Cyberspace Divide
The dramatic advances in computer and telecommunications technologies, such as the Internet, virtual reality, smart cards or multimedia applications, are increasingly regarded as ushering in a new form of society: the information society. Politicians, policy makers and business gurus are all encouraging us to join the information superhighway at the nearest junction or risk being excluded from the social and economic benefits of the information revolution. Cyberspace Divide critically considers the complex relationship between technological change, its effect upon social divisions, its consequences for social action and the emerging strategies for social inclusion in the Information Age. This book analyses issues of agency, equality and public policies as they are affected by global communications networks and information technologies. The contributors discuss such themes as human interaction, ethical behaviour, power relationships and gender divisions, as well as the growing disparity between the information rich and the information poor. Also contrasted are the policy formulations by nationstates and trading areas such as the EU and Asia. Cyberspace Divide will be invaluable reading for those studying social policy, sociology, politics, computing and communication studies. Brian D.Loader is Co-Director of the Community Informatics Research and Applications Unit (CIRA), University of Teesside. He has edited The Governance of Cyberspace (1997) and is editor of the new journal Information, Communication & Society (Routledge, 1998).
Cyberspace Divide Equality, agency and policy in the information society
Edited by Brian D.Loader
London and New York
First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Brian D.Loader, selection and editorial matter; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Cyberspace divide: equality, agency, and policy in the information society/edited by Brian D.Loader Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Information society. 2. Information technology—Social aspects. 3. Information technology—Economic aspects. 4. Information policy. 5. Information resources management. 6. Women—Effect of technological innovations on. 7. Social classes. 8. Social policy. I. Loader, Brian HM221.C93 1998 303.48’34–dc 97–39491 CIP ISBN 0-203-16953-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26498-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-16968-2 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-16969-0 (pbk)
Dedicated in memory of David Loader (1950–1964) and Kevin Loader (1952–1970)
Contents
List of illustrations
vii
Notes on contributors
viii
Preface
xii
Introduction 1
Cyberspace divide: equality, agency and policy in the information society Brian D.Loader
3
Part I Divisions, difference and social exclusion 2
Global networks and the myth of equality: trickle down or trickle away? Trevor Haywood
19
3
Who are the world’s information-poor? Mike Holderness
35
4
The ‘crisis’ in the urban public realm Alessandro Aurigi and Stephen Graham
57
Part II Identity, autonomy and social interaction 5
Gender, agency, location and the new information society Alison Adam and Eileen Green
83
6
Ethics @ the Internet: bilateral procedures in electronic communication Duncan Langford
99
7
The Internet, virtual reality and real reality Joe Ravetz
113
vi
8
Why even scholars don’t get a free lunch in cyberspace: my adventures with a tunnelvisionary Steve Fuller
123
Part III Strategies for social inclusion 9
Confucius or capitalism? policies for an information society Nick Moore
147
10
Information and citizenship in Europe Jane Steele
159
11
Managing the cyberspace divide: government investment in electronic information services Puay Tang
181
12
Connecting Wales: the Internet and national identity Hugh Mackay and Tony Powell
201
13
The Internet, other ‘nets’ and healthcare Justin Keen ,Brian Ferguson and James Mason
215
Glossary
235
Bibliography
241
Index
257
Illustrations
FIGURES 3.1 International Internet connectivity 3.2 Landweber’s map adjusted by the author 4.1a Difference between the UK ‘Internet population’ and overall population 4.1b Difference between the UK ‘Internet population’ and overall population by income 4.2 City Island 4.3 Bristol.Net 4.4 De Digitale Stad, Amsterdam 4.5 De Digitale Stad: the politics ‘square’ 4.6 De Digitale Stad: residential ‘buildings’ 4.7 Iperbole, Bologna 6.1 Simplified scheme of four Internet newsgroup sites 6.2 Scheme after A has ceased circulating 6.3 How websites are linked 12.1 CompuServe Wales Forum: contributors by country of origin 12.2 CompuServe Wales Forum: length of contributors (percentage of characters) by country of origin 12.3 CompuServe Wales Forum: thread titles and lengths
39 41 62 63 67 69 71 72 73 74 102 102 104 204 204 20 5
TABLES 3.1 Multimedia access 3.2 E-mail hosts in Africa, January 1996 4.1 Towards a typology of digital cities 13.1 Main costs and benefits of ICTs for selected actors in joining a local network
42 46 67 222
Contributors
Alison Adam is a lecturer in Computation at UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology). She has published widely on the relationship between gender and ICTs. Her most recent work includes a study of gender and artificial intelligence, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine (Routledge, 1998) and an edited collection with Rachel Lander, Women in Computing (Intellect, 1997). Alessandro Aurigi is a researcher in the Centre for Urban Technology (CUT) at Newcastle University. He is currently researching the development of virtual cities on the World Wide Web as a means of promoting social and cultural development within European cities. He has worked on multimedia development in Florence and has published several articles on cyberspace and cities in England and Italy. Brian Ferguson is Head of Clinical Effectiveness at North Yorkshire Health Authority and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. His research interests include the economics of the internal market of healthcare, evaluation of community care, and ICTs in healthcare. Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Durham. He has an extensive publication record, his most recent and current work being Science, a new volume for the Open University Press’ ‘Concepts of the Social Sciences’ series (1997); and Being There with Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History of Our Times (University of Chicago Press, 1998). He is currently working on The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology and Society. His work criticising the idea of the information society and its purported benefits for academic life has appeared in International
ix
Journal of Expert Systems, Academe (the official publication of the American Association of University Professors), The Information Society, Theory, Culture and Society, and the forthcoming HEFCEsponsored textbook, Computers for Political and Social Science Students (Blackwell, 1998). He is also a member of the editorial board for Information, Communication and Society. Stephen Graham is a reader in the Centre for Urban Technology (CUT) at Newcastle University’s Department of Town and Country Planning. He researches the links between telecommunications and the social, cultural and economic development of cities, and the use of IT and telecommunications as local/urban policy tools. He is coauthor of Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (Routledge, 1996). Eileen Green is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Social and Policy Research (CSPR) at the University of Teesside. Her research interests embrace women, work and leisure, gender and IT, and young people. Key publications include: Women’s Leisure: What Leisure? (Macmillan, 1990) (with S.Hebron and D.Woodward); Gendered by Design? Information Technology and Office Systems, (Taylor and Francis, 1993) (with J.Owen and D.Pain, eds); and Women, Work and Computerization, (Elsevier, 1994) (with A.Adam, J.Emms and J.Owen, eds). Trevor Haywood is Emeritus Professor of Human Information Systems and former Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Studies at the University of Central England in Birmingham. His research interests are broad and embrace information and wealth creation, information access, and the economics of information. His publications include The Withering of Public Access for the British Library in 1991, and Info Rich, Info Poor: Access and Exchange in the Global Information Society (BowkerSaur, 1995). He gave the Samuel Lazerow Memorial Lecture at Rosary College, Chicago, in 1996 and the Ameritech Lecture for Napier University in 1997. He is currently writing Only Connect: Shaping networks and knowledge for the new millennium (BowkerSaur). Mike Holderness was educated as a scientist before embarking on a career in journalism. As a freelance journalist he has had articles published regularly in the Guardian, New Scientist, Times Higher
x
Education Supplement and others. He is author of The Internet and the South (Panos, 1995). Justin Keen is the National Audit Office Fellow at the Centre for the Evaluation of Public Policy and Practice, Brunel University. He has published a number of books and articles on ICTs and healthcare. Duncan Langford is a Computing Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is the author of Practical Computer Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 1995) and has written extensively on computer ethics and the ethics of Internet use, in both of which he is an accepted international authority. He is currently writing a book on business computer ethics, and jointly editing a major new international text on Internet ethics. Brian D.Loader is Co-Director of the Community Informatics Research and Applications Unit (CIRA) based at the University of Teesside. He has published several articles and chapters on informatics and is editor of The Governance of Cyberspace (Routledge, 1997). He is also editor of the international journal Information Communication and Society. Hugh Mackay is a Staff Tutor in Sociology at The Open University. Recent publications include several edited books on IT in education, notably Understanding Technology in Education (Falmer, 1991); a paper in Social Studies of Science (1992) arguing for a cultural studies approach to technology; co-authorship (with Stuart Hall et al.) of Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Sage, 1997); and work on new media technologies and Welsh culture and identity. Current research includes prototyping in computer system design, and new media technologies. James Mason is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. His research interests include the acquisition and use of information by health service decision makers. Nick Moore is Head of the Culture and Communications Group at the Policy Studies Institute. He has extensive experience of research into the policy issues raised by the development of informationintensive societies. He recently spent two years studying the development of information policies in East Asia. His publications include Information-intensive Britain (PSI, 1991) and Access to Information (PSI, 1995). He contributed the chapter on information societies to the recent UNESCO World Information Report.
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Tony Powell works as a Project Officer in the Educational Development Unit at the University of Glamorgan. He is a columnist for Ffocws, the Welsh independent film producers’ monthly journal, has undertaken research on the culture of the Apple Mac, and has authored (with Hugh Mackay) an extensive review of comptemporary Welsh media (in Contemporary Wales, 1997). Joe Ravetz is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and European Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. He has contributed to a number of conferences and publications, arguing that there are limitations to the contribution ICTs can make to improve decision making and enhance communication in organisations. Jane Steele is a Principal Fellow and Head of the Information and Citizenship Group at the Policy Studies Institute, London. Her current research interests include an EC-funded project on ‘Information and citizenship in Europe’; ‘Non-solicitor agency franchising’, funded by the Legal Aid Board; and ‘Open government: a study of best practice in consultation and responsiveness’, funded by the ESRC as part of the Whitehall programme. Puay Tang is a Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the management of intellectual property rights in a digital age, the impact of copyright on innovation, development of new information and communications technologies and their economic, social and political impact, including public use of electronic information services, and electronic commerce and its implications for regulatory issues and business activities. Dr Tang has undertaken projects on the above subjects for the Economic and Social Research Council, the Department of Trade and Industry, the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Organization for Economic and Cultural Development.
Preface
The focus for this book is a critical exploration of the emerging properties of the new information and communications technologies (ICTs), such as the Internet, and their possible consequences for social structure and human interaction. Its primary concern is the uneven distribution of access to the technologies and the information skills required to participate in electronic communication, which is likely to have profound implications for economic, cultural and social development in all societies around the world. This topic formed the basis for a seminar organised by the Community Informatics Research and Applications Unit (CIRA) based at the University of Teesside, from which the majority of the chapters in this volume originate. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the issue of exclusion from the information age should find a particular resonance in an area steeped in the traditions and culture of the industrial society and increasingly subject to the process of deindustrialisation. All the papers have been fully revised as a result of the lively and productive debate during the conference and the reflection that has followed thereafter. Indeed, the issue of disparity between the information-advantaged and those who may be excluded from the benefits of the information technology revolution has continued to rise up the agenda of politicians around the globe. To date, however, discussion has been somewhat dominated by the over-optimistic and prescriptive pronouncements of some policy makers and practitioners through their proclamations of the arrival of the information society. The contributors to this volume, whilst recognising the potential of ICTs to foster significant social and economic change, have attempted to counter these Utopian and frequently deterministic accounts by including considerations of power, economic advantage, human agency, social struggle and resistance as significant factors affecting the social
xiii
and economic shaping of technology and its impact upon social structure. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the participants of the original conference for their stimulating contributions, enthusiastic desire to engage in a multidisciplinary exercise, and their good company. The task of editing a collection is always made more enjoyable by the good quality of the material and reliability of the authors, for which again I would like to make known my appreciation. I am also grateful to Heather Gibson for her support and encouragement as Routledge’s editor, as well as for the capable assistance of her colleague Fiona Bailey. The project itself could not of course have materialised without the organisational competence and skills of the CIRA team and so I am indebted to Jo Brudenell, for running the conference with her usual flair; to June Ions, for her help in compilation and word processing; and especially to Dave Eagle for all his advice, support and time which is always so generously given and which makes him such a good colleague to have the privilege to work with. Thanks are also due to a whole host of people at the University of Teesside who help to support the activities of CIRA, among whom are June Murphy, Charles Marshall, Barbara Cox, John Carter, Robin Haggart, Andrea Cook, Diane Meehan, Pamela Abbott and Helen Pickering. Finally, I would like to make my deepest expression of gratitude to Kim Loader, without whose invaluable comments, encouragement and forbearance this book would not have been produced: at least not if our young children, William and Christopher, could have had their way! Brian D.Loader Swainby 1997
xiv
Introduction
2
Chapter 1 Cyberspace divide Equality, agency and policy in the information society Brian D.Loader
The emergence of the new information and communications technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet are said to herald the coming of the ‘information society’: a new social and economic paradigm restructuring the traditional dimensions of time and space within which we live, work and interact. The global communication networks which make up cyberspace1 are claimed to be altering almost every facet of our lifestyles, including patterns of work and leisure, entertainment, consumption, education, political activity, family experience and community structures. Such fundamental transformations are now beginning to raise important questions about their consequences for social divisions, diversity and differences. Will they, for example, lead to a greater equalisation of power structures with their promise of access to public information and global collaboration? Or alternatively are they likely to produce a widening of the social cleavage between the information-rich and information-poor in and between communities around the world? This edited collection critically focuses on the prospect of developing strategies for equality in the information age. Until fairly recently the euphoria surrounding the advent of the Internet as a means of enabling ‘many-to-many’ communication across the globe might easily have led one to believe that if people were not already ‘online’ then they very soon would be. Little consideration, for example, was being given to the enormous divide between the telephonic access of people within individual countries, let alone the acute paucity of available connectivity for much of the world’s population. Talk amongst the technologically elite of advanced capitalist societies of joining the Information Superhighway is a discourse which has little meaning in many regions of the globe where even intermediate telecommunications are underdeveloped.2 Such exclusion from the information society is not
4 BRIAN D.LOADER
confined to a consistent pattern of a global north-south divide however, but is also said to be evident within the traditional nation-state boundaries of advanced industrial societies and metropolises (Davis 1990; Burrows 1997). Yet to date, little attention has been given to a consideration of the consequences of such uneven technological diffusion for social inequality; to the significant variation in experiences of computer-mediated communication and its potential for altering social relations and the formation of identities based around locality, gender, race, age, disability or religious fundamentalism (Cable 1994; Jones 1995); or to government and supranational policies which address issues of access, skills and universal carriage. This volume, by addressing such issues, is intended to make a small contribution to a debate which is likely to remain on the policy agenda for some considerable time to come. DECYPHERING THE INFORMATION SOCIETY The history of the concept of the information society is to be found in a variety of sources, including the work of social scientists such as Daniel Bell (1974, 1988) and Alain Touraine (1974), futurist writers and forecasters like Tom Stonier (1983) and Alvin Toffler (1980),3 cybervisionaries associated with the ICTs industry, and more latterly in the pronouncements of senior politicians and policy makers. Whilst differing significantly in the contributions they make to the debate, they all share the notion that society is being transformed by a revolution in information technology which is creating an entirely new social structure. Such advocates suggest that we are witnessing the demise of the industrial age with the replacement of capital and labour as the chief resources of economic growth by information and knowledge as the primary means of development. For evidence of the emergent information age they would claim that traditional manufacturing industries no longer dominate the generation of national wealth in advanced societies. In contrast, the information industry is rapidly expanding in terms of employment, investment and market share.4 The force for change is provided by the synthesis of formally disparate technologies such as personal computing, digital telecommunications, virtual reality, nanotechnologies and biotechnologies, as well as a range of multimedia applications and software which enable the creation, communication and dissemination of information in ways which transcend modernist conceptions of time
EQUALITY, AGENCY AND POLICY 5
and space. Work, for example, in the information society is not predominantly confined to a particular centralised location such as a factory or office, nor restrained by the traditional nine-to-five ‘working day’. Instead, assisted by the technological capability to connect from remote sites at any time of the day, the ‘information worker’ can adopt flexible patterns of employment more suited to the ‘flexible firm’. Thus we are told that increasing numbers of people will be employed as teleworkers operating either from their own homes or small local telecentres (Huws et al. 1990). Informatics applications such as computerised stock control systems, smart cards, videoconferencing, electronic mail, virtual reality, interactive Internet websites, encrypted networks and many others will continue to foster innovative, flexible and decentralised organisational forms. Moreover, no sphere of life will be unaffected by the information revolution. Business, commerce and the financial markets may lead the way but public sector organisations, the voluntary sector and the family will all be transformed in its wake (Loader 1998). Given the seriousness of such proclamations, we should not be surprised that the most recent formulations of the information society thesis come less from academic circles and increasingly from the manifestos and memoranda of state administrations. The importance of ICTs for economic regeneration and competitive advantage can be found in numerous pronouncements of politicians and policy makers, particularly in the USA and Europe. Concern within such late-industrial societies has tended to be directed towards the perceived need to avoid falling behind those Asian countries such Korea and Japan (as well as the sleeping giant of China) where ICTs are regarded as a prime focus for economic development (see Moore, this volume). Consider for example European Commissioner Martin Bangemann’s assertion that the first countries to enter the information society will reap the greatest rewards. They will set the agenda for all who must follow. By contrast, countries which temporise, or favour half-hearted solutions, could, in less than a decade, face disastrous declines in investment and a squeeze on jobs. (Bangemann 1994:4) Such exhortations to join the information society race are echoed across the Atlantic, where Vice President Al Gore launched the now-famous National Information Infrastructure (NII) programme in 1993. More
6 BRIAN D.LOADER
latterly in the UK the Information Society Initiative (ISI) was began under the Conservative administration and is likely to play a significant role in Tony Blair’s New Labour Government. That senior statespeople and policy makers have become fervent evangelists of the capabilities of ICTs to revolutionise societies (witness their concomitant exhortation to travel down the Information Superhighway) is seemingly unquestionable: non-participation in the creation of the information society is quite simply not a serious option. Yet the optimistic tenor of the debate which has so far been conducted about the alleged coming of the information society raises at least two concerns which underlie many of the contributions to this book. In the first place many accounts of the information society adopt an apolitical attitude towards technological development. That it represents the march of progress and that the only downside is the absence of a ticket for the journey. To question the possible consequences of such technological innovation for social structures and economic activity is often regarded as at best having a negative ‘mindset’ and at worst to be labelled a Luddite. Nothing, it seems, must muffle the clarion call of the cyber-visionaries. Yet what empirical evidence we have for the emergence of an information society does not present a picture of a new virtual world separated from the political, social and economic concerns of the old ‘real’ world order. In the pursuit of higher profitability and corporate control, for example, ICTs are being used to re-engineer organisations (Hammer et al. 1994) and in the process put millions of people out of work.5 Furthermore, many of those still in paid employment have witnessed a radical change in the nature of their working practice. Lateindustrial economies are increasingly producing labour markets characterised by a high level of part-time, temporary and frequently lowpaid employment opportunities. Female employees are moreover rapidly replacing traditional industrial jobs, which for most of the industrial age were mainly the preserve of men. What these trends illustrate is both the power of the new technologies as a source for economic and social change and also that such developments have consequences for political action and discourse. That is to say the technologies are not value-neutral but will have both beneficial and disadvantageous consequences for their increasing pervasiveness within societies. Labour market flexibility in the form of teleworking, for example, may be very attractive as a means of enabling people to work from home (often portrayed as an idyllic location in the telecommunications industry commercials), be able to structure their
EQUALITY, AGENCY AND POLICY 7
working practice to suit their domestic and social situation, reduce environmentally unfriendly travelling arrangements and allow ‘flexible companies’ to benefit from the more efficient use of resources. Such depictions, however, need to be matched by the potential for telework to foster social isolation, reduce job security by deterring collective action on conditions of employment, transfer production costs from the company to the employee in the form of heating, lighting and accommodation expenditure, as well as facilitating electronic surveillance through videoconferencing (Lyon 1994; Zuboff 1988; Huws et al. 1990). The point being made is not that we should simply either endorse or reject teleworking, but rather that its application gives rise to a political dialogue about both the potentially acceptable and unacceptable consequences of its adoption. Moreover, the contributing voices to such discussions will be militated by unequal power relationships between the contestants: more still at present are likely to have no voice at all (Lukes 1974). As Juliet Webster has observed with regard to teleworking, it may act to reinforce the lack of labour market opportunities for women which currently exists in society, and thereby ensure that the social burdens from such economically motivated arrangements continue to fall disproportionately upon female members of the population. Routinised and increasingly intense labour processes, together with low pay and lack of unionisation are conditions of work which are typical of women’s clerical work in general, but for teleworkers these conditions [are] exacerbated by their isolation from other workers and their inability to organise collectively in any way. (Webster 1996:98) The social and economic fabric of the information society will be unevenly woven by the warp of commercial innovation seeking competitive advantage and the weft of social action militating its realisation. Thus the technological developments driving the current changes can only be understood when placed within a wider political context of an unequal and changing pattern of power relationships. A second and related disconcerting feature of the information society rhetoric is its deterministic quality. This is the often unstated contention that technology is somehow independent from society and acts to define
8 BRIAN D.LOADER
social and economic structures as well as determining modes of human interaction. It is the force which maps our future and over which we appear to have little control. Not surprisingly perhaps, such a perspective gives rise to the somewhat fatalistic prognoses of the technoLuddites on the one hand and the Utopian predictions of the otherworldly dreamers of cyberspace on the other.6 In truth, such crude dichotomies cannot hope to provide very meaningful insights into the rich mixture of social, economic and political innovation which manifests itself in technological development, and the multitudinous, unintended and unforeseen consequences of such catalytic technological creation. The actual antecedents of technological change are frequently complicated to decipher, and its outcomes seldom, if ever, determined with accuracy from the outset (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1984). Our understanding of the complex relationship between the restructuring of capitalist modes of production and its technological consequences for social structural change are still relatively underdeveloped.7 Whilst we cannot but be impressed by the changes being driven (although not determined) by informatics applications, it is still far from clear that these represent a distinct break with past capitalist societies. The apolitical and frequently deterministic accounts of the information society ideologues, by envisioning the future through their virtually constructed realities, may well be guilty of overlooking the material impoverishment of large numbers of the world’s population by those both better equipped to take advantage of ICTs and also use it for the protection of their privileged position; a social and economic process which has much in continuity with previous epochs. A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE OF TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT By avoiding the more Utopian accounts of the information society thesis, the contributors to this collection have attempted to adopt a critical and perhaps more cautious (although not intransigent) approach to the technologically driven changes currently underway. In particular technological development is seen as being shaped by social, economic and political relations which in turn often produce indeterminate outcomes. From this perspective the explanation for the uneven spread of ICTs within and between societies is to be sought from a clearer understanding of the relationship between technological development and differential opportunities for exercising power.
