The Technologies of Self Esteem in the Process of Collaborative Content Creation
The Role of Collaborative Content Creation
So, you may ask, where is all this leading? Well, it is not easy to explain all the links in my argument without detaining you much longer, so I will have to do a little compressing.
My argument so far about the relationship between human beings and information systems has indicated that the system we use for expressing ourselves is the PC-based network. I have suggested that this is not a system that lends itself easily to the novice, particularly if he or she does not possess self esteem and self confidence and is working in an environment hostile to questioning and to the admission that one needs help. I have also suggested that one course of action that we should seriously consider is to use broadcasting for the provision of information to citizens instead of forcing them to use the Internet.
I now want to turn to a deeply significant paradox. So far I have suggested that the creation of information, the art of precise self expression, is less important to many people than their ability to obtain the information they need to improve their education, life chances and citizenship. That is true now but it will not be true for much longer; and this is why. Before our very eyes jobs are being swallowed up by machine processing. We are already familiar with this in the context of travel booking and increasingly our banking and financial services are going on-line; this is because these transactions can take place in fixed frameworks where machines make fewer mistakes than people, operate more reliably and cost less. This trend will continue to wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs which Governments still think are available to people with minimal literacy, numeracy and ICT skills. The policy is not deeply flawed, it is plain wrong. People with basic skills such as those promoted by the Government are bound to lose out to machines. On the horizon, too, we now have a manufacturing revolution based on 3d printing. There are already printers manufacturing prototypes which print layers of polymer at 0.003 inches; increasingly manufacturing will be automated; a laser will measure and create a template and a machine will either cut and assemble an article or a 3d printer will generate the pieces; there will be some assembly work but not much. All the calls for the Government to save manufacturing are in truth only calls for the Government to slow down an inevitable trend.
And so our priority at the beginning off this Century is to teach people to do what they are likely to be able to do better than machines. And that, by and large, means teaching people to collate, assimilate, collage, extrapolate, behave counter-intuitively, see disruptive possibilities. In other words, in the information age the only game in town is creating information.
Before I go down this road much further, however, I just want to allow myself a short detour. If I am right in my analysis, the current fad for educational games is unhelpful. Games encourage people to develop pattern recognition and to decrease response time; these are two quintessentially data processing attributes; we will never pattern recognise as effectively as the average contemporary PC and will never be as quick at reacting. We will have to take the pattern recognition reports and work from there but not do the pattern analysis ourselves.
So, back to the content creation. An important conclusion to draw from this analysis is that autonomous achievement, whose icon is the examination hall, is an anachronistic goal. Gone are the days when Proust writing in his attic was the goal we all sought; we are now interdependent. All the more sad, then, that a National Curriculum based on autonomous achievement, which penalises imitation and collaboration, bears down particularly heavily on the less gifted among us. People with narrow skills bases rely for their life chances upon negotiating skills and collaboration. In the world of content creation this means that people with narrow skills bases need to work together to create marketable content. It is very difficult to face this issue squarely but let us try to look honestly at both sides of the issue: on the negative side, we have become accustomed to placing less gifted people in manual or routine jobs, making a rough and ready rule that the more gifted the person, the less routine their job is likely to be; on the other side, however, is a deep instinct that we have, which we can never quite articulate rationally, that there is far more talent in our population than we have been able to realise, that the stories of brilliance realised in people who had a bad start in life is an exceptional phenomenon but need not be. I think it is fair to say that I veer heavily towards the second perspective; I have never worked with anybody who was not better than they thought they were, but for the purposes of policy I am advocating a more cautious position; and it is this.
Just as Hollywood in the 1930s made massive feature films with hundreds of extras and back room people, so we should be using the internet to train people with narrow skills bases to work together to create content which is marketable on community television stations, in local kiosks, as cultural records, as data which can in turn be analysed by policy makers and the producers of goods and services. We have plenty of talking heads to tell us about the marginalised people in our society but I would prefer them to tell their own stories.
Now I have to admit that there are many obstacles in the way of this proposal, the main one being a lack of self esteem in those very disadvantaged people and I will spend the final part of my presentation on that; but I just want to say this. There may well be many obstacles in the way of what I propose but if this is not the answer, then the policy makers need to get thinking pretty rapidly because the advance of machine processing and automated manufacture will not slow down and its flight from our shores will not slow down either. We may have to face the prospect of a substantial minority of our people being permanently unemployed; at which point we either grit our teeth and try to live with it as we do now, or we change our attitude to unemployment and stop defining virtue according to employment and income. But these are asides. The main thing we need to think about is the establishment of mechanisms which allow people who cannot make a living alone to work together to make a living. We have severe content deficits, we have network capacity, we have untapped talent. The challenge is to put these together.