Thoughts from the Jester
Return to Politics and Culture
Talk given at the Cybrarian Stakeholder Group Meeting - Institute of Mechanical Engineers
Date: 24/04/2002
Venue: Institute of Mechanical Engineers, London, UK
Article
There was a custom in the Mediaeval Church, sadly discontinued at the Reformation that on one day of the year a lay person was allowed to dress up and behave as the Bishop this was a recognition of the role of the officially sanctioned fool (famous in Shakespeare’s King Lear) and to a great extent I regard myself as adopting this role, being able to say things that may not be officially very acceptable but which are still pertinent.
The most salient feature of Imogen Wilde’s presentation was its aggregation of socially excluded people at approximately 25 million. We at humanITy reach roughly the same conclusion but put it in a slightly different way: if you gave everybody in the United Kingdom a Pentium and an unlimited training voucher about half the population would not be able to use Cyberspace effectively as it is currently constituted. I will return to these two last qualifiers in a moment, but in the meantime let us look at the figures again.
The problem of looking at ICT access using standard definitions is that this does not work very well. Disability, for example, can be defined epidemicologically but it is more often defined administratively. The purpose is to draw a line between people entitled and not entitled to certain Government and NGO benefits and services, but you only have to think of a computer user in a wheelchair to know that you cannot superimpose a standard definition on ICT access. To look at the problem from the other end, I like the story, almost certainly apocryphal, of the Nobel Prize winning Physicist who could not find York Minster from their hotel because they had to walk south using a north orientated street map. I don’t buy into the tabloid science idea that a quarter of the population, almost entirely female, does not know its left from its right, but it has to be allowed that many people do have navigation problems. Again, if you think about ICT access problems on a spectrum from 0 to very good there is what I call a hinterland of about 40% of the population which is neither in the 10% disability classification or the 50% with no measurable problem classification. These people may simply be of that number (around 15% of the adult working population) who cannot read Times New Roman 10 point print, which is what standard computers used to default to before NT. Finally, on the demographic point, one of the great mysteries of demographics of ICT access is the extent to which 20% of children with some kind of documented Special Need become the 20% of the adult population which is classified as functionally illiterate. If there is a major overlap, then that poses serious educational questions and if there is not a major overlap the issues are equally tantalising because that would point to a very substantial number of people with ICT access difficulties and would certainly underline Imogen’s figures and mine.
Let me, in my capacity as Bishop for a day cite my text: “and the Lord said take unto thyself the personal computer for it is serious and worthy but abominate the television because it is vulgar and frivolous!” What is interesting about the figures you have just seen is the heavy demographic bias against ICT on the part of elderly people – and remember that disability is largely a subset of ageing in spite of the paradigm of Tiny Tim – and who are the greatest watchers of television? Yes, the elderly. Another set of figures will show you that while PC sales have drifted down the economy from social class A through B to C1 digital television has risen up the economy from E to D to C2 and this trend will receive another boost before the World Cup. Again, the Government is trying to reach a large number of socio-economically excluded people and, lo, they watch television.
So I hope that one of the first developments in Cybrarian will be that it fast tracks digital television access. This is not an optional extra some years down the line; it is absolutely central to the success of the project. Along with this, just think for a moment of the 45 million people in our country who own a mobile telephone. In the ICT era there have been two salient phenomena about success (I owe this analysis to Chris Yapp the former ICL Fellow in e-learning); first, when a new technology emerges it is hyped and its performance in the short term is badly over estimated which then leads to disillusionment; secondly, because of this its medium and long term use is badly under estimated. So don’t be distracted by the peculiar problems of ITV Digital, their problems with unbundling the local loop, the slow uptake of Broadband and the apparent inability of Telecom Companies to work out why they bought 3G licences, the PC will soon be as invisible to most people as their car engines. In fact, one of the big tests for inclusion will be whether the Government can persuade consumer electronic manufacturers to provide connectivity for printers to radios and televisions.
There is, of course, another side to the story. One of the phrases that makes me most suspicious is “skills deficit” I say this for two reasons. First, and most fundamentally, there is now a massive evidence to show that most people, but particularly girls and women are only interested in learning in a “just in time” rather than in a “just in case” fashion. In other words, people want to learn through praxis (a much under used word since Marx became unfashionable); they are not interested in process they are interested in output. So giving people skills just in case they need them and detached from everything else is not going to work.
Secondly, a great deal of what passes for skills transfer is simply a cost transfer from producers to consumers. It has been argued that the rise of Companies such as Microsoft has demonstrated the power of global capitalism but I would say that the more important lesson is the ineffectiveness of global capitalism to force companies like Microsoft to improve products or lose sales. It may well be that games-oriented teenage boys regard a ‘head crash’ as something akin to a game but people trying to collect benefits over the Internet will want their system to be as reliable as terrestrial television. Last week I reluctantly got a new computer and because I was experienced I managed to work out that the only way I could get it to work was to instruct it to shut down. No amount of intelligence and no amount of training can prepare people for that kind of nonsense.
So I am pleased that Cybrarian proposes to be robust, intuitive and lively because that is the only way that it will engage that part of the population that has an intuitive appreciation of style even though it knows nothing about style sheets.
We also have to be aware of the possibilities and limits of human machine interaction using voice-in, the kind of people who find it difficult to write are precisely the same people who find it difficult to work inside strict, ruled based systems of the sort which allow effective voice-in communication. We are thinking here about individual Lexicographic ranges which are very small; there are some people who have a specialist soccer vocabulary which is bigger than all the rest of their vocabulary put together. This is important not only because of the need to drive the system effectively in terms of navigation, it is also important because we have to be honest about the meaning of interaction. When a commercial company talks about interaction it generally means choosing from a menu of options. It does not mean inputting new content into the system. People are rightly suspicious that the story of the Internet so far has mainly been its use as a sales channel for big business and an information channel for Government. Until people feel that they have a stake in an interaction system they will simply think that the whole purpose of projects like Cybrarian is to benefit the Government and not the individual. After all, if you have been alienated from the education system the last thing you are going to do is to agree to nail your bottom to a chair in something called a learning centre in front of a clapped out 386. I recognise that there has to be ‘walled garden’ element to what we are doing but people still need room to manoeuvre.
Finally, then, this project looks very exciting because it is based on sound theory and it has made some very practical and interesting suggestions in such areas as the search engine and the use of customer profiles, but we probably need to look more carefully at whether there is a genuine clash between Stakeholder needs and the very legitimate requirements of a democratically elected Government or whether we simply have to sort out some terminology and be clear about where these two sets of needs correspond. I don’t think this is a particularly difficult problem as long as we continue to think, as they say, “out of the box” or, as I would prefer to say, “to think the unthinkable”. This requirement is often imposed on all kinds of politicians and civil servants but that is asking too much; I think it can only be met by the Jester!.