EQUALITY, AGENCY AND POLICY 9
What is important about such an approach is that it foregrounds the role of agency in any debates about technological innovation. Social action and inaction on the part of different groups plays a vital part in the social shaping of technological applications. The existence of the ‘information-poor’ for example may be due to the express desire on the part of some information-advantaged groups to deliberately and systematically exclude them from participation in the wider community. Material benefits to be acquired through electronic communication may therefore be clearly tied to the material conditions of those participating in the network. Without the resources for access, understanding and knowledge to compete in the information marketplace there is little opportunity or incentive for the underclass in advanced societies to have a stake. This is not to say that those presently excluded can be regarded as passive recipients of technological change, unable to influence its course or direction. The ‘information-poor’ are no more an homogeneous social phenomenon than their wealthier counterparts. Fragmented and divided by gender, race, disability, class, location or religion, their experience of ICTs will vary enormously as will their opportunities to utilise it. Historically however, opposition and social struggle can often significantly modify, delay and sometimes prevent the introduction of technological ‘solutions’. Again, it is important that we recognise the role played by such agency in the analysis of the restructuring we are experiencing. Resistance can include, for example, the adoption of ICTs for purposes of empowerment. The hosts of disadvantaged around the world have not tended to participate in the social shaping of technology and have often experienced low-skilled jobs, sickness and oppression as a consequence. Increasingly however, some are arguing that cyberspace offers the liberating possibilities of ‘ordinary’ people constructing new identities which free them from the imposed classifications of class, race, gender or disability associated with material space and place (Haraway 1991; Barlow 1996; Squires 1996). The anonymity experienced through computer-mediated communication ‘is often valued because it creates opportunities to invent alternative versions of one’s self and to engage in untried forms of interaction’ (Baym 1995). Thus technology may provide the locus for struggle between the social and economic forces for domination and the opposing attempts by others to shape their own identities (Foucault 1980). In this context, agency is expressed through the potential to ‘break out’ of the constraining social relations of family, work and community and forge
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new, remote relationships in virtual spaces. Communications networks offer the prospect of greater opportunities for finding employment, seeking advice, challenging orthodoxy, meeting like minds and constructing one’s own sense of self. Entirely new notions of social action, based not upon proximity and shared physical experience but rather on remote networks of common perceptions, may begin to emerge and challenge existing social structures.8 For the vast majority of the world’s population, the possibility of constructing virtual identities is entirely dependent upon their material situation. Clearly most people are not free to choose but instead are subject to a variety of social and economic conditions which act to structure and articulate their opportunities for action. Their experiences of the information society are less likely to be those enjoyed by the information elite, which emphasise creativity and remote ‘spanning networks’ (Mulgan et al. 1997) and more likely to be the routine, lowskill and dull jobs of information call-centre workers and isolated teleworkers. ADVANCING THE DISCOURSE OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION This collection is divided into three parts: the first consists of chapters which challenge many of the contentions that cyberspace will enable greater agency, foster more equality and ensure more autonomy for the individual; the second consists of contributions whose respective analyses of the impact of ICTs are grounded in social and economic contexts; the third and final section comprises those contributions which focus more directly upon technology policy. Part I opens with Trevor Haywood’s measured assault upon the optimists of the information society who suggest that the benefits of ICTs will ‘trickle down’ from the information-advantaged to the disadvantaged much in the manner of previous technologies such as cars, TVs, electrical and domestic appliances. Such free-market perspectives see the widespread access to computer-linked networks as a way of spreading information and knowledge to many more citizens and thus sharing political and economic influence more widely. Haywood, however, contends that access to these networks will simply be laid over the same old patterns of geographical and economic inequality. He goes on to explore the view that the network as a marketplace of ideas will move from a metaphor to a reality, where established patterns
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of consumer detriment and the compounded disadvantages of lowincome groups will be replicated in digital form. Such groups could become the victims of a powerful triumvirate: a developing cocktail of selfish technology for the economically stable, a propensity for the middle ground to adopt a more reactionary political stance and the continuing invisibility of public information sources in the informationknowledge chain. Although technologies do trickle down, particularly those capable of pollinating new forms of accessing entertainment, few, Haywood claims, have revolutionised the way the majority of citizens have been able to understand and then influence the variety of political, social or cultural options available to them. The link between peoples’ ability to communicate and to acquire information and their material wellbeing is explored in Mike Holderness’ excellent analysis of the world’s distribution of information technology users. The shape of future trade, economics and development around the globe is mapped by a consideration of the levels of Internet access in different regions. Africa, in particular, provides a good illustration of the uneven spread of connectivity in the developing and under-developed world. Alessandro Aurigi and Stephen Graham further consider the effects of the fragmentary diffusion of ICTs through their focus on the alleged demise of the urban public space. It has long been argued that the public realm of western cities is in crisis, caught between privatising and commodifying tendencies and the rising fear of crime in the postmodern city. This crisis is closely bound up with the growing social polarisation which is being etched into the landscapes of advanced industrial cities with their ever more segmented and separated social zones. In its newest guise, such polarisation is clearly reflected in highly unequal access to telephones, computers and advanced telecommunications infrastructures within cities. In this context the chapter has two objectives. First, it explores the crisis in the urban realm and links this to the extremely uneven social access to communications technologies within cities. Second, it attempts to document how many cities across the advanced industrial world are now using Internet and Web-based ‘virtual cities’ as policy tools through which to try and address these interrelated problems. Finally, the chapter assesses what can genuinely be achieved at the urban level in terms of overcoming stark social divides in access to cyberspace and constructing genuinely public electronic spaces via virtual cities. The first chapter of Part II is provided by Alison Adam and Eileen Green, who attempt to bring together arguments on gender relations in
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ICTs in the workplace and in cyberspace. Their intention is to explore the way in which agency is constructed in relation to particular locations where ICTs are used. Often, for women, the material location of ICTs in employment situations may have a significant consequence for access to the possible liberating features of cyberspace. Adam and Green also question some of the assumptions of cyberfeminism, particularly in its more apolitical guise. The development of a global background to computer networking, combined with a general explosion in user numbers, has brought inevitable changes in the use of computer systems. High on the list are new opportunities for ‘unethical’ behaviour, and such behaviour—both deliberate and accidental—has dramatically increased in the past few years, according to Duncan Langford. Examples abound of the publication of graphic sexual material as well as extreme political and racist views. Globally networked users and systems are, perhaps understandably, frequently perceived by legislators and others as in urgent need of restriction and legal controls. But the standards by which networked materials are judged are often both parochial and poorly defined, while suggested solutions may be technically unworkable. Langford, by using actual examples to illustrate ethical theory directly, considers issues of ethical behaviour and current practice in relation to globally networked systems and presents some possible guidelines. Joe Ravetz is highly critical of Utopian cyber-visionary accounts and asserts that the Internet should be viewed as no more than a new communications medium which compliments the older technologies yet with new potentialities which require examination and regulation in the public interest. He argues that the Internet is a virtual reality potentially devoid of a reality of ethics and values, and that it has the negative feature of being a substitute for real experience as opposed to being an extension of experience. The advent of electronic publishing on the Internet has led to the emergence of Utopian claims for a frictionless medium of thought enabling both a saving of effort and expense, and the advancement of truth by a peer review system unimpeded by external agents such as publishers. In Steve Fuller’s chapter the author strongly criticises such contentions from what he calls a cybermaterialist stance. First he questions the characterisation of Internet publication as costfree and paperless, noting the failure to take into account the hidden institutional costs of maintaining electronic communication networks, especially during a time of increased network privatisation. Fuller goes on to argue that by operating with standards that are orthogonal to academic ones,
EQUALITY, AGENCY AND POLICY 13
publishers have actually tended to check the more conservative approaches of the peer review system. The final section of the volume is devoted to the theme of policy and the development of the so-called information society. It begins with Nick Moore’s analysis of the policies being created by countries around the world to shape the development of information societies. Whilst the goals of these policies are remarkably similar, it is possible to identify differences in motivating factors. In particular, Moore believes that two broadly divergent models can be characterised. One is based on neoliberal economic philosophies and emphasises the importance of market-led solutions, exploiting private capital. This approach has been adopted by G7 nations, the European Union and western-oriented economies such as Australia. The alternative model considered can be described as dirigiste. It is based on a much greater degree of intervention, and consequently places more emphasis on the role of the state as a participant rather than as a facilitator. This approach is characteristic of the economies in East Asia. While it is still too early to identify the effects of policies, it is possible to discern differences in the rates of social change and economic growth: the degree of stability and social cohesion and what is becoming known as the cultural ecology of the information society. Moore suggests that the broad lesson seems to be that when dealing with a pervasive social, political, economic and cultural phenomenon, neo-liberal policy mechanisms with their emphasis on narrow economic solutions are inadequate. The holistic approach characterised by the dirigiste model seems more appropriate. The policy approach of the European Union to encourage the development of the informed citizen is discussed by Jane Steele. Only by being well informed is it possible for citizens to exercise their rights, fulfil their responsibilities and play their full part in the democratic process. Approaches to issues of citizenship, and the information required to support it, have traditionally been very much national ones. But recent developments in many EU states have meant that there is a great deal of experience to be shared between them about the most effective policies on information provision. In addition, the process of European integration creates information needs at a European level. The EU places increasing emphasis on the role of information in shaping the lives of its citizens. And the Commission itself is doing more to disseminate information. At the same time, information and communications technology presents new possibilities and poses new challenges for policy makers and information providers.
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An example of national policy is provided in Puay Tang’s investigation of the UK government’s approach. Her chapter identifies the need for national governments to produce information strategies which tackle the threat of a cyberdivide. This in part can be achieved by policies which support the right of citizens to public information and the corresponding duty of government to provide access to up-to-date public information. The use and implications of the Internet for sustaining and constructing senses of national identity is explored through the example of how it may act to link Welsh people both within and beyond Wales. The analysis is developed by Hugh Mackay and Tony Powell through a consideration of three key elements of Welsh national identity: first, the notion of genes, blood or hiraeth is addressed; second, notions of community are explored; and third, language is considered as an important defining characteristic of Welsh identity. In each of these cases consideration is given to the importance of the Internet in facilitating national identity. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the policy context. With the exception of Demon, Internet access providers in the UK have been largely dominated by US companies. Initially, all of the access providers argued that points of access in Wales were not a viable option; later Demon installed a connection point in Cardiff. Most recently, CymruNet and Syntech have installed about twenty access points around Wales, so that all of Wales now enjoys access with a local telephone call. Wales has thus moved from enjoying the least to the most comprehensive local access, as a result of joint government (WDA) and private intervention. Mackay and Powell discuss how useful it is to see these developments, and the organisations and individuals involved in them, as an emerging cultural elite. The media have long played a key role in the cultural construction of Wales, and this chapter explores the implications of emerging technologies, forms and organisations for the future of the Welsh nation. In the final chapter Justin Keen, Brian Ferguson and James Mason examine the potential of ICTs to transform the relationship between providers and users of public services by a consideration of healthcare policy. Healthcare is an information-intensive activity which depends crucially on communication between professionals and patients, and health services are characterised by rapid uptake of a wide range of new technologies. Yet ICTs have made relatively little impression in healthcare in the UK. Now, with the arrival of the Internet and other
EQUALITY, AGENCY AND POLICY 15
large scale networks, new predictions are being made that the benefits of ICTs in healthcare will—finally—be realised. The authors examine the opportunities and problems associated with adopting ICT networks in the NHS. To focus the analysis, the chapter considers the practical implications of networking in primary care— where the greatest volume of healthcare is provided—and adopts an economic perspective to analyse current developments. It concludes by outlining the main economic issues that will influence the course of developments in the NHS over the next few years. CONCLUSION The development of the information society is not likely to be characterised by a linear technological progression, but rather through the often competing social forces of innovation, competitive advantage, human agency and social resistance. Where the benefits of ICTs are unevenly spread and the disadvantages are particularly concentrated in the ‘black holes of human misery’ (Castells 1996a: 2) it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the cyberspace divide will be a significant feature of political dialogue in the early years of the new millennium. It is hoped that the authors in this collection have contributed, albeit in a limited way, to what they regard as a crucial focus of study for the foreseeable future.
NOTES 1 Cyberspace refers to the virtual space created by the matrix of computerised telecommunications networks such as the Internet, where millions of individuals across the globe interact through discussion, business, information retrieval and a rich variety of other activities at any time of day or night. I have dealt elsewhere with a critical conceptual clarification of the notion (Loader 1997a) and other texts such as Rheingold (1994) offer the reader a good introduction to computermediated communications. 2 It is often remarked, perhaps somewhat apocryphally, that most of the world’s population has never made a telephone call. 3 For a good accessible account of the antecedents of the information society concept, see Lyon 1988. 4 For the UK, for example, see the National Information Infrastructure Report (1995) London: Parliamentary Bookshop.
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5 Indeed, the nature of much organisational restructuring is of a kind which would almost certainly have appealed to, the imagination and directives of Frederick Taylor, who was one of the central figures in the formulation of modernist organisational theory. 6 See Loader 1997a: Introduction. 7 Perhaps the most notable exception to date being the impressive work of Manuel Castells. 8 One interesting example of this may be the rising number of electronic selfhelp groups on the Internet particularly associated with health and welfare issues. A phenomena which Roger Burrows, Steve Muncer, Sarah Nettleton and myself describe as ‘virtual community care’ in our current research.
