ICT, Exclusion and Public Policy
Return to Politics and Culture
Date: 01/09/2002
Article
ICT, EXCLUSION AND PUBLIC POLICY
Kevin Carey
If a concept can be simultaneously 'classic' and slipshod then this must be the fate of the idea of 'social exclusion'. Given that the term is generally an aggregation of (all) women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, the poor, the illiterate, the ill-educated and trained and the feckless it is easy to see why this is a difficult term in the age of mass democracy. By any reckoning it accounts in this context for something like 3/4 of the population. Or, to put it another way, the world has been made in the image and likeness (to borrow a term from the Catholic Catechism) of males between the ages of 18 and 50. I concede immediately that one can hedge this absurd statement about with helpful qualifiers about rich and educated women, millionaires who left school without a qualification, members of ethnic minorities and disabled people who are leading useful and even prosperous lives but as a basis of policy-making the idea simply does not add up or, more accurately, subtract.
When the classic definition of social exclusion is transposed to define problems of accessibility to information communication technologies (ICT) it faces another set of complications which can best be summed up in two images, the wheelchair user with a full time job in ICT and the university graduate who cannot navigate effectively in unstructured hyperspace. Beneath these two images there is a massive groundwork of detail which involves an understanding of the relationship between a system and those trying to interact with it. This is a matter not of sweeping generalisations necessarily used for public policy on education and welfare payments but of breaking information systems transactions and individual functionality into pieces and seeing where they match and do not match. A person with arthritis may have as much problem with a standard mouse/keyboard driven computer as somebody who is deaf and blind but clearly she will not be at the same disadvantage either with a voice in system or a slide controlled audiovisual system.
I chose the comparison between a computer and a piece of domestic electronics quite deliberately because - we are back to slipshod taxonomy - governments assume that ICT is a handy short form for PCs and Apples, their operating systems and applications and the communications technologies which allow them to 'talk' to each other. Digitally enhanced traditional technologies like televisions, radios, telephone handsets, DVDs and games are, by policy-makers at least, ruled outside the definition which is odd when you consider how much good television there is and how much porn on the internet.
We have, of course, become ensnared by cultural prejudice. Whereas the computer is supposed to be worthy and serious, television is vulgar and frivolous. We are, as in most intellectual discussions, cursed by dichotomy. As the world-wide-web and television merge we will come to recognise that there is no real distinction between the television and the computer when it is simply a matter of receiving information. Currently they are two user interfaces, one the product of consumer electronics engineering and marketing, the other an accidental by-product of military and academic specialist needs. The single most important test of public sector commitment to universal access might be the extent to which pressure is placed on the manufacturers of digital televisions to provide simple connectivity to peripherals such as keyboards, printers, mice, scanners and voice-in/voice-out applications. Any decision by Governments to allow television to fragment into a series of walled gardens that resemble shopping malls and multi-screen cinema complexes will be a political decision that has nothing to do with current technological dichotomy but more to do with an irresponsible abdication to market forces.
If we can backcast for a moment, imagine how different our world would be if two decades ago IBM and Apple had thought of their products in the same way as Sony and Zenith and if Microsoft had manufactured to as high a standard and under the same consumer legislation conditions as the CBC and BBC.
So behind the demographics of accessibility and exclusion there lie a number of cultural prejudices and taxonomical absurdities which currently obscure the main convergence phenomenon which is not that between user interfaces - important and interesting though that is - but between the necessarily separate analogue processes of publishing and broadcasting which we might now better describe as broadcasting, middlecasting and narrowcasting. The first refers to major television channels in the public and private sector, the second to genre phenomena and the third to tailor made packages based on individual preference, increasingly driven by intelligent agents rather than exhaustive and routine selection. For once it is the middle way that is the least desirable of these three modes of receiving information and the one that is most likely to increase social exclusion.
