use of tools designed to facilitate asynchronous collaboration could provide some of our most difficult cases, our most alienated people, with a degree of productivity in their lives.
- Finally, we need to get away from the necessary but now out-dated hegemony of the engineer, of the IT department, of the whiz kids with Hollywood, teenage brains. If the dotcom collapse has taught us anything it is that we need robust economic models and sound marketing. It is my submission that hardly any ICT company has taken seriously the economics and demographics of ICT exclusion but has simply made generalisations based on ignorance which is how I would define the term "prejudice".
We are entering a world where publishing and broadcasting will converge, where photographs and moving pictures, sound and music, will be integral to broadband in the way that text and static graphics have been the natural content over the past two decades. We will soon have to get used to the idea that the Internet is not simply a one-way medium for governments and commercial organisations. In the information age those who cannot handle, process and make information will be seriously excluded; but the solution in most cases is cultural and technical, it lies in the attitudes of the clever and the wealthy as much as in the hands of the not so clever and the poor.