Part I Divisions, difference and social exclusion
18
Chapter 2 Global networks and the myth of equality Trickle down or trickle away? Trevor Haywood
I think that most people would accept that all technology is a Faustian bargain, that it giveth and it taketh away, and that the verdict on the value of the giving and the adverse impact of the taking often takes the jury, i.e. society, many years of observation and discovery before it can be delivered with any accuracy. It often requires considerable advances in science or scientific inquiry before a comprehensive assessment of the downside of most new technologies can be made. The famous case of DDT in the US was one of the first great exposures of the damage that a seemingly helpful and benign chemical can inflict on humans as it enters the food chain. The cycle of Utopian discovery and doom-laden revelation continues in a now almost predictable pattern, and even if the precise nature of the downside takes us by surprise we are not surprised that there is one. Science has never waited on society; if it had we might still believe that the sun moved around the earth. In the 1930s we discovered CFCs to refrigerate our food and propel aerosol sprays; in the 1970s we found that they eat ozone. We built atomic power stations to give us cheap electricity but at the price of their radioactive waste being almost impossible to clean up. Motor cars give us tremendous freedom and personal mobility but at the cost of filling our atmosphere with a host of pollutants that could turn our world into a greenhouse— and China has yet to start driving in earnest! With the introduction of all new technologies we enter an initial period when the missionaries declare the new scriptures. These are often the researchers involved in a technology’s early development or the enthusiasts who, as well as using it, also tend to predict the even bigger and better things that it will do. Then comes a period when the corporations test it for commercial viability, then a period of early market testing on the public and then, sometimes surprisingly quickly, it takes off and we all have it or want it. The crucifixion comes many
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years later when another set of researchers reveal how damaging all or bits of it are becoming to children and horses. Networking computers to communicate rapidly and to disseminate information, just like our early responses to DDT, could not look more benign. No radiation, no pollution—indeed networking could help cut down on vehicle pollution as it can, for some functions, substitute for polluting engines by reducing the need to ‘go’ somewhere; no bits or bytes are likely to enter the food chain; there are lots of possibilities for housebound people to communicate and make contact in a way that they never could before; possibly a few cases of screen-blindness and the odd electric shock here and there, but clearly it looks to be a winner! And for those who can gain access there can be no doubt that the ‘network option’ is one that can enrich and empower, and many of us in business and academic life can testify to its success in securing an important outcome which would otherwise not have been possible, as well as a myriad day-to-day conveniences that communicating rapidly over long distances has facilitated. We have only just moved out of the missionary phase as far as the Internet and global networking is concerned, and it is thus a bold prophet who attempts to predict possible downsides (one is almost tempted to say the far side), particularly at a time of such euphoria in anticipation of the wonders of bandwidth and content to come. However, I am fortified by the belief that all resistance to new technologies should be cheerily embraced by the missionaries, first as the understandable distress signals of the animals who will eventually be ‘tagged’ by them, and second as a cheap contribution to product refinement, the economy of this latter point being clearly recognised by software developers like Netscape and Microsoft. Also, some skepticism can offer a valuable antidote to the sometimes fierce technological determinism that now sees networking technology as ‘the’ distinctive feature of all societies. All obsessions need antidotes. One antidote is to step back to consider the ‘defining moments’ in our lives, those moments which loom large in our recollections when evaluating the richness of our experiences to date, and then to relate them to technology, any technology. Such an exercise more often than not throws up examples that are more clearly related to the age-old humanity of our connections with each other in real space. The reality is that the ‘big’ issues and distinctive features of our lives are still very much those that occupied our non-networking ancestors. Charles I, on reading a declaration of his treasons squirted down the line from Oliver Cromwell’s headquarters somewhere in England during 1649, still gets
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to hear that he is going to lose his head. The ‘defining moment’ had nothing to do with the technology that brought him the message. In trying to envisage futures we must also be aware that what we believe to be on offer at any one time is also a vital part of what we call technological progress. Donald Mackenzie’s ‘Technologies may be best because they have triumphed rather than triumphing because they are the best’ (Mackenzie 1996) is a thought well worth reflecting on when we consider the ubiquity of one technology rather than another. Have DOS and Windows ever been ‘the best’? The potential disadvantages of networking technology, the ‘trickle away’ of my title, are more likely to be messily associated with the much wider social, political and economic imperatives within which networking will reside, rather than as a direct result of networking per se. This is the context, the way it compounds and coincides with the wider economic and political behaviours of both communities and individuals, the exclusivity that emerges as the prerogative of certain groups who gain unassailable advantages by developing deep knowledge early and the increasing pool of citizens who do not understand what it is they need to understand to get a foot in the liberating door. DETERIORATING POLITICAL AGENDAS FOR PUBLIC ACCESS TO INFORMATION AND THE WIDENING OF EXISTING ECONOMIC DISPARITIES While there is a tremendous amount of interest in all societies as to how those with the tools and instruments to access the new global networks, e.g. modems, computers, software, telephone or cable lines, boxes full of interactive intelligence and the skills to understand and handle them, will be empowered, there are generally few political agendas addressing how accessible these networks will be for the sizable populations who will not have easy access to these tools. The impact of exclusion both on the haves and the have-nots, and the extent to which such a discrepancy changes each group’s assumptions about the world, looks like being left to market forces to mould and then control. It has ever been the case that the affluent in any society have always had new discretionary wants created for them by the market while the economically hard-pressed simply tend to adjust their wants downward to cope with new conditions. Free-market capitalism has no system for identifying common human needs (as opposed to wants) and provides no way of fostering community forms of provision. Attempting to sell needs is
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never very profitable. Needs are by definition low or nonmargin services required to achieve the lineaments that we style a ‘minimum quality of life’. The very sophistication of the information handling and processing options available to rich corporate environments, their ability to pay over the top for quite mediocre information solutions, and the strongly emerging imperative that all information should be regarded as a market-driven commodity, has had a deleterious effect on current perceptions of publicly funded sources of information. Thus the kind of values that accompany a subscription to Reuter’s news and financial services by a profitable commercial concern are now nearly always used when politicians and civil servants address the issue of communitybased information provision outside the corporate domain. The loss of cheap paper sources of information as the build-up of digitisation accelerates is a little considered issue in the context of wide public access to sources of information. But without institutions to mediate digitised information to economically deprived groups, their access to something that was often relatively easy via a public library, law centre or citizens advice bureau could be severely impaired. The growth of networked access to information by the middle ground of citizens who nearly always vote, i.e. a public library of their own via a modem, is unlikely to encourage them to vote for the continuation of public institutions which provide information on a community basis. Although many optimists see the widespread access to computer-linked networks as a way of spreading information and knowledge to many more citizens and thus sharing political and economic influence even more widely, others believe that access to these networks will simply be laid over the same old patterns of geographic and economic inequality. For these pessimists the network as a marketplace of ideas will move from metaphor to reality where established patterns of consumer detriment, the compounded disadvantages of low-income groups, are replicated in digital form. Such groups could become the victims of a powerful triumvirate: a developing cocktail of selfish technology for the economically stable, a propensity for the middle ground to adopt a more reactionary political stance with regard to public investment in information infrastructure, and the continuing invisibility of the social and economic value of public information sources in the informationknowledge chain. The self-sufficiency of the ‘wired home’ is becoming a high-tech icon of the ‘there is no such thing as society’ politics of the late 1980s, a situation where everyone should take individual responsibility for the economics of getting online. If they don’t then they must just accept that they will be left out!
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Although all technologies trickle down, particularly those capable of pollinating new forms of accessing revenue-producing entertainment, few have revolutionised the way in which the majority of citizens have been able to understand and then influence the variety of political, social or cultural options available to them. Power structures continue to remain distant (parliamentary involvement in UK government long ago gave way first to cabinet and then to special committee government), the fibres of US government remain largely untouched by the existence of a White House e-mail number, economically limited citizens continue to remain limited in their access to higher education and the effective manipulation of the higher-level technologies that comes with it. The integration of higher-level communicational computing into everyday life—other than that found in washing machines, the TV remote control and cash machines—has remained the exclusive preserve of Robert Reich’s elite ‘symbolic analysts’, i.e. that 20 per cent of a developed nation’s population who work for enterprises with disposable cash to spend on the technology or who believe that their business will benefit from the investment. Although the one-person design, translation, editing, consultant-type of small enterprise might easily invest in such connectivity as the cost of the technology falls, by far and away the majority of users will still be members of large public or private closed systems. Social divisions and distinctions have remained largely untouched by the massification of a whole range of computerbased technologies, and the Internet will be no different. It owes its existence to the desire of info-rich actors to talk and share information and knowledge with other info-rich actors, and whatever their altruistic motives may or may not be, neither will have the power (though some may have the desire) to extend membership of the club. Contrary to current Internet folklore, the users do not own the ‘means’. They have great freedom to communicate but they do not have the freedom to decide who else may communicate with them. That decision will remain with the ‘investors’, be they individual or corporate, and will thus exhibit all the disparities of access that characterise existing technologies. Such questions lie at the crux of the info-rich/info-poor debate across the world as well as within individual countries. Most developing countries, except Singapore and Hong Kong, have an average income per head (as measured by the World Bank at purchasing power parity which takes account of international differences in costs of living) at well below the OECD average of US$20,110.
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India comes bottom with below $1,000 per head; Poland and Brazil lie seventh and eighth from the bottom at around $5,000 per head. The GDP per head in Africa has grown at only 2.6 per cent over the past ten years, which given its rapid population growth was insufficient to lift real incomes at all (The Economist 1997:138). The disparities between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world are so great that comparisons seem almost meaningless. There may be eight million documents available on the World Wide Web, but 70 per cent of the host computers are in the US and fewer than ten African countries are connected to the Internet (see Holderness, this volume). A modem in India costs about four times as much as it does in the US, and Internet access can be twelve times more expensive in Indonesia than in the US. While developed nations will gradually increase the range of socioeconomic groups that can access global networks, Internet users in developing countries are likely to be confined for many years to a much smaller privileged elite. As in developed economies, this group will naturally increase their awareness and extend their grip on the ‘deep understanding’ and ‘knowing’ which is such an important part of economic differentiation. As those with the deep knowledge dig deeper they inevitably extend their hold on the developing sophistication of systems. Employing the latest and most satisfying version of networking technology requires ongoing, hands-on know-how to maintain its benefits as well as the disposable income to invest in it. Lack of opportunity to access this know-how, as well as lack of cash, will forever keep large populations on the edge of the networking revolution. In developed nations they will get some trickle down as corporations seek outlets for their content, but as observers rather than as richly engaged participants. In poorer countries the ‘superhighway’ is more often than not a long and tortuous dirt-track miles from a made-up road which itself is miles from the nearest medical centre or school. Slow trickle down in some countries will be a matter of policy. Governments such as those in Singapore, Vietnam and China face the paradox of wanting more and more access to the world of WWW documents and images for use by their governing elites, while at the same time seeking ways to stifle or limit the free flow of information which might change their citizens’ view of the political and social system that they currently belong to. The oft-promoted universal virtue of global networks pales somewhat before the private affluence and public poverty that look set to coexist within the noble aims of the Internet movement. In developed economies, Are you on the network? could become as big a social and economic differentiator in the late
GLOBAL NETWORKS AND THE MYTH OF EQUALITY 25
1990s as Are you employed? has been in the early 1990s; indeed, the answer to either question might now well depend on your access to the other. This need not be so. If both nations and supranational bodies like the European Union or The World Bank can find ways of stimulating access to non-profit-purposeful information, information that fuels curiosity and self-education, and encourages animated and involved citizenship (including dissent) in tandem with stimulating the conditions within which private enterprises can better use information to be more competitive, then global networks would indeed be on the road to a ‘universal virtue’. However this would require levels of political commitment and social priority which none of us have seen yet. The world has always been a place of haves and have-nots and I can see no way that internetworking is going to change this very much. Indeed it has the decidedly ominous potential to increase the sense of alienation that has always made it more difficult for the economically deprived to cross over into higher levels of economic activity. Although the technology trickle-down factor may operate differently in different economic systems, with those systems that favour a mixture of intervention and market forces1 facilitating the liberation of serious benefits to a wide range of citizens, it has always failed to deliver its promises in the UK. Opportunities for the economic liberation of wider population of citizens via technology in the UK have been lost in the mishmash of laissez-faire economics which has passed for public policy since 1979. The United Nations Human Development Report, published in July 1996, shocked us all by showing just how fast inequality has been growing in the UK over the last twenty years. It showed that the poorest 40 per cent of Britons now share a lower proportion of the national wealth—14.6 per cent—than any other western country: this is only marginally better than Russia, the only industrialised nation east or west to have a worse record. The gap between rich and poor in the UK shows a similar degradation, with the richest fifth of Britons enjoying on average incomes ten times as high as the poorest fifth. The poorest fifth of Britons have an average per capita income which is 32 per cent lower than their equivalents in the US and 44 per cent lower than in the Netherlands. During the same month Forbes Magazine in the US highlighted the plight of the worlds 447 dollar billionaires (up from 147 in 1986), the burden of whose combined wealth is now worth more than the annual incomes of at least half the world’s population. Over two hundred years on from the world’s first iron bridge, technology has failed to deliver the levels of release from poverty and drudgery that its
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proponents anticipated, and among the developed economies the UK has performed worst. Only the most demented of optimists can expect internetworking to challenge the basis of this kind of society. The differentials run deeper than the deepest cable and they stand every chance of being made worse by the tendency for the ‘haves’ to observe the world from insulated, screen-based cells rather than in among the community outside their front door. The opportunities that easy access to information can bring have never been distributed evenly among the members of any community, rich or poor, large or small. What is probably more important is that despite the convergence of whole range of new technologies, easy access to the information that can really empower and liberate people still looks likely to be the preserve of an affluent minority. Unless the economic sharing of all kinds of information becomes commonplace this discrepancy could occur to such an extent in the future that it will become impossible for the inhabitants of info-rich and info-poor communities to communicate with each other using similar assumptions. EXACERBATING THE LOSS OF COMMUNITY, MORE ECONOMIC DISPARITIES, PLUS THE DESTRUCTION OF REAL SPACE OPTIONS AND CHOICE Networking is about maximising returns by remote communications and therefore we should not be surprised if it makes us more remote from each other. This is a serious paradox. That which can connect us with others in far-off places can also reduce and inhibit the richest and most satisfying of human intercourse when we use it over short distances to replace meeting each other in real space. The new monasticism that encourages us to see ourselves as totally independent actors who need no more from life than singular access to the communications port of a computer or an interactive TV is the enemy of truly collective reason and debate, and we must not fall for it. Testing and reviewing information and knowledge within lively and articulate communities is still the most important safeguard of our democratic freedoms. Most community-based activities that involve meeting in real space, e.g. attending specialist clubs, voting, attendance at political, trade-union or voluntary club meetings, have already become a minority interest largely occupied by children and old people. Children are still ferried about by tired (and anxious) parents to ‘do things together’, and older people often travel to local dances, bingo and clubs or to go on
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social outings, etc., while the rest of us are increasingly locking ourselves away in rooms connected by wires and beams. The traditional British pub is probably now the most ubiquitous place of human engagement in a small space and, important and delightful a place of recreation as it is, it would be a dangerous pillar on which to maintain the discourse of a democracy. Accomplishing things together looks like becoming a forgotten art; associations of humans striving to achieve common goals look like becoming extinct. Even the voluntary work that contributes so much to the hidden GDP of the UK economy is in severe decline in many towns and villages of the UK, due to a growing tendency to disconnect from real space and stay inside. The vital connectedness between hearts and minds that once so animated social and informational exchange in the US and Europe is in danger of losing the important sparkle that it always gained from humans engaging with each other in small spaces. We have begun to disregard the benefits that accrue to societies from being socially connected, including it being good for your health. Harvard’s Dorothy Zinberg has summed this up well: Areas with high social connectedness produce better government services—less corruption and more efficiency. The drop in membership in voluntary associations is marked by a concomitant rise in cynicism and alienation. The convergence of these two growing trends—dropping out and logging on—exacerbates the serious consequences of a drop in political involvement and a rise in social isolation. (Zinberg 1994) The critical discourse that once illuminated issues, exposed humbug and highlighted new imbalances in the exercise of power is trickling away as citizens, once involved as actors in a vibrant and public national polity, are increasingly seduced by the safety of seclusion. Lodged more and more in private rather than public worlds, we face becoming units of consumption rather than the lifeblood of a democracy. Within such hibernation tendencies, hard-won community priorities can come to seem less important and may be easily surrendered in favour of more immediate, if trivial, private conveniences. In such private worlds we stand to lose that sense of community wherein the information which fuels liberty and oils the limbs of dissent also lies. By privileging a world of home-wired information, we may be feeding new depths of isolation where families have little connection with each other, other
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than by the common use of similar services. The political association and social kinship that has always been the prerequisite for articulating the common demands needed to satisfy common needs, will find little to nurture it in this new privatised social life. Such conditions may lull citizens into a somnambulance where they will discover too late their loss of authoritative citizenship. Their participation will increasingly be limited to what is expected from members of a market, a place where the rights of consumers always have more protection than the rights of citizens. Many social and economic factors are encouraging these tendencies—fear of violence, cheap entertainment at home, longdistance commuting, dormitory neighbourhoods, etc., but overlay a popular culture of electronic communication from remote terminals on top of these trends and we are looking at a world without legs. As citizens we operate in a number of spaces. Our communities have until comparatively recently been largely built up and developed around activities and transactions carried out in real space. Networking, by privileging the ever-more efficient production, analysis and consumption of information in digital form, is turning each of us into an audience and a market of one. Our wants and needs will be thoroughly documented in order to, for example, deliver a digitally customised newspaper to our desk or to highlight the appearance of a new range of domestic appliances, which according to our digitised profile should be just what we need (want?). Although the software agents required to do this are currently crude and primitive compared to what appears possible, networking has to be recognised as a serious component in driving out the serendipity and richness which we get from conducting our affairs in real spaces. All the UK banks are restructuring to cut the number of both employees and high street branches. It is a common story. Other physical institutions like local post offices, branch libraries, newsagents and small shops, long accepted as key binding elements in a community’s fabric because of the way they facilitate space for mixtures of economic and social intercourse, are also disappearing fast. Of course, commercial enterprises must compete and if they cannot compete via small units then they have to move on, but we cannot avoid the expectation that unless we create alternative, useful and convivial real spaces for people to meet in then we will drive more and more of them indoors. Many of these will not have the resources to plug into cyberspace alternatives, even if they were to find them attractive enough to want to try. Society as it has operated in real space may be a construct that as a theoretical issue has no more value than the construct of disconnected individuality, but it is a construct that has drawn out the