Underlying all these changes, however, there is a constant demographic of access which must be analysed carefully. The UK Government's demographic of ICT exclusion is based on the analysis of the traditional framework of class (in turn determined by profession) age and disability. This produces a figure of approximately 25 million people in the UK who do not have ICT access in terms of the narrow definition I mentioned earlier. Interestingly, humanITy, the organisation I work for, approached the demographic from a functional perspective and arrived at approximately the same result. Looking first at what we might broadly call the 'Cognitive' cluster of syndromes, some the result of nature, others of nurture, we started with the UK figure for functional illiteracy, at approximately 20% (OECD, 2000) and put this at the mild end of a spectrum whose severe end covers such conditions as autism. On the same basis we next looked at the spectrum of physical difficulty from mild condition such as arthritis to severe conditions such as quadriplegia. Next in the descending order of magnitude came hearing loss and deafness and finally visual impairment and blindness. The figures we arrived at were a level of severe disability leading in most cases to an access problem of approximately 10% of the population and then another 40% of the population with some functional limitation which would mean less than total functionality within an ICT system as defined in public policy terms. Looking at the age distribution and literacy levels for Canada (OECD, 2000)[1] it would not be significantly different from that of the UK. All these figures have the problem of overlap between categories - people who have a mild hearing and visual impairment or either of these and some cognitive difficulty - and so it might be prudent to put the figure at nearer 40% than 50% but this is counterbalanced to some extent by the emerging phenomenon of ex internet users, people who have tried what is on offer and then gone away, first noticed in Sally Wyatt's seminal paper: They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach (Wyatt, 1999)[2], there is also a good deal of evidence now of people who have bought domestic computers, tried them and dumped them in a cupboard (Keri Facer’s (University of Bristol) private conversation) . These two sets of demographics chime uncannily with the penetration down the class system of ICT access as measured through purchasing. As digital television advances 'up' the class ladder, PC/Apple access 'descends' down it to meet roughly half way.
The obvious question that arises from these demographic approximations is, if everyone has either a computer or a digital television, how will the two sets of users differ. In the long run, with the capacity for televisions to work with peripheral devices, it may hardly matter at all but people do not live, suffer deprivation and ignominy in the long run, they experience these things now from day to day as destroyers of their life chances. It is a fact that the cost of processing power in computers has fallen in unit/cost terms but, at the very least, the rich will enjoy the benefits of new developments - in spite of their associated headaches - first. It is a matter of public policy, for example, whether the gap between the rich and the poor, the autonomously accessing and those who need financial or other help, in using broadband should be narrowed with public sector funds. In this area Canada has decided that where accessibility is dictated by geographical location it will step in whereas the UK Government and the private sector are blaming each other for slow roll out, particularly to rural areas. It may well be argued that because the jury is out over the effectiveness of ICT in increasing efficiency, not having access to ICT does not have economic consequences but I am suspicious of this argument at least at the level of fairness and self-respect. As Bruce Grocot MP once perceptively remarked, if work was such a desirable thing the rich would have a monopoly of it. The economics of ICT may still be in doubt - even for those who sell them - but autonomy, choice, flexibility, self satisfaction, status and style are all bound up with the ICT boom. No doubt money is an excluding factor in some cases but it is almost impossible to generalise here because of the deep penetration of the video cassette recorder in the 1980s, the satellite and now digital television, the mobile phone and the games console which naturally leads to two further considerations, the efficacy of education and training and the incentive to use our current information systems.
My starting point is the obsession in our education system with 'just in case' learning rather than relying upon praxis and what is often, rather narrowly, referred to as 'problem solving' (Facer, K. et al, 2001)[3]. Boys like to use ICT in schools for games whereas girls prefer to use mobile phones to maintain and grow human relationships. As adults we may be quite fascinated by process but we have to balance this with output; again, this is even more true of females than males. So tackling the ICT exclusion problem by planting an unwilling late teenage youth in front of a clapped-out 386 and driving him through a literacy and ICT skills module is not going to work. The chances are he was alienated by the education and training system, so there is no point perpetuating it. For many people excluded through poor education and training, whatever the cause but particularly if it is alienation, we will have to adopt much more subtle means, learning almost by osmosis or learning a process as a by-product of producing an output. We have already learned that many people classed as innumerate can handle sports statistics with amazing facility and there is hardly a human, no matter how ill educated, who will not challenge if she is given the wrong change in a shop. Just as we have frequently taken analogue content and planted it on the Internet without understanding the intrinsic advantages of the new medium, so we have taken 19th Century education for general clerks and administrators and applied it to ICT education and training. We have also assumed that the ICT world is largely a matter of strings of symbolic language and static graphics when it is about to be overwhelmed by multimedia. The novelist who makes more money than the film director is the exception that proves the rule about the financial returns for literacy.
