The humanITy Digital Inclusion Manifesto

Article Sections

Contents

  1. Executive Summary
  2. Foreword
  3. humanITy's Partnership Agenda
  4. Introduction
  5. Summary of Recommendations
  6. The Future
  7. Where are we?

Introduction

1.1 When a radically new technology is developed, there is always a tendency to think that it will solve fundamental problems; and to an extent this is a credible hypothesis.

  1. At one end of the spectrum, the discovery of radioactive technology revolutionised medicine and at the other end it revolutionised warfare; in other words, it changed some basic 'terms of trade'.
  2. Likewise, people thought that railways would change rural life beyond recognition, and they did; but people also thought that they would eliminate poverty but their impact in this area was patchy; there were severe economic depressions in the late 19th Century and in some cases railways created differentials proportionate to their proximity.

1.2 The same kind of expectations greeted the arrival of personal computing; it was thought that it would cause a giant cultural and economic leap forward.

  1. New Labour in 1997 was sure that the ICT revolution mattered but did not know why. It still does not.  It remains unduly focused on very simple computing operations such as word processing, spreadsheets and simple databases which:
    • Cut down the cost of error;
    • Improve presentation;
    • Save time in limited cases.

    but, conversely:

    • Increase time spent on process rather than product;
    • Generate massive communication redundancy (eg email).
  2. There is still very little evidence on the economics of computing in these   simple areas of most widespread use.
  3. The major functionalities of computing are:
    • Pattern recognition and extrapolation; model making;
    • Large scale realisation;
    • Radical, consequential change to a model.
  4. The major impact of computing should have been:
    • Its impact on creativity;
    • Its convergence with broadcasting.

1.3 Policy makers were aware from a very early stage that a differential acquisition of ICT hardware, software and skills would widen the already serious socio-economic gap between the ‘top' 2/3 and the ‘bottom' 1/3 of the population. Thus the "digital divide" was born.

1.4 The problem with all the major theories around the "digital divide" was that they were based on a deep fallacy in the strategy that had been developed to deal with social exclusion as a whole: that if people could be given adequate training they would be able to work their way out of deprivation. Thus, if the economic obstacles to autonomous computing could be overcome, and supplemented with a skills injection, social exclusion would be radically reduced.

1.5 This optimistic scenario was incorrect for five related reasons:

  1. The main problem with poverty is that people lack money; all societies, including our own in previous generations, have mitigated social exclusion through a combination of economic re-distribution and education; the more egalitarian the redistribution the less the exclusion.
  2. Skills are not naturally universally acquired (that is why they are called skills):
    • Many of the underlying skills which people need to function effectively are not easy to acquire.  There is no reason, for example, why reading, writing, counting and spatial awareness should be evenly distributed in a population;
    • What we call 'soft' skills are necessary, for instance, in imagining 'the other';
    • Soft skills are a necessary precondition for exercising hard skills but training usually reverses this basic principle.
  3. Many poor people quite properly believe that the connection between acquiring ICT skills and improving their life chances is not strong enough to justify the effort; the level of skills they can acquire will condemn them to permanent unemployment as jobs requiring such skills as they have are being or will soon be automated.
  4. Most people rightly assumed that the whole thrust of the internet in phase one was largely 'top/down':
    • Governments in the EU put tax collection on line before any form of distribution to citizens;
    • Major Government documents on e-inclusion fail to hide the Government's main agenda which is to use online access for Government (not citizen) cost saving; it was rumbled!
    •  Major corporates saw the internet as a form of business extension;
    • Poor people, sceptical of Government, and with scarce resources, quite rightly thought that subscription television was a better buy than computing;
    • The mid '90s belief that the major obstacle to domestic computing for poor people was a lack of money was incorrect; the comparative incentives of Murdoch and Gates swung radically in favour of Murdoch.
  5. The marketing of the internet to the poor was inept; people without money will not do something because it is worthy or seen as socially good.

1.6 This is not to say that there was no great advantage for excluded people of all kinds in learning ICT and internet skills:

  1. They provide a natural extension to the informal learning generated by television:
    •   The internet is methodologically less restrictive than reference books;
    •  ICT massively increases the density of communication (through email).

1.7 However, ICT's greatest benefits in the informal sector lie ahead in the deployment of digital photography and multimedia.

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