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greatest ideals and altruism from individuals who have diverted a part of their personal energy and resources to the common good, however capable they were of just looking after themselves. They did this because they inhabited and moved around the same spaces, shared the same problems and saw for themselves the variety of circumstances and conditions that their neighbours experienced at first hand. We cannot, even with access to the most sophisticated virtual worlds, see or feel moved in the same way. Remote means remote, and while occasional remoteness may corrupt, absolute remoteness will corrupt absolutely. Our current construction of society has created healthy and safe environments and it has extended the hand of opportunity to millions who, if left in the economic circumstances of their birth, would themselves have been able to contribute little. Networking also offers the scope for participation in serious political debates about our condition; indeed one could envisage a future in which citizens of the world could join together across the wires to influence and achieve valuable common goals, and as part of a process of building solidarity it may yet prove a powerful and potent instrument. But to be effective for all citizens, including those left outside the electronic club, it has to be followed up by action in the real space which they inhabit. This may be difficult. Tucked away in virtual worlds, we will be less organised, less streetwise and thus less effective in the real world because we will have forgotten how it works. PRIVACY: RHETORIC AND REALITY Interestingly the potential for intrusiveness, control and misuse that can arise as a result of networking computer technology, while inspiring a few commentators, mainly in the US, to take up the cudgels, has generally generated less heat than we might have expected. Nelkin (1993) has compared this complacency with the vigorous opposition that has characterised the dissemination of other technologies: Both information technology and biotechnology promise enormous benefits to society, and both present certain risks. Comparing the public response to these technologies and laying out the issues that have generated opposition, suggests the hierarchy of values that more broadly shape public attitudes towards science and technology. It also exposes certain contradictions between rhetoric and reality. We give lip-service to the importance of the right to privacy, the freedom from social
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control, and the preservation of democratic values. But the issues most likely to generate resistance to a given technology have more to do with its potential risk to health, its impact on organised interests, and especially its effect on moral and religious agendas. (Nelkin 1993) This is a very apt summary. The commitment that individuals, corporations and governments have to privacy has proved to be ephemeral. There is no broad consensus on the seriousness of the risks because they are largely invisible. A single incident may arouse concern but it is soon swept away by the day-to-day need to collude with a technology that most of us believe we cannot now live without. Also, quite a lot of this intrusion into personal privacy happens at sensitive points in our engagement with institutions: maybe when we seek credit, request a licence of some sort, open a new bank account or attempt to adopt a child—times when we least want to complain about intrusive systems or draw more attention to ourselves. In many countries ordinary citizens are now powerless to control the flow of information over networks that governments and other agencies hold on them, usually in multiple electronic databases that interface with each other via national bridges. This personal information may be benign, it may be mildly inaccurate or it may be inaccurate and defamatory; whatever its accuracy, redress against misuse, despite the Data Protection Act in the UK, is usually hard to obtain and is often only secured after serious damage has been done to the individual or organisation concerned. In October 1993 a BBC Panorama programme entitled ‘Secrets for sale’ revealed just how easy it was for private investigators in the UK to acquire confidential information on just about anyone. The programme demonstrated, via a group of four willing ‘victims’, how, for a price of between £50 and £200, they could collect information on their private bank and credit accounts, health and criminal records, national insurance, tax details and ex-directory telephone numbers. Those willing to pay for this information—mainly companies seeking information about their competitors and customers, as well as on their current and potential employees—seem to be impervious to the fact that this information can only be accessed illegally. UK bank staff are routinely bribed, as are senior police officers with access to the Police National Computer, a facility whose security is no doubt hindered by its networked linking of over 1,500 UK police stations. One seasoned private investigator noted how many of the police contacts that he had used and built up over his fifteen years in the business had now moved
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to more senior positions. Having helped before with ‘favours’ it was difficult for them to now withdraw from his service. Medical information is particularly vulnerable, and valuable. At its Annual Meeting in 1996 the British Medical Association voted to oppose linking hospital databases to the national network until confidentiality can be guaranteed. The BMA’s IT Committee has heard evidence from a lawyer working at an AIDS clinic in Boston who reported that the patients always go to see her first to find out what they can safely tell their doctor, as the clinic’s computer records could, quite legally, be accessed by insurance and health insurance companies. A US banker who happened also to be the director of another American health centre used information from its database to call in the debts of cancer patients being treated there; and patient information in the UK is known to have already changed hands insecurely. Interestingly the problem is not with mischievous hackers on the outside breaking in, rather it is people inside the health services of the world who are likely to be tempted to sell personal information. It is ironic that so much of the information that people feel is their due as citizens and voters, they often cannot obtain, while personal information about themselves which is held by the state and ostensibly for the communal good, and which should not be openly available, can be traded so easily and so cheaply. THE EVIL EMPIRES THAT ALWAYS MANIPULATE NEW TECHNOLOGIES Pornographers, fundamentalist religious movements, paedophile networks, racists, terrorists, ethnic cleansers, electronic stalkers—all these will make use of the Internet and global networks to expand the range, and sometimes the profit, of their seedy activities. Police forces all over the world are currently bemused as to how to deal with the abuse of public networks used to smuggle bytes of sadism and violence across national borders, and we are in for some big debates about what we should be allowed to do with these networks. When is a server a publisher? What is a newsgroup? And so on. All forms of publishing technology have raised issues like these in the past, but the freedom and liberty of the wired individual will tax our old moral and ethical values like no other form of publication has done. The digital copying of everything that is not nailed down will also tax good relations between nations and companies, and a select band of lawyers will make fortunes out of advising on the law (or the lack of it) concerning international and national copyright. As the old map makers of the fifteenth century
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put it when they did not know what was over the next ocean, ‘here be dragons’ indeed. Any crystal-ball gazing into the future of networking technology is a complex business because we are always enmeshed in a crisis of progress. Our motives are always mixed but socially negotiated factors, such as trust in the system one belongs to; confidence in the way that science has been applied before; political and scientific secrecy that has excluded us from potential harms or side-effects during the development phases of past technologies; our experience with the previous impacts of market forces; our faith in the capacity of our political systems to distribute the benefits of technology—all these represent reasonable axes of concern. Science transforms human identity but we also want it to be subject to the scrutiny of independent moral principles. But these principles themselves shift as science, for example as in bioengineering, declares new possibilities that in themselves transform the cartography of what we choose to regard as acceptable behaviour. Internetworking operates on many levels. It is heavily diffused throughout the rest of the technical pantheon, ‘a pack horse in the great affairs’ of so many other technologies from missile systems and financial speculation to realtime medicine over great distance and the monitoring of dangerous chemical processes. Its valuable contribution as a ‘carrier’ within these domains will no doubt go from strength to strength. It is its role in facilitating the economic and social rejuvenation of large, as opposed to elite, populations and its exacerbation of the already discernible drift towards isolation and alienation that I believe is much more questionable. We will probably have to wait another ten years or so before we can assess the impact of the main areas of concern noted here. In 2010 those babies born in the sunny mid–1960s of reasonably well-to-do parents in developed economies, who will have grown up with computers, e-mail, computer games and CD information to help with the homework, will be in their fifties and occupying leadership roles in business and government. In their teens when IBM launched the PC, using computers to ‘connect’ will be second nature to them. However, they will be torn between two opposing ideologies. They will know that to leave large populations of citizens outside the networking club will mean: 1 Handing competitive advantage to those nations with more egalitarian and dynamic educational systems;
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2 The creation of a sizable subculture who will not be able to access some of the basic tools of a modern society both at work and at play. But they will also know that access to more and more information creates some great contradictions. Less knowledge because of all the knowledge that is now signalled to exist. Less certainty as they are exposed to an explosion of options and counter-strategies. More anxieties as the complexities of life become more visible but no more comprehensible. Less certain as facts and expertise become more disputable and as less and less knowledge is derived directly from our own senses. Instead of a world of greater certainty they will know a world where confidence is always qualified by anxious suspicions of incompleteness. The Utopian certainty of the young, predominantly male computer infatuates of the 1980s has been seriously qualified by some expensive mistakes in setting up big computer systems, the infection of software by ‘designer’ viruses—McAfee the anti-virus software vendor reckons that 90 per cent of companies experience a virus attack every month (Taylor 1997:7), by the hacker’s easy invasion of ‘secure’ environments and by fears of hardcore pornography trickling quietly into school classrooms. We have learnt to take the vehemence of the techno-optimists with more than a hard-diskfull of salt. There will be great riches and great opportunities from internetworking but there are no certainties, and we have little evidence so far to suggest that all economic groups will secure similar benefits. Without a major shift away from the current economic paradigm, we cannot doubt that it will be the economics of profit rather than of social enrichment that will be prioritised. NOTE 1 Doyal and Gough (1991) during 1990 tested a set of needs indicators in association with economic, social and political variables in 128 rich and poor countries, and discovered that only those with regulated (i.e. not entirely free-market) capitalist structures were associated with the highest need-satisfaction levels.
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Chapter 3 Who are the world’s information-poor? Mike Holderness
INTRODUCTION ‘It’s strange,’ said the civil servant from Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry in March 1997, ‘but last year everyone was talking about the Internet as “community”. This year, it’s all “electronic commerce”.’ ‘That’s easy,’ responded your cynical author. ‘In London, if you organise a seminar called “Building virtual communities” you’re lucky to get £50 a person. If you organise a seminar on “Electronic commerce”, you can and do charge £975 per person per day—plus Value Added Tax.’ The communications revolution—the Internet for short—is still so new that discussing it entails telling stories. The journalism is history in its first draft: this can be no more than a second draft. When the Internet reached wide public notice—in Britain as long ago as 1993—it was discussed as a communication medium. Much was made of its startling new features and its possible impacts on our cultures. Possibly the feature which gained most attention was its anonymity—or in the words of the notorious New Yorker cartoon, ‘On the Internet, noone knows you’re a dog’. The more interesting features of this new medium, to this author, are these:
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• This is, above all, inherently a many-to-many medium. It is thus potentially as different from the culture of the book—of few-to-many communication—as that is from the oral tradition of few-to-few. • Everyone who is on the Internet is in the same place. There is very little difference in cost and convenience between Internet communication with someone on the other side of the city and with someone on the other side of the world. Communities of communication can therefore be expected to form around common interests and not around common physical location: ‘ideography’ replaces geography (Holderness 1994a). From the notions of anonymous communication, from the relative ease of ‘publishing’, and with a certain amount of support from the above more fundamental features, there arose a rhetoric of the Internet as an eraser of difference. In the brave (perhaps) new (truly) world, ‘the native home of Mind’ (Barlow 1993), all intelligent entities would be free to communicate without restriction of gender, colour or tribe. And then the Men in Suits hit the net, and the picture, or the discourse, changed. The continued growth of the network required investment; investment required ways of making money out of a network which had thus far been financed invisibly from education and research budgets, mostly in the USA (Holderness 1994b). The emphasis changed from talk to trade: Telecommunications has made it possible to develop global markets for goods, services, money and information. The rise of the global information economy in turn is transforming human life, nationally, regionally, locally, and within the family. Today, everything is changing because of telecommunications—the nature of work, relationships with people, media, messages, and patterns of political life. The talk is of information superhighways and global information infrastructures, with the potential to improve the ‘human capital’—the health, education and skills of everyone. (Dr Pekka Tarjanne, Secretary-General, International Telecommunications Union) A minor discourse had already developed about the possible effect of exclusion from this new world of communication and learning. While the Internet was almost entirely a phenomenon of academia, it was clear that places which did not have access to the Internet were going to fall
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behind in the research and education stakes (Holderness 1993b). Assume for the moment that you can type, in English. Assume that you have access to the necessary equipment. Assume that you are able and prepared to learn the sometimes baroque commands needed to access the system. Assume that you are tolerant of the fact that when you make a mistake, as you will, the system may fail to notify you at all, or may throw screeds of gobbledegook at you:
For these assumptions to be true, you’re quite likely either to be a member of an academic institution in a western industrialised country, or very well-to-do in world terms. You’re also likely to be male. And the public area of the news system bears this out. A high proportion of messages—over 90 per cent in an unrepresentative sample of discussions of physics—comes from the USA. An even higher proportion (of those with identifiable senders) comes from men. (Holderness 1993a) Such questioning of the universality of the Internet was met with hostility from insiders. For example: The [above] article is to be commended for pointing out some of the new uses for the net, but somehow, just like in a conversation with a religious zealot, the feminist dogma just had to surface…. This attempt to view and understand the nature of the net through the refractive, narrowly focused theology of a fringe group flaws the article very badly. (Landwehr 1993) Four years later, it remains the case that the sharpest, most clearly enumerable divides in cyberspace are those based on where one lives and how much money one has. As increasing amounts of trade move into cyberspace—whether trade in the information of facts and entertainment whose true home may be said to be the network, or trade in material goods mediated through promotion, contacts, contracts and payments in cyberspace—we face a growing risk that these divides become selfreinforcing. We face another depressing vicious cycle of increasing relative poverty: not only ‘information poverty’, but relative material poverty, the absence of what others come to regard as material necessities. It is not difficult to
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construct scenarios in which absence of access to communications leads to local increases in absolute poverty. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, information is becoming at least as important as land and physical capital. In the future, the distinction between developed and non-developed countries will be joined by distinctions between fast countries and slow countries, networked nations and isolated ones. (Baranshamaje et al. 1995:2)
In order to assess the depth of this divide, the first section of this chapter examines the measures of the spread of ‘Internet access’ among the world’s people, while the second section considers the very different levels of ‘Internet access’ available in different places. The situation is changing extremely rapidly. The third section examines as an example the spread of Internet access in Africa. What does it matter? Those who do have access to the new communication technologies, of course, gain access to new sources of information and, probably, to new forms of cultural expression; and those who do not are thus relatively deprived. But this is not all. The fourth section of this chapter describes ways in which inadequate access to communications may affect people’s material wellbeing. These sections indicate that the market, left to itself, will not address the inequality of people’s access to communications. Positive political intervention will be required. The final section concludes by briefly examining some of the directions this should take if it is to bridge rather than exacerbate the divide. HOW WIDELY IS THE NET CAST? In September 1969 four computers on the west coast of the United States were connected together as part of an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) experiment (Hobbes 1994). This was the first physical manifestation of the Internet. Since then, statistics have been maintained on the numbers of computers connected to the Internet and, since the first international connections were made (to the UK and Norway) in 1973, of the states and territories in which the network is accessible. These record an impressive case of continuing exponential growth. Especially when presented in graphic form, they give an impression of
WHO ARE THE WORLD’S INFORMATION-POOR? 39
Figure 3.1 International Internet connectivity Source: Landweber 1996
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the Internet spreading inexorably across the globe. Larry Landweber’s maps, distributed by the Internet Society, categorise territories as having full Internet access, Bitnet but not the Internet proper, electronic mail only through UUCP or FIDOnet links (see Glossary) or no connectivity. Landweber’s latest map (1996) suggests an almost complete project: there were by 1996 no countries in the ‘Bitnet but not Internet’ category (Figure 3.1). Almost the whole world, it seems from a casual inspection of this map, has turned Internet-coloured. The sun never sets on the Internet; it appears to reach everywhere except some war-torn corners of the world. Consider, however, that only in North America, Japan, Europe, and Australia is there a genuine national communications infrastructure. There may be a full Internet connection at the university in Ulan Bator, but ten kilometres away there are no telephones. As a first approximation at a realistic map (Figure 3.2) the author has faded the colours of non-metropolitan areas outside the OECD countries. In addition, in an attempt to correct the perceptual distortion inherent in the map projection used, major tundras, icefields and deserts have been ‘greyed out’. The picture is rather different; and it is not dissimilar to a map of per capita income—or, for that matter, one of where the white folks are. This map, it should be noted, is an approximate freehand adjustment for illustrative purposes. Table 3.1 shows the availability of telephones and PCs in the top forty world economies. It demonstrates the wide disparities even within this severely limited range of countries. It does not deal with disparities within the countries in question. The author has not found any data on this; but given the clear correlation with cash income, it is scarcely credible that the balance is not overwhelmingly in favour of urban men. The availability of communication capacity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for individuals to join the communications revolution. Consider what an individual needs in order to send and receive electronic mail: • A computer (a 1990 ‘antique’ will do nicely for sending messages); • A modem (to convert computer files to and from a code of squawks which can be sent over the phone); • A functioning phone line (of relatively high quality by southern standards); • A reliable supply of electricity;
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Figure 3.2 Landweber's map adjusted by the auther Source: Landweber 1996
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Table 3.1 Multimedia access: main telephone lines, television sets and personal computers per 100 inhabitants, major economies, 1994
Source: ITU World Telecommunication Indicators Database
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• An ‘account’ for their modem to dial up (that is, permission to use facilities on a computer which itself has a link to the rest of the Internet). A new computer with a modem costs about one year’s unemployment benefit in the UK; or about the annual income of three schoolteachers in Calcutta; or about fifty times development economists’ estimate of a bare subsistence income in Calcutta (six rupees a day). RICH NET OR POOR NET? In order to understand the full nature of the divide, it is necessary to delve a little into the technology. Not all Internet connections are created equal. Our Mission is to provide an Information footpath within the country interconnecting Universities, Schools, Government societies, R&D organisations and research laboratories throughout the Nation. (Ernet, India’s Education and Research Network home page: Ernet 1997, emphasis added) The author connects to the Internet over a normal UK telephone line at a speed of 28,800 to 40,000 bits per second (see Glossary). To fetch the text of this chapter at that speed takes about ten seconds; each of the (rather low-fi) maps above takes twenty to thirty seconds. Until Spring 1997 the whole of India’s Education and Research Network (Ernet) relied on a link to the outside world with a capacity of 64,000 bits per second—which is to say that the author and two friends had between them more Internet communication capacity than all the students and researchers in India put together. The author alone has three times the ‘bandwidth’ of the entire University of Madras. Ernet had by April 1997 trebled its international bandwidth; its ‘information footpath’ was now equivalent to the connectivity of a whole half-dozen individuals in the north. The result has been a severe bottleneck in interactive electronic communication between India and the rest of the world: the quotation above arrived from Ernet’s website in India at a rate of approximately thirty bits per second, which indicates that it was at that moment competing for bandwidth with up to 4,000 other requests to transfer Web documents in or out of India.