As if this were not difficult enough, the education and training systems have to compensate for cynicisms and infelicities, the poor design and sloppiness in programming, of the ICT manufacturers in general and operations systems and software designers in particular. Much of what passes for ICT training is a cost shift from the manufacturer to the employer and the citizen, the Government and the consumer. It is almost impossible to keep this observation generic. Some people argue that the triumph of Microsoft is an icon of globalisation but I would classify it as an icon of its failure. How could the combined weight of international capitalism and big government fail to impose some minimal quality standards and consumer protection on Microsoft? It may well be that its goods are the most widely used but hated in history. Surely there is something deeply alienating in a system which tells a user that he has "performed an illegal operation" or made a "fatal error" when he is at the other side of the room doing nothing. In other words, the idea that exclusion from ICT is in some way the fault of the excluded is clearly a nonsense; it is simply an attempt, often made by business and government, to blame the poor and inadequate for the shortcomings of the clever and the powerful. The combination of wooden, legacy curricula in ICT skills and maddeningly poor design is an almost fatal combination in preserving exclusion. In these circumstances it is staggering that half of the population have acquired, used, and continue to use, contemporary ICT systems.
This leads, inexorably, to the matter of incentive. That 50% ICT usage figure is stunning when you consider that there has never been a marketing campaign for the benefits of computing nor for the benefits of the Internet. History is repeating itself; television has found it very difficult to develop its own genre separate from cinema and the Internet is finding it very difficult to develop its own genre separate from analogue books and brochures, pictures and posters. We have a curate's egg of text and pictures of bewildering provenance and reliability; the esoteric, the hysterical and the pornographic can appear as consecutive items on a search engine report. We have intuitively understood the attractions and almost as quickly the drawbacks of e-mail but the serious potential of digital information is still that, potential.
It is easy in this context - the curse of the dichotomy, again - to fall into a wholly dystopian (Joy, B. 2000)[4] or utopian (Berners-Lee, T., 1997)[5] view of the future of our information society but one historical phenomenon already appears to be repeating itself; that the greater the upheaval or the more rapid the change, the more the rich benefit and the more the poor are disadvantaged. The concept we need to hold fast to in this context is comparative disadvantage. The evidence is currently weak, resting as it does on existing disadvantages suffered by classically excluded people, but there is a danger that a gap, already widened by rapid economic growth in the 1990s, will grow even wider once digital information systems can be harnessed to produce greater productivity and higher individual income. So far the growth has been in selling ICT and associated services but there is no doubt that even if efficiencies are not being achieved now, they soon will be. We are in the early stage of using the new technologies where we know that they are important but not quite how. A recent example of this is the huge money spent by telecommunications companies on 3G telephone licences when they still do not know what to do with the resource, let alone how to make any profit. This, in a sense, gives us some time to work out how to keep the comparative disadvantage as narrow as possible between 'top end' ICT users and those at the 'bottom'. No matter what we do, however, there is bound to be an ever widening gap between those who own the power of the machine processing and those who are being asked to change and ratchet their skills set in order to survive. The emergence of the 'Semantic Web' based on Resource Description Frameworks (RDF) will greatly increase the power of machine processing and eliminate millions of jobs where basic numeracy and literacy skills are required. Thus, the current strategy on both sides of the Atlantic of trying to lift people out of illiteracy into some semblance of basic literacy in order to improve their economic utility is doomed. When a similar process took place in the industrial revolution, the speed of process changed but the intricacy, if anything, was simplified between the craftsmen and all-round farmers of 1750 and the mill worker of 1850. It was almost a century after the serious beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England before it was felt necessary to legislate universal primary education to provide the artisan class with the skills which industry required, namely reading, writing, counting, punctuality, discipline and obedience. Now we are faced with a rapid change in skills requirements and sophistication and we have to ask the question, how far can many people keep pace with skills requirements? Like many other decisions, business will calculate the cost of investment in people and machine processing and draw the rational conclusion. So, not only is the current public policy on eliminating ICT exclusion through teaching basic literacy and numeracy educationally bleak, it is redundant. Again, we have a breathing space because little work has been undertaken on the optimisation of hybrid systems - of where the machine should give way to the human, of the interface between software and skinwear - but that time is strictly limited. One method of increasing job satisfaction and employee retention in a tight labour market is likely to be the ownership by operatives of the whole customer relationship process from first complaint to final solution, an anti intuitive solution to the supposed efficiency of Adam Smith, but that will require a broad skills set which, again, will work against those with limited skills who benefit from the division of labour. The problem is that if you can effectively divide a task into a myriad of pieces we already know from the analogue world that this lends each to mechanisation; so it is with digital machine processing.
While we are in anti-intuitive mode, we should think carefully about reducing ICT exclusion through using the Internet as a literal, as opposed to a metaphorical, collaborative device. This will, simultaneously, add value to the work of people with narrow skills bases, increase participation in a variety of social discourses and break the tedium and pessimism of geographical entrapment. If we can break away from our cultural paradigm of the solo creative genius and think more of Spielberg and less of Proust, if we are to achieve a high degree of collaboration and high quality output, we will need to develop procedure tools for asynchronous working. Such products need not necessarily be highly sophisticated. Currently there is a gulf between 'professional' media production and home videos but the gap is bound to narrow. Some producers need access to very cheap, continuous music or colourscapes, they want to buy this raw material by the metre or the hour. There is immense potential for logging and collating local community material and routing it through not-for-profit mechanisms operating the equivalent of a public lending right. In the context of narrowcasting it will also soon be economically viable for small co-operatives to narrowcast local events like sports fixtures to the housebound or to send family ceremonies, such as weddings, through the internet to absent well wishers and relations. We have to focus carefully on what machines will manage to accomplish now or next year and what they will only manage five or ten years from now; we must concentrate in employing the less talented on what is most human and least mechanical, not the other way round.
People who lack self-esteem, self-confidence or skills which are generally thought to be universal perform optimally in collaboration rather than in isolation but the solo paradigm is immensely strong in our culture. It starts with the examination hall and ends with the novelist. Employers frequently say that they want creative team players but lean on governments to continue to provide them with obedient bit part players who only behave collectively in the sense that ants do. Creativity loses out but so do people who can only really function in teams. To be in a team is not the same as being a process in a chain: it is to give and take, to stretch and be stretched, to intuit, to be counter-intuitive, to be allowed to be sad and to encourage, to give, take, share and improve. We are presented here with that most wonderful of ideas, one which forwards creativity and helps the disadvantaged; at least it should be tried.
There is a myth about social discourse before the ubiquity of television and another about the vitality of geographical community. The discourse myth remembers colour and richness. I grew up in a North of England town without television and became used to discourse which was tediously circular with only the occasional minor variation; the slightest local incident was eagerly fastened onto as a way of varying the diet. I have also worked in more than fifty countries where television is confined to the major cities and have found the same threadbare pattern of content. This is one reason why I am so optimistic of the potential of the Internet for the enrichment of discourse but I would not want that richness to be confined to those who already enjoy vast intellectual resources. The Internet also makes it possible for people to break out of depressing surroundings. I learned from my work in developing countries that the first thing that the rich buy is privacy and that "Community" is an idea wished by the bourgeoisie onto the poor. What the rich want - and if they want it there is overwhelming reason to think that the poor want it too - is community of interest rather than the compulsory tolerance of people you do not like forced on you by proximity. The Internet provides a constructive and uplifting escape from geographical community, it allows people to develop conscious, constructive, digital fraternity and it makes possible participation in collaborative creation and in serendipitous discourse. Such joys will not be the lot of those in ghettos of poor housing and social provision unless public policy ensures that the Internet is not seen as a valve, a one-way channel for Government and business to persuade us to listen and to buy. Thinking of Bruce Grocot again and his comment on work, the rich have definitely kept the means of creativity in their grasp and in the information age that is quite as serious a charge as that levelled by Marx on mill owners. If anything, our education systems are becoming more mechanistic as we are driven to hysteria by immigration and social breakdown, drugs and rampant individualism. If it is impossible to manage a radical change in public policy to abolish examinations altogether then the least we can do is to develop scoring techniques for individual performance within creative syndicates. I am not optimistic that this will happen because I think that our industrialists are far more interested in exercising power than making money, far more comfortable with managing by fear than managing creativity. As societies we may admire entrepreneurs but they are exotic creatures separate from the mundane existence of steering a mammoth corporation from one island of indifference and business re-processing to another.