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The newer technology of the World Wide Web places much more strenuous demands on communications links—because users demand ‘real-time’ responses rather than being prepared to wait an hour or ten— than does electronic mail. Consider a situation where two suppliers are competing for purchasers’ attention as they browse the Web for products: one, in the USA, can respond within seconds and the other, in India, takes hours. Meanwhile Internet technology is not sufficient for the multimedia entertainment and ‘infotainment’ applications envisaged for relatively wealthy consumers in the north. As some southern countries are expanding their entire Internet connectivity from an intermittent 9,600 or 14,400 bits per second to a whole one megabit per second, ‘virtual reality’ applications which require more than one megabit per second per household are being dreamed up (Holderness 1996b). Revised Internet ‘protocols’ to deal with greater need for security, and a massively expanded demand for ‘addresses’, are under development (Castineyra et al. 1992). This is already being transformed into a subset (Malis 1995) of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) (ATM Forum 1997). Possible interim solutions to the problem of basic public connectivity include, in urban areas, fixed-location cellular phones, which are often cheaper than putting a lot of copper into the ground. However, the amount of digital information which these systems can transport is not likely to be sufficient for more demanding applications than electronic mail. Installing cellular base stations in rural areas with few potential subscribers is not a profitable activity, though in some cases it may offer a cheaper means of installing subsidised telephones than copper wire. There are a number of proposals for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites which would provide telephone service to a hand-held receiver anywhere on the surface of the planet. The Iridium scheme (Lockheed 1993) led by Motorola (Motorola 1995) proposes handheld mobile phones with 9,600-bit-per-second data connections for $2,000 (Holderness 1993c). The similar Teledesic scheme (Teledesic 1995) proposed by Bill Gates of Microsoft fame and another billionaire, Craig McCaw, promises higher bandwidth. As with Iridium, Teledesic’s coverage for the south is a side-effect of Newton’s laws of gravity: it is simply not possible, as a result of Newton’s laws, to put satellites into orbits which cover only the US or only the industrialised north. To cover the plum markets using low-orbit satellites, in other words, entails covering the entire world.
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Iridium was in 1993 promising service in 1998, and Teledesic in 1995 was promising to go into service in 2000. It is not unreasonable to guess that the recent lack of announcements from either party is related to difficult investment decisions: the projected cost of Teledesic is US$9 billion. It is rumoured that Iridium managers have declared their target market to be the ‘one million people who pay first-class air fare from their own pockets’. All these systems, based on radio transmissions, suffer from the problem that bandwidth in the radio spectrum is a limited resource (one can no more create new spectrum than one can insert a brandnew colour between green and blue). Massive use in urban areas would rapidly exhaust it. Bandwidth in fibre-optic cables, however, is limited only by the number of cables one can lay and connect; and a single fibre can theoretically provide as much bandwidth as the entire radio spectrum. Africa One (AT&T 1996), proposed by AT&T, is a grand-scale solution to Africa’s backwardness in telecommunications. The proposal is to spend US$2.65 billion laying fibre-optic cables around the shore of the continent. The total bandwidth would be forty gigabits per second (see Glossary). The financial decisions on the scheme were due to be made in late 1996, but no news on implementation was forthcoming by March 1997. If the telecommunication authorities of (initially) the coastal African countries pre-purchase enough capacity, it may still go ahead. Connecting landlocked countries presents interesting questions of political trust and stability. WHO’S WIRING AFRICA? The first steps towards wiring Africa were taken by intrepid activists with a mission to communicate, fanning out across the continent with rucksacks full of modems. The French did their bit in a rather more elegant way. By January 1996 it was possible to use electronic mail at least in the capital cities of most African countries. The breakdown of technologies (excluding South Africa) was as shown in Table 3.2. The major player in this phase, as Randy Bush’s table shows, was GreenNet in London. GreenNet is a charitable organisation depending on subscription income from northern individuals, activists and NGOs, with minor amounts of funding from development organisations. It is
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Table 3.2 E-mail hosts in Africa, January 1996
Source: From an internet information posting maintained by Randy Bush. (Note: version 15 of Landweber’s map (Section 1) shows an increase in full internet access since this table was issued.) Note: ★ (Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Zambia) Note: ★★ (Dakar has IP-over-×.25 too)
affiliated to APC, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC 1996). Most of the remainder of Africa’s connectivity passed through the French government development research organisation ORSTOM (Orstom 1996) in Montpellier. Between mid–1993 and the end of 1995 GreenNet forwarded 2.2 million messages between the developed and less-developed worlds, at a total cost of US$80,000: an average of $0.036 per message (Banks 1996). It did this mostly using the lowest technology applicable to the Internet, direct-dial FIDOnet connections. FIDOnet was developed by computer hobbyists starting in 1983, following the spread of relatively affordable personal computers from the early 1980s (Hardy 1993). The computers which form FIDOnet store messages, usually until night time, and then dial a neighbouring computer to exchange ‘what’s new’ through their modems. Selected computers dial ‘hosts’ with full Internet connections to exchange messages between FIDOnet and the Internet. FIDO users can exchange messages—delayed by up to twentyfour hours—with anyone on the Internet. They can extract information from some databases and some parts of the World Wide Web by sending carefully formatted e-mail to ‘servers’, which interpret their requests and return the results by e-mail. They can participate in some international discussion fora—but they cannot do anything which requires a continuous, realtime connection. Dutch journalist Michiel Hegener calculates that to move a 2,000word message between the Netherlands and Ghana costs US$34 if you make a voice call from Amsterdam and read it out; $7.00 if you send it
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as a closely typed fax; and $0.20 to $0.40 if you send it as e-mail. If you put it in the post, it may or may not arrive (Hegener 1995). This kind of low-tech electronic mail is thus the only kind of intercontinental communication that many southern organisations can afford. It is not surprising the the major impetus for connectivity in Africa came from development organisations and non-governmental organisations, which have always had an urgent need for rapid international communication but do not have the resources to set up, for example, private satellite uplinks. Such low- tech electronic connectivity, however, is available only where there are telephone lines. Over the past ten years about 200 million new main telephone lines have been installed worldwide, bringing the total to some 575 million. The proportion of lines in lower income countries increased from 20 per cent to 30 per cent over the same period. This is certainly progress in the right direction. But the lower income countries contain 85 per cent of the world’s population— there is a long way to go. The grossly uneven distribution between population and access to telephone lines is frequently illustrated in terms of teledensity— the number of main telephone lines per 100 inhabitants. Average teledensity in high income countries is now 49, increasing from 38 ten years ago. Over the same period the average teledensity in the rest of the world rose from just 2.0 to 3.5, some countries even experiencing a drop in teledensity as the installation of main lines failed to keep up with population growth. In most high income countries about 10 per cent of the population live in the capital city, which is served by about 10 per cent of the telephone lines in the country. The situation is dramatically different in many low income countries with a predominantly rural economy. Here only 4 per cent of the population is concentrated in the capital city, but they benefit from nearly a third of the telephone lines. Rural areas suffer from really severe telecommunications blight. (Sharrock 1995) In Ghana, for example, in spring 1995 the country’s total network connectivity was ten 14,400-bit-per-second leased lines to Cambridge, England, costing $7,500 a month each (Hegener 1995). One was used by the SWIFT inter-bank clearance system, and another by the air traffic control network SITA—which reaches parts of the world which
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no other network touches and plans to offer Internet services wherever governments allow competition with the state telephone company. By early 1996 the private Network Computer Systems Internet host in Ghana’s capital had 140 subscribers paying US$1300 a year each. Martin Mulligan of the Financial Times points out that this is the entire annual income of a Ghanaian journalist (Mulligan 1995). ‘Our customers are expats, large companies, and a few Ghanaian researchers’, Network Computer Systems Deputy Director William Tevie told Hegener (Hegener 1995). To compile an exhaustive list of commercial projects in Africa would be exhausting. It seems reasonable to predict, however, that within the next three years, if not sooner, most capital cities which are not in the thick of armed conflict are likely to have a satellite connection. The Gondwana project, based in Belgium and Zimbabwe and dedicated to improving connectivity worldwide, has identified at least forty agencies and NGOs which have Internet-related projects in Africa (Gondwana 1996). One, for example, the US-based Leland initiative, has $15 million to spend in twenty countries. It was launched in January 1996 after US Vice-President Albert Gore had invited the USAID agency to lead a US effort to ‘bring the Global Information Infrastructure to Africa’. By the end of January 1997 it had signed Memorandums of Understanding with the governments of Mali, Madagascar, Rwanda, Mozambique, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Benin and Guinea-Bissau. In February 1997 it commenced a programme of technical training for African institutions and individuals (Leland 1997). In March 1995 a World Bank report noted that, using Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) satellite dishes, ‘full Internet nodes could be established in the forty-seven sub-Saharan African countries currently lacking this level of service for approximately $30 million, including the first year’s operating cost and exclusive of local labor costs’ (Baranshamaje et al. 1995:14). We should be aware that the geography of communication capacity is much more complicated than a north-south divide. The author lives in a largely Bangladeshi-populated area of London, ten minutes’ brisk walk from the Bank of England. That walk crosses the route of a British Telecom tunnel which has presumably carried huge quantities of fibreoptic bandwidth for the City financial institutions since the technology was available (the existence of this tunnel was officially secret before UK telecoms privatisation). But cable television—which can be used as a low-cost, high-speed Internet connection—was only just arriving in a
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pocket of the City at the time of writing. (It must be understood that the author wants cable television only for the side-effect of fast Internet access, not for any frivolous reason.) Nevertheless, the disparities in the south are enormously greater. The disparities between urban and rural areas in the south are large and some current development policies will increase them. The Action Plan from the first International Telecommunications Union World Telecommunications Development Conference, held in Buenos Aires in March 1994, set these goals: Special assistance to the least developed countries is given top priority. And for the LDCs specific targets were set for the year 2000: fully meeting the demand for telecommunication services in urban areas. This means virtually eliminating the waiting list for services by that year, which translates into an average urban main line density of five per 100 population achieving a rural main line density of one main line per 10,000 inhabitants. (Sharrock 1995) The FIDO systems and other low-tech solutions cannot be expected to meet the entire long-term communications needs of the populations they serve. But they do have a mission to extend communication to as wide a range of their societies as possible, and to offer support and training. Many of the small-scale projects are concerned that the income upon which they depend for their training and outreach work is jeopardised by the arrival of commercial ISPs, creaming off their heaviest users. Those users cannot be blamed for preferring a fully interactive connection over the delays of store-and-forward technology. In January 1996 StarCom arrived in Kampala, with the backing of US Sprint and the Norwegian phone company Telenor. It provides one megabit per second of full Internet capacity in Kampala through a VSAT satellite dish (Banks 1996). But Mike Jensen, who was in at the beginning of WorkNet, a GreenNet affiliate in the south, and now manages to combine street-level assistance to community groups with high-level telecommunications conferences, stresses that the people on the ground are more pragmatic (Jensen 1996). Charles Musisi in Uganda has negotiated with StarCom for Mukla to use its bandwidth—part of that set aside, under the agreement with Norway, for free use by universities. Commercial ISPs must start by wiring the richest sectors of the population. Under the market, bandwidth is distributed by ability to
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pay. Since increased bandwidth will increase ability to pay, there is a serious risk of starting another vicious circle of increasing economic inequality. High-quality connectivity is also at present being made available only in the cities. It can be argued that a major reason why people migrate from the countryside to towns, and from small towns to cities, is ‘bandwidth’: the higher communication capacity of a crowded place, of a factory compared to a rural workshop. It is not entirely fanciful to suggest that current trends in telecommunications will exacerbate the problems of urban migration when, in theory and leaving aside the economics, they ought to do the opposite by dissociating communication from physical proximity. This is enough cause for concern. The same communications technology, used in broadcast mode, ensures that almost all citizens of the planet are informed of the conditions of life of the most privileged. Watching street children in Calcutta watching Dallas and MTV on satellite television raises a number of interesting philosophical questions about the nature of poverty. It must raise, too, immediate political questions. What will be the effects on the aspirations of this generation? One immediate and clearly apparent result of the massively increased visibility of relative poverty in the past decade is massive resentment among the younger generation. Some of this may be channelled into backlash and fundamentalist rejection: the author suspects that the burning down of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Bangalore in February 1996 may turn out to be a kind of iconic event—but whether its historical equivalent turns out to be the church in Dresden where citizen’s groups opposing the government met in 1986, or the notorious beer cellar in Munich in 1923, remains to be seen. WHAT IS AT STAKE? Imagine, for a moment, a future in which the only multinationals are AT&T and UPS. In a fully wired world, there is no reason why all economic transactions cannot be negotiated directly between those who have the goods and those who have the needs. If you want mangoes, and you want them now, why not browse the producers’ offers, select an exquisite variety from a farmers’ cooperative in East Timor, place and pay for an order, and have them delivered to your door?
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AT&T conveys the ‘bits’ of contract and funds; United Parcels Service delivers the ‘atoms’ of physical trade. The bits/atoms distinction was, of course, popularised by Nicholas Negroponte in his Being Digital (Negroponte 1994). In principle, considering trade in the abstract, all other goods and services—from crude oil supply and tanker leases to cigarette papers and horoscopes—could be traded in a continuous global ‘farm-gate’ auction (Holderness 1996c). This is no more than some current management shibboleths— downsizing, just-in-time delivery, delayering and autonomous divisions —taken to a logical conclusion. And there are signs that something like it is happening. Air freight is now so cheap to make the shipment of humble vegetables economic and computers enable Hilbre [a farm an hour’s drive west of Harare in Zimbabwe] and its customers to make, track and record orders all the way from field to dining room table…. If you are buying baby corn from Marks and Spencer tomorrow, it may have been picked in Zimbabwe yesterday. (Prest and Bowen 1996) Hilbre owner Ian Gordon also exports to mainland Europe, Australasia and the Far East. In any case, an increasing proportion of trade in and with the developed world is trade in pure ‘bits’ of information. The imminent advent of electronic cash (Chaum 1990) is likely to create a parallel economy, largely divorced from the ‘real world’ (Holderness 1996a). In 1994 the European Union’s Directorate-General XIII projected that nearly half the new jobs created in the EU before 2010 would be information-related (Wilkinson 1995). The major area of uncertainty in that projection is whether those jobs will be created in the EU—or in the few high-literacy, highly connected, relatively low-wage areas of the south. The low-literacy, poorly connected areas can be predicted to slide to an even lower rung on the wage economy ladder (Holderness 1995). The possible implications are quite startling. For the past two millennia, for example, the terms of trade between Africa and the rest of the world have been set by the middlemen—whether they be Phoenicians, the Swahili-speakers who traded with the Romans, or British imperialists. Eliminating the trader, the wholesaler and the
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shipowner holds out the prospect of, at long last, achieving fair terms of trade. Ultimately, if someone can sew shirts at home and make $4 each selling them to shops, or even directly to consumers, for perhaps $15 including shipping—why go to a factory and sew them for $0.05 each when they sell for $40? One risk which development organisations can and must address is that inequality of access to communications may promote increases in absolute poverty. The scenario above, in which control of (for example) textile export markets is concentrated and wage levels in the remaining home-market sector are depressed, is a risk to be taken seriously. Africa needs to seize this opportunity, quickly. If African countries cannot take advantage of the information revolution and surf this great wave of technological change, they may be crushed by it. In that case, they are likely to be even more marginalized and economically stagnant in the future than they are today. Catching the wave will require visionary leadership in Africa. The World Bank, other international agencies, bilaterals, and NGOs can all help. (Baranshamaje et al. 1995:2) It is not clear how any of this will affect the very poorest—who have only heard gossip about telephones, perhaps—but it is all too often unclear what any kind of infrastructural development has to do with these people. The consequences go beyond the economic sphere. Political power in these days rests to a significant extent on access to information and the means to disseminate information. This, too, is being concentrated in the hands of urban elites. BACK TO COMMUNITY US Vice-President Gore was quoted by the World Bank in 1995 as saying that: The liberating effects of these technologies have been clear around the world. Satellite stations brought medical advice to those tending to the suffering in Rwanda. Radio and TV broadcasts in South Africa promoted the role of voting in a democracy. Wireless technologies are allowing emerging nations to leap-frog
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the expensive stages of wiring a communication network—for example, in Thailand, where the ratio of cellular telephone users to the population is twice that of the US. (Gore 1995)
A report from the Rand Corporation—hardly a hotbed of aid lobbying— noted that: With greater than 99.9 per cent certainty…one can reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between democracy and interconnectivity. Furthermore, the coefficient on interconnectivity is large. A single point increase on the interconnectivity scale corresponds to an increase of 5 points in democracy rating. Governments that try to squelch the new information technologies to protect their monopoly on power do so essentially at the peril of economic growth. This is…precisely what leading analysts have been predicting: ‘For nations to be economically competitive, they must allow individual citizens access to information networks and computer technology. In doing so, they cede significant control over economic, cultural, and eventually political events in their countries’ (Builder 1993:160). (Kedzie 1995) Almost everyone who comes to use the new communication technologies can see liberatory potentials—often different potentials according to their fields of interest and activity. If one focuses on women achieving equal participation in society and the economy, then it is easy to see that these technologies for communication-at-a-distance are relatively gender-neutral. (But developments like videoconferencing may, within fifteen years in the north, challenge this assumption of gender-neutrality.) If one focuses on universal access to education, then probably no better technology than the Internet can be imagined. Anyone, anywhere, can already explore for themselves a huge body of knowledge, and stands some chance of being able to consult leading experts in many fields. (For ‘anywhere’, of course, read ‘anywhere with phone lines and computers’.) If one focuses on political self-organisation, then enormous potential is apparent for people who have mobilised in geographical communities
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to build global networks of mutual support. Fishing villages on India’s west coast could make their concerns heard in European Union debates on fishing policy; and communities in Vietnam could offer their experience and support directly to mineclearance programmes in Bosnia. This does presuppose a common language; and at present the Internet handles Serbo-Croat poorly and Vietnamese not at all. In those countries in the south with reasonable political stability, commercial enterprise is likely to provide connectivity, to the capital city at least, in the very near future. Initially this may happen through entrepreneurs—with overseas backing, which may include logistical support by aid agencies—installing satellite dishes. In the longer term, projects of the scale of Africa One—the proposed high-capacity fibre-optic communication ring around Africa, described in the first section of this chapter—are likely to mature to meet growing demand. It is also possible that projects to provide global satellite connectivity, such as Iridium and/or Teledesic and/or one of their competitors will render physical location practically irrelevant, for those who can afford the receiver equipment. Direct satellite links such as those promised by Iridium and Teledesic offer a solution only for an absolutely wealthy minority. In this sense, the problem for development agencies and economists is not now one of connecting countries, but of connecting people. Development organisations should form relationships with commercial ISPs where they exist, as with the Norwegian support for StarCom mentioned above. They should use these relationships, and their influence with governments, to promote telecommunications regulation regimes which promote community access. One possibility is to lobby countries to impose ‘Universal Service Requirements’, with timetables for compliance, as a condition of licenses to new ISPs. A telephone company operating under a Universal Service Requirement is legally bound to provide service to anyone who asks for it, wherever they are in the relevant territory; the extra charges which the company may make for remote connections are regulated. This, however, runs counter to a very powerful ‘deregulatory’ current in worldwide telecommunications policy. It may be practicable, however, to require operators to provide low-cost connections to schools and community facilities as capacity is installed in their areas. Commercial enterprises may well resist even such mild regulatory initiatives. There appears to be an illogical prejudice that all regulation should be resisted. It is illogical because efforts of any kind to promote
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widespread access to communication, beyond the very small elite markets which exist now, are building a potentially huge market for such services in the near future. Commercial enterprises should be reminded at every opportunity that the large market for private Internet connectivity in the United States was built entirely on university students being given access free at the point of use—and then looking around for ways to stay connected when they finished their courses. The primary focus of financial aid for communications should be shifted immediately from the country-level infrastructure programmes to the village level—with the exception of ITU-level support for programmes such as Africa One. This reverses the priorities set out by the Buenos Aires Conference and listed above. The greatest effects have over the last decade been achieved by the programmes with the lowest budgets, such as GreenNet. There is scope —and funding can in principle be redirected to these—for hundreds or thousands of such outreach projects to work at local level throughout the south. The major restriction on the emergence of such projects may be the supply of individuals having enough personal commitment to the concept to go through the organisational hoops required to obtain funding. It is unrealistic to expect economic development to progress at such a rate as to enable large numbers of individuals to take advantage of the connectivity thus provided. Communal access seems an obvious alternative. Andriette Esterhuysen, director of SANGOnet (the renamed WorkNet) reports for example ‘a lot of discussion about community access in South Africa—for example through multi-purpose community centres. But there’s not a lot of clear direction or commitment from the centre’ (Esterhuysen 1996). At present, the onus for providing that sense of direction almost certainly rests with SANGOnet. Provision of connectivity through community centres of various kinds does seem to be the main route to providing access for civil society. In particular, in most of the world, connectivity provided to commercial enterprises will reach only locally rich men. Collective or communal access points seem to be the only way to extend access to women, children and male employees. It might be objected that large areas of the world have no libraries and poor schools: why worry about modems for people who have no books? But is there a reason why aid agencies should not assist these areas to leap directly to remote-learning capability—in other words, for
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development aid financed on the back of interest in communications to create virtual libraries and schools where there are now no real ones? Such projects stand the highest chance of avoiding the ‘rusting tractor’ outcome of failed development projects. Maintenance of computers and Internet connections in the south is difficult; it is likely to be achieved only where there is a close connection between indigenous organisations with the need, and outside facilitators with the means. Such organisations must also shift their focus from country level to village level. They may find that their work becomes less glamorous: eventually it will integrate completely with health and education aid work. Eventually, in other words, telecommunications should disappear as a separate concern, and become an integral part of human capacitybuilding work.