Again, we may have to admit that we are saddled with a public education policy that simply cannot be radically altered, in which case we need to look for a parallel strategy. The industrial revolution ultimately led to universal primary and then secondary education, the electronic age was first decorated with mass cinema and crowned with public television and we now need an equivalent mass measure in the digital age. I believe that we should take two radical steps to decrease ICT exclusion: a flat communications tax and the establishment of an entitlement to free or subsidised lifelong learning.
The flat communications tax is not quite as heterodox as it might seem. The BBC has operated on a flat, compulsory tax since its inception and although this leads to occasional grumbling it has not as yet been seriously challenged. There are also many telephone tariffs whose base is a flat fee, regardless of usage, for the line. In the first instance this flat rate tax should finance broadband and other technical advances thereafter. For as far ahead as we can see it would therefore be a hypothecated tax but it need not necessarily be. In exchange we would receive, in addition to our on-line access, a number of free to air television channels, government information and kite marked free resources such as on-line-learning materials. Governments could, if they chose, subsidise this fee for poor people (as the UK Government does with the television licence for seniors) but the equal access to a set of national media resources would both increase coherence and act as an incentive to use the system. A less radical proposal would be to charge a commercial flat rate for services which could be paid for out of the savings from multiple user interfaces (televisions, radios, PCs) as more intelligence migrates from the client side to the server side.
Life long learning accounts are not controversial in a minor, grudging sort of way but a proposal to treat lifelong learning as, say, one day of every working week, would at the moment be characterised as preposterous; the quantity itself is notional here but is used to emphasise the point that as the working life lengthens and machines become 'smarter' we will need more intellectual and procedural resources to work effectively and to enjoy our leisure. In some way which cannot yet be worked out precisely, we should tie our increased productivity through ICT to freeing up time for people to upgrade their skills. If productivity is not improved by ICT then we need to ask ourselves seriously why not.
Before closing this Chapter with some observations about what we can forecast and what we must leave for the time being, I am going to look at some interesting ICT applications miles away from reading and writing which will be of central importance in the way we help people who are commonly classified as socially excluded; these are, surveillance systems, remote applications, intelligent agents and electronic democracy.
I am not surprised that we have been so docile in the face of massively increased public surveillance as I have always regarded the obsession with privacy to be irrational - unless driven by guilt or fear of being found out - socially narrow and historically short lived. We are gregarious, public creatures but what do we think of surveillance in our own homes? In the UK we have already employed 'tagging', a form of domestic surveillance, for convicted criminals who are released early to free up accommodation in bulging prisons but would we voluntarily accept it in any circumstances? As always, it depends upon the alternative. We have been using pattern recognition for some time now to identify pornographic images in Internet searches but we could equally use it to monitor old people living alone. The surveillance device might react if a person was 'seen' lying flat on the floor or, through a 'smart' house network it might prompt a forgetful senior to take a snack as indicated by a physician, to maintain a diet regime. If the choice is between living in a collective and living longer at home, or between recovering at home or in hospital, many people might choose home as long as they could be certain that their isolation would not lead to undetected disaster. This, in turn, might moderate what are bound to be accelerating medical insurance premiums as life expectancy increases. It might also allow poorer people into medical insurance where they currently exclude themselves. It might, too, decrease public sector expenditure on medical facilities or, at the very least, it would allow resources to be diverted elsewhere.
Remote learning is not the same thing as autonomous e-learning. By remote I mean that children can be taught in their own homes by logging into an intranet where the teacher is all but present beside them. At the moment our justification for teaching anything up to 30 very different children in the same room at the same time is that it is supposed to have some socialisation benefits but this is surely a case of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Children should be able to spend some time in intensive learning, alone, in collaborative groups of like-minded and like talented people, in groups with differently gifted people and in mass, random, socialising episodes. Some of this will be in a central location, some of it can be in a satellite with a dozen children, some of it can be at home where child minding is shared between an on site person on a rota and the teachers who are in communication with children. This strategy has important advantages for two particular groups of socially disadvantaged children, those who are disabled and those who truant from our current, inflexible systems. The days of teachers lecturing to imprisoned children on the basis that the child tolerates the conveying of wisdom as this is packaged with useful or interesting data are surely numbered. We need to distribute resources much more finely so that the children who need most human contact get it, whereas those who can manage on their own or with peers to a reasonable extent are allowed that latitude. There is a close parallel here with various aspects of health and medicine.