Chapter 4 The ‘crisis’ in the urban public realm1 Alessandro Aurigi and Stephen Graham
Public space in cities has never been fully inclusive, and has always been infused with complex combinations of social, gender, ethnic and geographical exclusion and inclusion. To many authors, however, current urban trends threaten to undermine the very notion that an urban public realm exists supporting inclusive, face-to-face, collective discourses within cities (see for example Sennett 1994; Sorkin 1992; Davis 1990; Mitchell 1995; Boyer 1994). Such commentators attest to the creeping privatisation and commodification of urban public spaces, the rising fear of crime and the ‘other’ in the postmodern city, the erosion of urban social cohesion, and the social and spatial splintering of the contemporary metropolis. In American cities like Los Angeles, it is now common to doubt whether ‘public space’ still exists at all, as extreme social and spatial fragmentation, fortressing and privatism are alleged to have triumphed over (always tenuous) collective notions of public mixing in public space (see Sorkin 1992). In this scenario, some aspects of which are also increasingly apparent in European cities, the North American urban public realm is seen to have collapsed (or be collapsing). US city centres have become packaged, ‘themed’ and commodified for consumption and leisure, with access based on ability to pay rather than some universal notion of the rights of citizens (Gottdeiner 1997). Enclosed malls, which subtly exclude socially ‘undesirable’ groups, have emerged to dominate suburbs. And the middle classes have increasingly retreated to cocoon themselves in houses and gated communities, relying on cars and communications infrastructures to integrate their lives. In parallel with such trends, multiplying layers of technological media, from TV, radio and the telephone to new computer networks like the Internet, are diffusing to undergrid and interlace cities and urban
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systems. These offer multiplying channels for social expression and exchange, and flows of cultural symbolisation that complement and interact with face-to-face exchanges (Castells 1996b; Thompson 1995). But, reflecting the splintering of cities, these technical media too are increasingly diversified and fragmented, supporting ever more specialised and tailored media and interactions, over widening distances, with less and less truly ‘mass’ content. In such a context Don Mitchell asks, from the US standpoint, ‘have we reached the “end of public space”? Have we created a society that expects and desires only private interactions, private communications, and private politics, that reserves public spaces solely for commodified recreation and spectacle?’ (Mitchell 1995). Christine Boyer argues that what she calls the ‘figured city’—the grids of isolated, imageable, carefully designed and controlled consumption nodes for affluent groups —now overlay the ‘disfigured city’—the neglected, unimageable, interstitial spaces of confinement for the poor. Design and planning practices, transport and computer network infrastructures, and surveillance systems work to keep the two superimposed ‘cities’ utterly segregated (Boyer 1995:82–3). She writes that: a strange sense of urbanism now invades the city, full of inconsistencies, fractures and voids. Homogenized zones valued and protected for their architectural and scenographic effects are juxtaposed and played off against areas of superdevelopment, while monumental architecture containers have turned the urban street inward and established their own set of public spaces and services within privatised layers of shops, restaurants, offices and condomiums. In between, to the back and beyond, lie the areas of the city left to decay and to decline, until the day when they too will be recycled and redesigned for new economic and cultural uses. (Boyer 1995:105) ASSESSING THE ‘PUBLICNESS’ OF PUBLIC SPACE: THE DANGERS OF OVERGENERALISATION But it is too. easy to pronounce the simple death of urban public space. The varied experiences of different cities suggests that we need to be wary of assuming that the above critiques can be extended unproblematically to all advanced industrial cities (Madanipour 1996).
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Not all urban trends everywhere can be generalised from Los Angeles, or other supposedly ‘paradigmatic’ examples (Amin and Graham 1997). Writers such as Jim Collins (1995) and Rob Shields (1992) have argued that scenarios of the total collapse of the urban public realm tend to be absolutist and deterministic. They ignore the fact that new consumption spaces can indeed become meaningful places supporting new types of public interaction. They forget that diverse social and cultural groups do actively construct the meanings of space and place in ways that often transgress the disciplinary powers of the managers of town and city centres. And they also tend to ignore the diverse paths being taken by different cities, including some where the urban public realm seems to be maintaining, or even strengthening, its importance (Amin and Graham 1997). ‘CYBERSPACE’ AS THE ‘NEW URBAN PUBLIC REALM’ Whilst the nature of the public realm of cities clearly varies across the world, we do believe that general forces exist towards urban fragmentation in which the traditional notion of a universal public realm becomes increasingly problematic. Such a context has encouraged a wide range of debates to emerge surrounding the potential of digital computer networks (or ‘telematics’) for supporting new types of public social and cultural exchange. Not surprisingly, such debates increasingly interconnect with those on the urban public realm. In North America, a growing band of optimists have urged us to look to cyberspace—the ‘space’ of digital exchange, transaction and communication accessible via new technology—as the ‘new public realm’ (Schuler 1996; Rheingold 1994). To such authors, the apparent or alleged erosion of the public realms of cities, by implication, need not necessarily concern us: such realms merely need now to migrate towards the brave new world of electronic mediation (see Graham and Marvin 1996: Chapter 5). Michael Benedikt, for one, hopes that cyberspace will lead him toward salvation from the city, allowing personal transcendence from all the inefficiencies, pollution (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things—from paper to brains—across, over and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace.
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(Benedikt 1991:3) In fact, much of the current hype and hyperbole surrounding the Internet and ‘Information Superhighway’ rests on the Utopian assertion that such networks will inevitably emerge to be equitable, democratic and dominated by a culture of public space, enrolling multiple identities into new types of collective, interactive discourse and ‘electronic democracy’ (Bellamy et al. 1995). Computermediated communications, stretched over global distances will, it is argued, offer simple substitutions for face-to-face contact in specific urban places, as part of a generic shift to telemediated work, service access, health and education networks, and media flows. Some US commentators already argue that ‘virtual communities’ on the Internet, geared towards both specific interest groups or place-based communities, represent solutions to the search of people increasingly alienated by the (apparently) repressive, commodified and instrumental character of contemporary urban life. As large cities become more fragmented geographically, socially and culturally, Howard Rheingold, a keen advocate of virtual communities, suspects that ‘one of the explanations for the [virtual community] phenomenon is the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives’ (Rheingold 1994:6). Doug Schuler believes that virtual communities offer perfect antidotes to the often atomised, fragmented and threatening world of the many North American urban areas experiencing growing violence, fear, alienation and the reduction in civic associations (Schuler 1996). Heralding early urban network initiatives in the United States like the Cleveland Freenet, Santa Monica Public Electronic Network and Seattle Community Network, he argues that local initiatives can help establish a new vision of community based on decentralised, interactive, one-to-one and one-to-many media networks, which are intrinsically more equitable and participatory than previous paper and mass broadcasting-based media. Run ‘by the community for the community’, such local IT networks will, he argues, herald ‘an overall democratic renaissance and civic revitalisation’ (Schuler 1996:x). The promise of new cyber-based communities offering new interactive ‘public’ arenas is perhaps especially strong for the most marginalised groups, who have been hardest hit by economic restructuring, growing urban privatism and the increasing predominance
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of individualistic ways of social organising in cities. To Cristina Odone, for example, the disenfranchised are still seeking an alternative public arena that will afford them an opportunity to participate in that circulation of ideas that constitute society. Enter the Internet: a technological patchwork quilt that will provide the arena for public dialogues and gather together some of the most disparate social elements, generating solidarity amongst distinct and sometimes conflicting elements. The Net has already managed to promise a reordered world where the individual can sample a community life that has long been eroded by the rush for individual gains, the rending of the fabric of family life, the polarisation of an economic system that makes for haves and have notes. The Net has been cast over that collective space once filled by the family hearth, the church yard, the village marketplace. (Odone 1995:10, quoted in Belt 1996) THE URBAN SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE OF CYBERSPACE If the Internet is to realise its potential for supporting new public discourses at the urban level it would, at the very least, need to shift from the preserve of elite, professional groups to become a nearuniversal medium. The costly infrastructural supports for Internet access—skills, finance, a telephone line, a modem, a computer, software, a service subscription and electricity supply—would need to be accessible to the bulk of urban populations. These barriers tend to be overlooked in debates about the Internet, cyberspace, and the so-called ‘Information Superhighway’. All too often the academics who participate in such debates, who receive high-quality Internet access for free, fail to appreciate the enormous structural inequalities in access to communications and computing infrastructures that are deeply woven into urban social geographies. Many debates about globalisation, electronic democracy and the shift towards telematics-based social networks, for example, often imply some degree of uniformity in social access to IT, resorting rather too much on hyperbole and utopianism. There is growing evidence, however, that social inequalities in access to electronic network technologies are stark. Moreover, such inequalities are clearly deeply woven into the fabric of contemporary
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Figure 4.1a Difference between the UK ‘Internet population’ and overall population
cities (Massey 1993:60). Pervasive social inequalities characterise access to, and use of, telecommunications and telematics infrastructures in cities (Graham and Marvin 1996; Castells 1996b). Such inequalities seem to challenge any notion that the growth of cyberspace is currently anything but the domain of the well-off and privileged. The improvement of Internet surveys gives us an accurate reflection of social unevenness in access to the Internet and World Wide Web. In 1995 for instance, Browning (1996:33) found that the global population of the Internet amounted to twenty-five million users linked into 9,472, 000 hosts. But those users tended overwhelmingly to be ‘exactly the sort of people that companies want to talk to:30ish, well-educated and often in exactly the sorts of high paying jobs that keep a steady flow of spendable cash sloshing into their bank accounts’ (Browning 1996:33). Cyberspace, in short, looked ‘remarkably white, middle class and well educated’: only a third of users were women; over two-thirds had at least a university degree; and the average incomes, in both the USA and the UK, were well above average ($50–60,000 in the US). The British ‘population’ of the Internet, moreover, could be compared the UK population as whole, to reveal its stark biases towards white, middle class, well-educated male users. The survey revealed, for example, that company directors are proportionately ten times more likely to be online as ‘housewives’ (Browning 1996) (See Figures 4.1a and 4.1b). But these inequalities and differences are also extremely complex, and do not simply result from the unevenness of global economic networks, social polarisation and uneven wealth. This is because simple access to networks does not necessarily imply that use develops, that this use has any meaning, or that it necessarily brings power and
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Figure 4.1b Difference between the UK ‘Internet population’ and overall population by income (no data available for £20,000 to £29,999 group)
advantage to users. Heavy users may simply be under-taking routinised telework, over long distances, on piece rates and in non-unionised conditions, without being in a position of control in relation to their intensive use of the technology (Massey 1993). And, against the inference of the optimistic rhetoric that cyberspace is a single, unifying space, it seems likely that different topologies of network use are likely to emerge, which accord users of the system different degrees of power and control. MODELLING SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE, NETWORK TOPOLOGIES AND THE CITY It is important, then, to disaggregate the social make-up of cities, so that we can begin to trace the positions of different groups within the emerging urban social architecture of cyberspace (see Castells 1996b: 371). Three broad groups, we would argue, are likely to emerge here. First, elite groups seem likely to be the ‘information users’ (Dordick et al. 1988) experiencing the full benefits of global, interactive telematics systems like the Internet. There is substantial evidence that a new ‘transnational corporate class’ is emerging which is the primary agent of operating the global economy, and which relies on intense mobility and access to interactive global computer networks on a continuous basis to ‘command space’ (Sklair 1991:62–71). Friedmann (1995) argues that the emergence of such groups in western cities needs to be seen as an integral element within a worldwide shift towards the emergence of global spaces of capital accumulation, dominated by
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transnational corporations (TNCs) and their associated social elites. This transnational elite group consists of those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it…. These are the groups who are really, in a sense, in charge of timespace compression, who can effectively use it and turn it to their advantage. (Massey 1993:61) In effect, computer networks allow such groups to extend their ‘personal extensability’ through electronic means, by being electronically present in other, distant places to undertake transactions, maintain social relations, extend their political power and access information (Adams 1995). Elite executives, to some extent, can now ‘live where they choose and still remain plugged into the economic mainstream’ (Leinberger 1994:51). Such elite, transnational groups seem likely to experience interactive, empowering models of electronic democracy, as the new class strives to be ‘internally egalitarian and communitarian, and externally effective in exercising political and economic power’ (Calabrese and Borchert 1996:250). Second, there are the lower strata of less affluent and mobile wage earners, who seem more likely to be, as Dordick et al. (1988) put it, ‘the information used’—experiencing different technological topologies: hierarchical systems geared towards narrow, passive consumption. Access for these groups to anarchic, non-hierarchical and interactive networks such as the Internet is likely to be outweighed by the growth of consumption-driven, home telematics systems which embody ‘high degrees of hierarchical control’, interactivity largely limited to ‘press now to purchase’ buttons, and ‘high bandwidth downstream flows and low bandwidth upstream flows’ (Calabrese and Borchert 1996). This ‘consumer model’ of the ‘Information Superhighway’ will have only limited capability for interactivity supporting the development of horizontal discourses: wage earners, the precariously employed and the unemployed will interact infrequently on the horizontal dimension, except primarily in commercial modes which are institutionally and hierarchically structured, and controlled for commercial purposes such as games and shopping, and also do more routine forms of telework. The low spatial mobility of lower strata will be mirrored
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by low network mobility and limited perceived prospects for using the available network resources for creative expression or upward mobility, and by limited felt need for horizontal and upstream communication flows beyond those which are structured for commercial purposes or for the accessing of social services where they are available. (Calabrese and Borchert 1996:253) The current frenzy of global alliances and mergers between TV, Internet, cable, telecoms, film, publishing, advertising and newspaper industries must be seen in this context, as sectors jostle to take commanding positions within a global set of information infrastructures, geared toward exploiting and commodifying the information, media and cultural industries, and offering homebased consumer services (Schiller 1996; Hamelink 1995). The commercialisation of the Internet, the development of electronic transaction and financial systems, and the emergence of commercial, off-the-shelf Internet packages geared to consumption, shopping and entertainment, are all part of its shift toward a ‘consumer’ model information highway driven by ‘pay-per’ electronic consumption (Baran 1996). Finally, of course, in the ‘off-line’, marginalised spaces of cities there will be disadvantaged groups living in poverty and structural unemployment who seem likely to be excluded altogether from electronic networks. Here, poverty and unemployment mean that access to any electronic network at all, from the phone upwards, will be financially problematic. Infrastructure providers are unlikely to target new investment in such spaces. In the context where certain neighbourhoods in western cities have been shown to have only 30 per cent phone penetration (Graham and Marvin 1996) the inclusionary rhetoric of the ‘Information Superhighway’ seems somewhat hollow for the most disadvantaged areas of cities. In fact, ‘in the electronic ghettoes’, writes Nigel Thrift (1995:31) ‘the space of flows comes to a full stop. Time-space compression means time to spare and the space to go nowhere at all’. In such spaces, efforts to get lower income groups on to the interactive and discourse-driven Internet will continually have to address difficult issues. At the very least there are likely to be competing priorities, costly training needs, crime problems, relatively low levels of English literacy, issues of technological intimidation, the rapid obsolescence of technologies and the high costs of continually
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upgrading software to meet the latest industry standards (Sparrow and Vedantham 1996). Moreover, the relevance of Internet access can often be questioned for those facing the most severe social crises. ‘Just giving someone time at a terminal with Internet capabilities—or, by extension, at a kiosk in a public place—will not benefit anyone who feels confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem, or who has no idea where to begin’ (Rockoff 1996:59). THE RISE OF THE VIRTUAL CITY Despite the stark urban social inequalities in access to the Internet, and the varying social architectures of emerging networks, experiments to develop ‘public’ urban cyberspace initiatives (see Graham and Marvin 1996) are now proliferating. In attempting to address the context of the urban crisis, and the pervasive growth of the Internet, city authorities across the world have recently constructed hundreds of experimental ‘virtual cities’, based on the World Wide Web, which are variously constructed to operate as electronic analogies for the real, material, urban areas that host them. Over two thousand virtual cities and urban web pages are now collected together on the City.Net network (http:// www.city.net/), ranging from comprehensive, integrating Web spaces, drawing together all the Web activities in a city, to single promotional web pages. Web or virtual cities are, in fact, a diverse range of efforts to harness the potential of the Internet for supporting (various combinations of) local democracy and discourse development, urban marketing and ‘regeneration’, new types of electronic municipal service delivery, local inter-firm networking, and social and community development within cities. ‘NON-GROUNDED’ AND ‘GROUNDED’ VIRTUAL CITIES Research just commencing at the Centre for Urban Technology, with the aim of building up a typology of Web digital cities in the EU, shows that two main types of web city are emerging. First, there are ‘nongrounded’ web cities. These use the familiar interface of a ‘city’ as a metaphor to group together wide ranges of Internet services located across the world. The example of ‘CityIsland’ (http://www.taynet.co.uk/ ~gdx/mellanta/fd/cityisle/index.htm) is shown in Figure 4.2. Here, an idealised, imaginary, small-town map is used to group together a wide range of public, private and third-sector services within a coherent and
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Figure 4.2 City Island
imageable space. But these services are actually spread across the disparate networks of the Internet and bear no particular relationship to any specific town or city. Second, and more interestingly, there are ‘grounded’ virtual cities which are actually supposed to feed back positively, and relate coherently, to the development of specific cities. Such virtual cities can be configured either as glossy advertising and promotional spaces, with little or no useful information for residents, or as civic services providing ‘public’ electronic spaces supporting political, social and cultural discourses about the city itself. Table 4.1 Towards a typology of digital cities
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Table 4.1 shows the different paradigms adopted by the several web cities, according to our early efforts to construct a typology of these initiatives.
WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE? COMPETITION AND THE DOMINANCE OF DIGITAL CITY MARKETING Early research seems to suggest that, in general, the rhetoric that virtual cities constitute some new, discourse-driven, urban public realm is radically over-hyped. Most of the civic websites are configured as little more than urban databases, collating information for residents, and nonresidents, about political processes and decisions in town management, as well as transport information, leisure opportunities, cultural events, accommodation and restaurants for tourists. A common characteristic of many virtual towns seems to be a relative uni-directionality and the lack of opportunity for genuine interaction and discourse. Such web cities tend to be constructed as distributed databases or as one-way broadcasting systems; the ability to e-mail the mysterious ‘webmaster’ is often the only opportunity for individuals to make their positions known. Here, web cities can be considered to be ‘public’ services, but they do not look very much like ‘public space’. The absence of citizens and public life in many of these sites means that, seen on the Web, most ‘cities’ resort to simulation, idealisation and even parody, as each attempts to electronically construct the virtual version of the perfect postmodern city. Exciting, aesthetic, urban design; diverse cultural spaces, nightlife zones and restaurant areas; a high-quality ‘business climate’; leafy business parks and office zones; and world-class communications infrastructures are the almost universal claims. The private, commodified, urban marketing ethos leads to widespread sanitisation: crime reports are never among the topics covered, and information and debate about other typical urban problems such as pollution, racial and social tensions, and levels of poverty are usually ignored. Moreover, coherence is often lost as a range of competing virtual cities jostle to represent the same physical place, a trend that reflects the fragmented privatism that often dominates current urban governance. In Bristol, for example, together with the site managed by the council, five alternative and competing digital sites are being developed: Bristol OnLine, Bristol Cyber City, Digital Bristol, Bristol.Net (see Figure 4.3:
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Figure 4.3 Bristol.Net
http://www.bristol.net/) and Bristol Index. All are private, and all claim to be relevant to the local community, but at the same time all of these sites show their narrow, commercial vocation, portraying themselves variously as: ‘a focus for commercial initiative and expansion in a competitive world’ (Bristol Cyber City) or ‘Bristol’s shop window to the world’ (Bristol.Net). At most, an online Bristol resident might use such sites for some links to the available web pages of local organisations, and some one-way information about services in the town. The small council-related site, moreover, offers basic online promotion of the city (‘Bristol—the Right Location for your Company’: http://www.open.gov.uk/bristol/brishome.htm). The result of all of this is that, ironically enough, the ‘real’ city of Bristol has six digital counterparts yet there remains no real digital public space for debates among the citizens, and no opportunities to allow citizens to communicate with the public administration.
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THE VIRTUAL CITY AS EXPERIMENTS IN ELECTRONIC PUBLIC SPACE But more ambitious virtual cities, which at least claim to be more socially inclusive and discourse-driven, are also developing. The two best examples in Europe currently are De Digitale Stad in Amsterdam and the Bologna Iperbole initiative. De Digitale Stad, Amsterdam De Digitale Stad (The Digital City) in Amsterdam was inaugurated in January 1994, shortly before the local elections of that year (see Figure 4.4: http://www.dds.nl/). It has always been a private site, but at the beginning of its development was subsidised by the municipality of Amsterdam and the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Home Affairs. DDS was not born for the World Wide Web, and in its first eight months of life was very much like a typical ‘free net’ site, offering a text-based interface. Since 1994, however, it has developed into a very complex, Web-based site, with an appealing graphic interface that exploits very well the spatial metaphor of the city, standing as an example and a pilot development for an increasing number of Dutch digital cities (see Figure 4.4). DDS is actually organised as a ‘town’. It has thirty-three thematic squares, covering issues as diverse as books, transport, new technology, gay issues, politics, health and medicine, local government services, planning, and sport. Each ‘square’ presents home pages of up to eight relevant information providers from the private, public or voluntary sectors. The politics ‘square’, for example, is shown in Figure 4.5. Each ‘square’ is surrounded by residential ‘buildings’ (huizen) providing web page ‘homes’ through which the digital city’s ‘residents’ can express themselves by publishing their own information free of charge (see Figure 4.6). Each square also has a ‘virtual cafe’—an area for archived, online debate on its theme, and also relevant links to materials published on the Internet. Speaking about DDS in an interview that is also published on the digital city itself, Marleen Stikker, the ‘virtual mayor’, states ‘all those ideas that you heard so often from the US about the new information society, tele-democracy, electronic citizenship, suddenly became a reality on DDS’ (see http://www.dds.nl/dds/info/english/marleen.html). But beyond these enthusiastic claims, does DDS really operate as a virtual public space for Amsterdam? Two problems place great limits on
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Figure 4.4 De Digitale Stad, Amsterdam
the degree to which DDS can in fact genuinely claim to be ‘public’. First, despite the existence of public terminals and some use by marginalised groups, the system is dominated by the young, white, male, well-educated groups that dominate the Internet as a whole (Brants et al. 1996). Of the city’s 35,000 registered ‘residents’, for example, 58 per cent are under thirty, almost 75 per cent have higher education, and 85 per cent are male (Brants et al. 1996). The approach of DDS is ‘bottom-up’. ‘In principle everybody is able and welcome to raise an issue, participate in a debate, chat openly or put information on the network’ (Brants et al. 1996:241). Yet such freedoms inevitably accrue to the privileged, already powerful minority rather than the city as a whole in any truly ‘public’ sense. And as DDS has started to entice more and more commercially driven content in order to address its funding shortages, such inequalities seem unlikely to reduce. Second, it is questionable how much its demographics, debates and discourses genuinely represent the citizens of Amsterdam as opposed to the wider Internet population. Although non-Dutch- speaking visitors can have their problems in using DDS, nothing prevents an American, English or Chinese user from signing up as a resident of the Digital City and participating in its life. Actually, DDS presents itself with such
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Figure 4.5 De Digitale Stad: the politics ‘square’
wide, globally oriented aims as ‘to play its part in the development of the public domain in the electronic society’, while specifying that ‘The city metaphor is abstract and not bound to a place’. As Brants et al. note, the discussion platforms on computer technology, art and culture, the relation between information technology and democracy, and on the level of democracy within Digital City itself, are better visited than those on specific, local political issues, which feeds the suspicion that the Digital City is more a place for a (new) elite and a number of ‘techno-freaks’ than for ‘ordinary’ citizens. (Brants et al. 1996:242) This problematic link between the virtual city and the real town might further deteriorate given the need for DDS to gain more revenue by marketing itself to possible international advertisers. For this reason, DDS looks at foreign visitors as a valuable resource: The Digital City concentrated on a national audience during the initial period of its existence…. But now it is regularly consulted by visitors from abroad. An English language menu structure,
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Figure 4.6 De Digitale Stad: residential ‘buildings’
together with a ‘street guide’ covering the city and some of the services that are of international interest, will help increase the number of visits from abroad. (The Digital City Foundation) Iperbole, Bologna The Iperbole initiative in Bologna, another of the most sophisticated virtual cities to yet emerge, is in many ways complementary to the Amsterdam case (see Figure 4.7: http://www.nettuno.it/bologna/ MappaWelcome.html). While the latter is privately managed (although with declared non-profit purposes) Iperbole is owned and run by the local council, with the technical support of CINECA, a public educational institution, and Omega Generation, a local software house. Iperbole was born in 1994, and was immediately conceived for the Web environment. The way the site presents itself is not as appealing as in DDS, and the aspect of the home page is that of a civic database. The citizens who connect to the service, though, can access a wide range of discussion groups through the ‘Usenet’ interface. Most of them—there
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Figure 4.7 Iperbole, Bologna
are currently thirty-three—are about local topics. A whole range of pages of urban services and organisations such as unions, job centres, health services, police and voluntary groups, are hosted free of charge, together with the ‘central’ pages relative to the several council services and offices. The Bologna site is a more controlled ‘public’ space than the DDS. Iperbole tends to be more like an interactive public service than a virtual community in which events are mainly shaped by the users. The absence of features such as the possibility for individuals to publish their pages or to chat in real time, currently limits the potential of the site as a digital community. The evident aim of the project, more than establishing a new public realm (as with DDS), is to boost the ‘development of an increasing wealth of reciprocal knowledge and democratic two-way collaboration between the local authorities and the public’. In order to allow this, several council departments can be contacted via electronic mail, and newsgroups are set up to allow people to speak about local problems, events and developments.
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Local users dominate use of Iperbole to a greater extent than in Amsterdam. The policy choices related to the development of the web city itself are a clear demonstration of this will. In recent times, the council have started connecting citizens to a full Internet service for free, while on the other hand the small local businesses of the area surrounding Bologna are allowed to rent web pages at low rates. The development of Iperbole has been beset by severe problems. Tambini (1996) notes that computer-mediated referenda have been shelved because of technical, political and social problems. The number of subscribers remains tiny compared to the whole population. Discussion groups have tended to focus on leisure rather than political issues, and whilst the system has led to a flood of direct electronic enquiries between citizens and public officials, many of these have remained unanswered or ignored, threatening the legitimacy of the system (Tambini 1996). TOWARDS ‘URBAN CYBERSPACE PLANNING’: THE PROBLEMS AND POTENTIAL OF VIRTUAL URBANISM Do locally developed virtual cities offer hope in supporting new arenas for public discourse in cities which are more inclusionary, equitable and interactive than the consumer-model information superhighways dominated by global, commodifying corporations, which seem likely to dominate cyberspace in the future? Can such initiatives help overcome the sense of economic, geographical, social and cultural fragmentation so characteristic of contemporary cities, by helping to bind the urban fragments together? Can they help to provide new ‘channels through which knowledge and information can be democratised, [and] dispersed around the diversity of relational webs in urban regions’ (Healey et al. 1995)? In short, does the ‘urban planning’ of electronic spaces at the city level offer a new arena within which progressive, imaginative urban futures might be shaped? Problems… Experience is still far too limited to fully assess the wider potential of virtual cities, as well as other local telematics projects. But two preliminary conclusions can be made from our discussion. First, on the negative side, we would argue that virtual cities, as presently developing, offer no easy, quick-fix solutions to the complex
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interrelated problems surrounding public space and social polarisation in cities. Such initiatives are inevitably infused with the wider urban dilemmas surrounding the relations between the global and local, trends toward social polarisation, problems in creating synergies between private enterprise and wider social benefits, and tensions between collective and individualised solutions. Local, virtual cities, as reflections of the broader Internet, tend still themselves to be dominated by narrow, technological elites. Virtual cities can usually be accessed from around the world, which may dilute their local identity and make them less ‘grounded’. And most public-sector offerings give, as yet, little or no potential for genuine interaction, being merely spaces for one-way applications: postmodern urban promotion, local government advertising and the collective advertising of private, local firms, tempted by the cash-rich market of local Internet users. Many more private virtual cities are little more than commodified consumer spaces that use local labels and city metaphors to distinguish themselves from the chaotic mass of ‘placeless’ Internet sites. Even when stimulating two-way public discourses within cities is the central objective, as in Amsterdam and Bologna, the social bias of virtual city users and ‘residents’ towards affluent, highly-educated, white males remains strong. Significantly opening up such initiatives to the extent where we can consider them to offer genuinely public spaces will be a costly, long-term and complex exercise. Arguably, the very idea is of doubtful practicality in an era of urban financial crisis. There are also dangers that interactions and exchanges in virtual cities may substitute for place-based, face-to-face ones, and so further threaten the public nature of urban public space. Virtual interactions in virtual cities need to be shaped, as far as possible, to feed back positively to the development of face-to-face, direct interactions embedded in the physical spaces and cultures of real cities. For virtual cities to positively improve urban life, they need to be based on some sense of collective identity, experience, solidarity and destiny. They should, as far as possible, be grounded in real community issues in real cities, which draw the participants of interactions into meaningful, effective relationships with each other and with their city. Without this, McBeath and Webb (1995:7–8) argue that the experience of virtual communities merely becomes an illusion brought on by the use of computer technology, offering ‘a fantasy through which we can live in apparent proximity to others, talk to them and express feelings’. But virtual communities, they argue, tend to ‘ignore a dimension of community which we consider central to the concept, namely, its
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affective aspect, the dimension of the fellow-feeling bound to “being together”. This is the emotional/feeling strand of solidarity’. Without some grounding in a common, affective, collective experience, the danger is that electronic associations within virtual cities, and the evolution of virtual communities will, by definition, emerge as ‘pseudo communities’ (Beniger 1987:354), traditional communities transformed into safe, unthreatening ‘impersonal associations’. Thus virtual cities need to recognise and encourage the clash of viewpoints and discourses that are an essential element of urban life, and should relate closely to grassroots activities and debates. Otherwise, there is a risk that they will simply embody the desire for indirect, mediated encounters, reflecting deep-seated fears about the ambivalent nature of real, face-to-face experience in increasingly diverse and fragmented cities. …and potential But, perhaps more positively, we would argue that we cannot expect virtual cities, or other new community IT initiatives, to emerge as simple replacements to some long-lost ideal of what Friedland (1996) terms the single, ‘deliberative model of public sphere’. Rather, we need to have a more pragmatic focus, recognising that such a model has rarely been approached in any city at any time, and that it is, perhaps, becoming increasingly anachronistic. Moreover, it is important that ITbased exchanges are not treated in isolation. New tele-mediated exchanges in cities will inevitably complement many other media and information channels—including face-to-face contact—in complex ways (as the telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema, TV and newspapers have done before them). To Friedland (1996) the focus should be on linking community IT networks more pragmatically to building up social and institutional capacity at the grassroots level. He notes the distinct enabling relationship that new technologies have to the building of social capital on the one hand, and new citizen capacities on the other…. The new social capital relationships that emerge from new community networks ground deliberation in the concerted practices of citizens, a much richer set of relations than could be developed through polling and the mass media alone…. Access to network tools, which is rapidly widening, is beginning to create public spaces in which new forms of information and relationship-building can circulate. This
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allows for both the practical strengthening of grassroots democratic organising, and its growth and extension to new citizenship groups. (Friedland 1996:207) Following this, our second, more positive conclusion is that the growth of virtual cities and the general proliferation of locally planned electronic spaces may, in the longer term, prefigure a broader movement based around the ‘urban planning’ of cyberspace, based on creative local partnerships between the public, private and community sectors. In some senses, such a trend is reminiscent of the first trends toward integrated land-use planning in western cities at the end of the nineteenth century (which in their own way were attempts to bring structure to the chaos of industrial urbanism). The more innovative examples of virtual cities are helping to add local structure and coherence to the often chaotic, global world of the Internet, in ways that may help in building up local social capacity and economic spinoffs within cities. Clear trends toward the localisation of the Internet in US cities, where access to the Web for businesses and citizens is the highest in the world, may provide a pointer here. Here, the idea of the Internet as a splintered, anarchic and global system is giving way to a growing stress on carefully integrated local content, planned and delivered by small and large web firms, at the level of the large metropolitan region. Private web sites like Total New York (www.totalny.com), Citysearch San Francisco (www.citysearch.com) and a range of others, now provide single-site access to a vast range of local services, public and voluntary organisations and businesses, and local discussion groups. Content is tailored to the home city, reflecting the fact that, in many ways, the urban and local level of organising cyberspace is the most relevant for most people’s lives: ‘80 per cent of purchases are made within a 20 mile radius of the home’ (McElvogue 1997). Such websites effectively help to articulate part of the link between a city and the globally-stretched Internet, and to make tangible and visualisable the intangible skein of computer networks which increasingly undergrid our urban areas. The challenge, of course, is to make such profit- and consumptiondriven initiatives more than merely a network of ‘superinclusion’ for elite groups with home Internet access. Is it possible for local virtual cities to work against, rather than simply replicate, the
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systematic social and spatial bias of the Internet as a whole? Can virtual cities, supported by public funding and driven by social objectives, really help to draw in the ‘disfigured city’, the off-line spaces and electronic ghettos of decay, poverty and exclusion, where few have the resources to go online? This is the greatest policy challenge, given the dominance of private, profit-seeking capital within the telematics industry, and wider trends towards social and spatial polarisation in cities. It is clear that the best hope for virtual cities will come with broadly based local strategies driven by broad partnerships between public, private and community sectors, combined with the gradual shift towards true mass diffusion for Internet access. As the Internet becomes a more mainstream and widely accessible communications medium within cities, virtual city initiatives may help, quite literally, to ‘ground’ the globally integrated world of electronic spaces and so make the Internet feed back positively to the development of real cities. Publicly led and socially oriented virtual city strategies may then help to widen access to electronic infrastructures further, incorporating off-line spaces and disadvantaged groups in ways that private, market-based mechanisms are unlikely to achieve in the medium term. The hope must be that virtual cities will, in the longer run, help to make the Internet more meaningful, and more useful, in real places and real communities. In the longer run, what we might call ‘urban cyberspace planning’ may thus help in the construction of meaningful urban ‘enclosures’ within what Castells calls the global ‘space of flows’—the grids of panglobal electronic spaces. They may constitute an important dynamic of resistance to the more fragmenting effects of globalisation. And they may help to bind together the social, cultural and geographical fragments of cities, possibly even helping resuscitate collective notions of urban identity and belonging in the process. Given the wider context of globalisation, privatisation and technological change in the media industries, such urban enclosures in cyberspace may become more and more important. For it seems likely that the global communications grids of the future will be increasingly dominated by massive media corporations and their commodified, capitalised outputs and applications (Castells 1989, 1996). Within this context, the potential of local policies to sustain democratic, inclusionary and discourse-driven electronic spaces may be extremely important. Social need, the particularities of place, freedom of expression and local cultural diversity often tend to be squeezed out of the corporate, commodifying logic of current globalisation trends. ‘Media conglomerates will not fill
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the vital educational, civic and cultural needs’ of real places and real cities (Grossman 1995). Urban cyberspace planning and virtual cities may, if properly configured, offer some hope here in the longer term. NOTE 1 This article is adapted from S.Graham and A.Aurigi (1997) ‘Urbanising cyberspace? The nature and potential of the virtual cities movement’, City, vol. 7–8. All the virtual cities shown in the figures were approached for permission to reprint their pages. Thanks to those who agreed. Every effort was made to approach those who did not reply.