At first glance intelligent agents are most useful for removing the procedural dross from the lives of talented people. Monitoring human behaviour, they rank preferences and 'run' digital errands. Yet their greatest impact may be to help people with very little talent to enjoy information systems to the full by acting as mentors. At the moment these systems are primitive and rule bound but they will increasingly become more suited to human fuzziness. Unlike humans they will not become tired or impatient, they will not have others to serve who are equally in need of help and, in the last resort, if we get our hybrid systems properly designed, they will be able to call for appropriate human help. This, strangely, is one area where there has been very little hype. There has been a good deal of loose talk about physical robotics but the world of intelligent agents is still somewhat submerged.
The final application is electronic democracy which, in the short term at least, is bound to have a seriously bad effect on the prospects of the ICT excluded. This is not because of electronic voting procedures and the use of the internet for providing information, the main problem is the technologies for lobbying and spam resistance which major lobbyists will master much more quickly and effectively than the kind of lobbyists who work for disadvantaged groups such as the disabled, ethnic minorities, or the elderly. This may prove to be a much more important issue than electronic decision-making.
It is difficult to draw neat and tidy conclusions from this mass of problems and ideas but a few pointers may be helpful. We should first of all recall Chris Yapp's often-cited maxim that the potential of new technologies is always hyped in the short term which leads to disillusion which, in turn, leads to an under-estimate of its potential in the medium-term. Secondly, all the technologies we are using today will generate developments which render them redundant. The transformation times are accelerated but in the industrial revolution the railways of England could not have been built so rapidly without the network of canals which they then rendered redundant. Thirdly, the essence of digitisation is that it is 'plastic' which means that its economic models will be different; Internet publishing, unlike the stacks of analogue books in reference libraries, is provisional but eternal. These three observations alone explain why we have found it so difficult to frame public policy for ICT and social exclusion; and if we are bad at handling the present there is little wonder that our forecasting is so poor.
This technology is not neutral. The way it works does not depend upon enlightened or wicked utilisation but it has the power to transform the whole of our society just because it makes kinds and levels of activity possible that were impossible before. It will not be enough to let the benevolent write the rules. We are all too familiar with the paving stones of the road to hell. The four sided dialogue we currently expect to solve our problems is far too disjointed: academia theorises and researches up to the stage of the prototype in some cases; industry produces and sells; Governments then make public policy reactively; and the civil society sector protests when it is far too late. The dialogue between these four sectors on ICT and social inclusion needs to be intense, iterative, informed and institutionalised. We have learned to perform environmental audits and gender audits across the public policy field; from now on we need a social audit when we consider the impact of new digital technologies. If we fail to do this, nothing very terrible is going to happen in the short term and we cannot possibly say what will happen in the long term but in periods of rapid change the precautionary principle comes into its own. There is already enough evidence that exclusion from ICT is widening yet further the divide between the rich and the poor, the bright and the limited, the young and the old. In this field, as in others, reactive public policy is both unnecessarily onerous on the disadvantaged and on the taxpayer. We are not yet at the stage where we need crisis management; good government would be quite enough.
[1] OECD (2000) Literacy in the Information Age. OECD and Ministry of Industry of Canada. Canada.
Note: The figures for the UK and Canada in the same OECD publication are not calculated in a way that produces precise equivalence but for public policy purposes they are close enough.
What we can forecast and what we can leave
[2] Wyatt, S. (1999) “They Came, They Surfed and They Went Back to the Beach: Why Some People Stop Using the Internet”. In Woolgar, S. (ed) Virtual Society? www.virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk
[3] Facer, K., Furlong, J. and Sutherland, R. (2001) Constructing the child computer user: from public to private spaces. British Journal of Sociology of Education. March. Vol. 22. No. 1
[4] Joy, B. (2000) Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. Wired Magazine. 8.04 (April)
[5] Berners-Lee, T. (1997) Realising the Full Potential of the Web. Talk at the W3C meeting in London. www.w3.org/1998/02/Potential.html