Part II Identity, autonomy and social interaction
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Chapter 5 Gender, agency, location and the new information society Alison Adam and Eileen Green
INTRODUCTION In this chapter we review two major themes in research on gender and ICTs (information and communications technologies). These are gender differences in IT-related employment and the relationship between gender and cyberculture. Although we argue that these are currently the most fertile areas for research on gender and IT, it is clear that they have developed largely separate research trajectories. Efforts to bring the two together might then appear to be no more than an overambitious attempt to be comprehensive. However, we lay no claim to a comprehensive coverage. Rather, we argue that there are more compelling reasons for bringing these two seemingly disparate areas together; reasons which do not obviously emerge from treating them separately. Although these two areas have been pursued by separate research communities, there are important commonalities which we try to open up in what follows. First, there is the question of agency and how it is granted and performed along gendered lines, especially in pursuit of equality. Second, there are the spaces and places where gendered relations and IT exist. Third, bringing agency and location together involves a consideration of differences, although space does not permit us a thoroughgoing discussion of differences here. Age, able-bodiedness, class, ethnicity, sexuality—all these have a role both in terms of access and hence agency, and are also involved in terms of the places where information technologies are used. While we emphasise difference, there is also a sense in which we want to emphasise sameness, and it is this sense which also acts as a bridge between the twin areas of employment and cyberculture. The sense of sameness can be found in the way that the idea of the ‘user’ can be understood along gendered
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lines. The point here is that the archetypal computer user, as understood in software engineering terms, is an individual, male user in paid employment in a welldefined organisational setting. We argue that, so far, women have hardly been considered as computer users as a separate and possibly distinct group and important considerations emerge when women are specifically considered to be users. In what follows, we argue that agency is intertwined with the idea of skill and de-skilling in gender relations in IT work. Defining a job as skilled is a way of granting a greater degree of agency, autonomy and the ability to act and choose for oneself. In the sections on gender, IT and employment, we argue that the traditional perceptions of women’s office work as de-skilled permits them considerably less agency and autonomy than that of men in professional roles. This is hardly a new phenomenon. But the level of women’s agency and autonomy in relation to teleworking is less obvious. On one hand, teleworking may appear to offer a degree of control over working and domestic lives, unimaginable in the traditional workplace. Yet as a later section shows, the reality is often very different for women. When we move away from employment and look at gendered models of agency in relation to cyberculture, the whole picture becomes much more diffuse. There are certainly some that argue, in the spirit of the new voice of ‘cyberfeminism’, that cyberspace is an area where women are taking control and subverting the technology towards their own ends (Squires 1996). Yet at the same time, stories abound of ‘cyber’ versions of harassment and worse, such as cyberstalking and cyber-rape (Brail 1996). This pinpoints the problems of space and place. If traditional employment, and even teleworking, takes place in well-defined places, the same cannot be said for activities in cyberspace. To say this is to do more than make the point that cyberspace is a virtual space, although in itself this is not without problems. The question is rather, how and where do men and women make space to interact in cyberspace and are there differences between the ways in which they use this technology? A later section explores these questions and the difficulties of finding appropriate answers. The chapter proceeds by taking a broad view of gender, ICTs and employment, and then focuses on the issue of how far a feminised labour market can be seen as part of the drive towards flexibility and a concomitant insecurity in relation to the introduction of ICTs. We ask the question of how far teleworking is a panacea for the insecurities of flexibility and de-skilling which have a disproportionate effect on women’s employment in ICTs. We then argue that the discussion on
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gender and ICTs needs to be widened to examine how professional roles in the IT industry are organised along gendered lines. However, in arguing for a greater recognition of the importance of this area, we recognise that it is much less researched than gender roles in clerical and administrative work. In the section that follows, we argue for a much broader definition for the ‘users’ of computer technologies, than has hitherto been prevalent in software engineering amongst the developers of computer systems. This provides a link between women as users of ICTs in the workplace and women as users in cyberspace, allowing us to find similarities and differences between the two settings. We then go on to explore the curious rise in popularity of the phenomenon of ‘cyberculture’ and discuss feminist responses, most notably in terms of ‘cyberfeminism’. In our conclusion, we bring together these very disparate strands to comment on how agency is performed and located in relation to gender and ICTs. GENDER, ICTS AND EMPLOYMENT Technologies are represented as powerful and semi-autonomous, constantly evolving products and processes which exert a major influence upon both our working and domestic lives. In fact, the twoway relationship between gender relations and information technology is a complex mixture of interactive processes, a key site of which is the workplace. Gendered divisions of labour are central to the process of technological development, whether we are examining the occupational segregation of the IT industry, or the nature and levels of IT which are introduced into particular industries and occupational sectors. Equally, patterns of IT implementation vary between the areas referred to as ‘women’s work’, and those traditionally labelled as ‘skilled’ and mainly populated by male workers. This section will review research which focuses on the impact of IT developments upon women’s position and experiences in the labour market, summarising the effects of technology and automation upon changing levels and types of employment. The question of a ‘feminised labour market’ will be addressed, commenting on the impact of offshore processing and outsourcing on women’s jobs and employment conditions. We argue that the ‘flexible’ work which is crucial to the restructuring and globalisation of particular forms of work such as manufacturing, could not have occurred in isolation from the proliferation of ICTs which support them. Economic restructuring is taking place on a global scale, and within increasingly competitive
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product and service markets; groups of managers are rethinking their use of labour, leading to downsizing becoming a common corporate technique. In a similar vein, relocation and flexibility of labour is of major benefit to employers seeking to capitalise on cheap labour power in an international context. Despite ‘flexibility’ becoming the byword of the 1990s, bringing more choices for individuals, whether it is in the labour market with working hours ‘packaged to suit downsized lives’ or in our leisure lives where we can escape from reality via communing with fellow enthusiasts around the globe from our living rooms via the World Wide Web, the majority of the jobs on offer to women are remarkably familiar. Flexibility for employers has led to an intensification of insecure, de-skilled jobs for women workers trapped within increasingly segregated, low-paid employment sectors. During the first phase of widespread industrial IT implementation, which occurred in Europe and North America in the 1970s, concerns about the potential for de-skilling and job losses were expressed among bodies as diverse as government agencies and trade unions. A number of theoretical accounts of this process, especially those which adopted Braverman’s (1974) de-skilling thesis (e.g. labour process theorists) argued that managers were using unskilled female labour power to reduce (male) wages and break craft unions. This was fuelled by a popular form of technological determinism which viewed the potential negative effects of the ICTs with alarm and predicted high levels of unemployment in the wake of their widespread introduction (Large 1980). But as Webster (1996) argues, discussions of potential ‘technological unemployment’ were largely gender-blind, focusing on the effects of technology on particular types of work, rather than on the differential effects on women and men. There was concern, however, that jobs in so-called ‘women’s work’ were particularly likely to be displaced by automation. This was related to women being horizontally and vertically segregated into low-paid, low-status, clerical and information-handling jobs and under-represented in the managerial and scientific posts where the implementation of new technologies might enhance workers’ skills and status. Predictions which forecast the ‘paperless office’ and related job losses have not been confirmed (Bell et al. 1988), although as Webster suggests (1996) little systematic, international data on the diffusion of information technologies on employment, especially women’s employment, is available. What has emerged instead is a more
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complicated picture where the effects of IT implementation are closely related to a range of other variables, such as social and economic context and the size and levels of unionisation of the workforce involved (Daniel 1987). What is clear in the 1990s, is that a major and continuing restructuring of the labour market is occurring on a global scale, characterised by increasingly competitive and insecure product and service markets; major changes which are also deepening gender segregation. Changes in the timing and location of work are strongly influenced by the proliferation of ICTs, which is having a major impact upon the sectors of the economy where women are the ‘preferred’ workers. Security of employment is becoming a thing of the past, a phenomenon which has always been an issue for part-time women workers, but seems to have become a focus of more ‘mainstream’ concerns now that it cannot be represented as a component of ‘women’s work’ and, as has been argued, mutually beneficial to working mothers and employers. A ‘FEMINISED’ LABOUR MARKET? The decline in full-time jobs with related conditions of service has preoccupied a growing number of commentators within the sociology of work, not least feminist theorists who are concerned by the proliferation of ‘flexible’, part-time jobs, changing patterns of shiftwork, homeworking and teleworking (Bradley 1996; Rees 1992; Siltanen 1994). Part-time work represents the most rapidly expanding area of employment growth over the last few decades and is heavily dominated by women. By the end of 1994, 86 per cent of the part-time labour force in the UK were women (Naylor 1994), and in the EU women hold 83 per cent of all part-time jobs (Bulletin on Women and Employment in the EU 1994). Part-time work is also primarily undertaken by white women, who are reported to prefer part-time jobs; however, it is difficult to disentangle the impact of unpaid caring work upon their availability for employment and the fact that the expansion of part-time jobs is principally occurring in areas like the service industries, which are increasingly characterised by casualised ‘women’s work’. As Roberts (1994) argues, black households are more likely to be heavily dependent upon women’s incomes to alleviate poverty.
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FLEXIBLE JOBS? RELOCATION, INSECURITY AND ICTS Alongside this casualisation, or what Greenbaum (1994) refers to as a ‘temporisation’ of work, there is a geographical relocation of work sites underpinned by the implementation of ICTs in industries where women constitute the bulk of the labour force. Although employers ‘roaming the globe in pursuit of operational and cost improvements’ (Webster 1996) is not a new phenomenon, the use of ICTs ensures a geographical flexibility which enables the relocation of a growing range of tasks and information. Time and space are ‘decompressed’, facilitating an international labour force sharply divided along gendered and racial lines. The use of third-world female labour by multinational manufacturing industries offering poorly paid assembly jobs is well established (Mitter 1986), and computerisation has been a key factor in the developing production strategies within the textile industry. Garment assembly and seamstress work is subcontracted to (small) offshore companies in the Third World, whilst the process of design and cutting is carried out in the West, enhanced by computer-aided design (CAD) and automated processes which speed up production and significantly reduce costs (Elson 1989). Elson predicts that satellite links could be used to maintain electronic links between clothing suppliers (such as Benneton) and customers, which enables the suppliers to benefit from daily intelligence about customer demand in order to ‘finely tune’ the efficiency and cost-competitiveness of their operations. Young women in London and Manchester flocking to buy wedgie sandals and other items of clothes favoured by the Spice Girls pop group will be quickly picked up via networked cash tills and fed back into the marketing chain. In this situation the implementation of ICTs has reduced multinationals’ preference for third-world (female) labour; instead the garment manufacturers are increasingly intent upon ‘close-to-market’ strategies which involve subcontracting work to smaller companies in the West. Subcontracting within their host countries to companies employing mainly women from immigrant and ethnic minority groups, ensures a captive, regional labour force which is compelled to accept very low wages and exploitative working conditions (Phizacklea 1988). The use of subcontracted female labour has also occurred in the software industry, allowing the industry to cope with variations in levels of demand for the products and linked labour requirements. Skilled
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software design and development projects are sited in the West, whereas the programmers employed are located in offshore companies who employ skilled workers who maintain consistently high production rates for very low wages. Detailed client specifications for western customers can be swiftly transmitted by sophisticated telecommunications technologies to third-world subcontractors who employ local women at ‘local’ (i.e. low) rates of pay; rates kept down by a lack of alternative employment. Women are generally used and indeed viewed as the ‘preferred workers’ for the lower-level, standardised elements of programming; rates of pay are lower than in the West and productivity rates higher. Heeks (1993) argues that countries like India have an available pool of well-educated, English-speaking workers who are also technically competent, and therefore ideal for the software industry. Such qualifications may not protect them, however, from an unstable economic situation where the market for global subcontracting of software development is shrinking, and automation is reducing the cost advantages to employers of outsourcing. The global economy sets the pace or demand levels for this type of ‘women’s work’, in a similar way to the more traditional jobs which women occupy in the garment industry. Employers responding to fluctuating markets are unlikely to invest in developments which would facilitate career development or skills training for such women, but clean, safe jobs are regarded as preferable (by the women themselves) to dirtier forms of manual work or unemployment. Despite the repetitive nature of the work and lack of job security, women in this situation are ‘grateful’ for local employment which has built-in flexibility. That flexibility is of course dominated by employers’ interests within globalised markets, but it still affords a level of choice about hours and location which many women find attractive. TELEWORKING: FROM THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME AND IN THE MIDST OF ‘FAMILY LIFE’ Evidence of a deep-felt desire to exercise more control over our working lives, in order to make space for the needs of children and other dependents, is to be found in numerous studies of working mothers carried out since the 1960s (Pollert 1981; Sharpe 1984; Westwood 1984). A debate more characteristic of the 1990s sees this desire for more flexible hours and more time at home extended to the
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male workforce, where it connects with public debates about ‘new fathering’ (New Ways to Work Newsletter 1996). The phenomenon of teleworking, working at home with new technology, has been advocated as providing a solution which is mutually beneficial to employers, workers and families alike. Numerous images of workers freed from stressful commuting, polluted inner-city offices and ‘nine-to-five’ hours, represent the home as the ideal place in which to combine gainful employment, with childcare and flexible, comfortable places to work. Such images are well suited to the advertising strategies of telecommunications companies anxious to keep their share of an increasingly competitive market. This suggests that with a little planning, teleworking can facilitate a more balanced life. But what of the reality? The incidence or growth of teleworking is difficult to measure, partly due to the broad range of employment behaviours grouped beneath it as an umbrella term, and partly because in the UK, and the rest of the European Union for that matter, the only available statistics are collected under the broad category of ‘homeworking’, which includes a very diverse set of activities ranging from assembly work to childminding. The few studies of home-work which do exist suggest that there is a low level of teleworkers among those categorised as homeworkers, and a marked gender segregation in the nature of the work (Allen and Wolkowitz 1987). The traditional sexual division of labour is reproduced within teleworking rather than challenged by it. Women doing telework are more likely to be in their child-rearing years (i.e. in their thirties), located in clerical industries and combining it with childcare (Haddon and Silverstone 1993; Lie 1995). Like the female home-workers who populate the textile industry, they are paid (low) piece rates of pay, on top of which they have to find overhead costs such as heating, lighting, etc. In contrast, men doing telework are more likely to be professionals who have either set up on their own as specialist consultants, or as selfemployed teleworkers, looking for new careers following being made redundant. Women cite domestic responsibilities, particularly childcare, as the major reason for working from home and try to work flexibly in terms of hours and space to accommodate both, whilst men set up dedicated ‘offices’ in spare rooms; childfree spaces in which to complete nine-to-five days. Even among the minority of professional women who work from home, few are able to separate the demands of motherhood and domesticity from paid work, as evidenced in the following comment made by a self-employed solicitor:
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‘He (husband) says I’ve always had a problem with boundaries, so it’s not just self-employment…. He thinks that my boundary problem is that I can’t stop working. He sees me as a workaholic. I don’t think that’s true, (but) I do have a problem. I find it very difficult to switch off in the evenings. Peter doesn’t have a problem with that, just reading his magazines and going to the pub. I think I have a problem with boundaries, but it’s the other way as well, so that in the middle of the day when I should theoretically be working, I’m trying to sort out a doctor’s appointment for one of the children, or I’m thinking “Oh god, I’ve got to get out and get some milk,” you know. So I’ve got a problem both ways.’ (Green and Cohen 1995:306) This is not to suggest that teleworking is necessarily experienced as negative by all women, or even the majority of women. Instead the point we are making is that ICTs have enabled the proliferation of teleworking, which although it has the potential to alter the sexual division of labour, of itself and in isolation from other initiatives, seems merely to have reproduced the status quo in the home, as opposed to the office. Combined with other egalitarian initiatives, it could be used as a mechanism to empower women, but in reality it offers women another opportunity to juggle childcare and domesticity with paid work; perhaps more effectively than nine-to-five employment outside the home. An alternative explanation for the promotion of teleworking is related to its attractiveness to employers, as an additional mechanism for achieving reduced overheads, flexibility of labour and relocation or downsizing of offices. Teleworking does not solve the problem of childcare for women, in fact it reinforces it as ‘women’s problem’. However, given the lack of affordable alternatives and the undiminishing need to find what continue to be individual answers to the double-burden crisis of paid and unpaid work, many women continue to choose it as a partial solution. GENDER AND PROFESSIONAL ROLES Research on gender and ICTs has focused to a large extent on office work and automation of secretarial, administrative and clerical skills. This is not surprising, as women make up the vast majority of secretarial workers, and also because it is in this area where new information technologies are seen as having the most substantial
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impact. We argue that this area is, at least relatively speaking, fairly well understood. However, women’s employment in the software industry, at systems analyst and programmer level, i.e. the professional and managerial level, is much less understood. As we have argued above, there is evidence, on a global level, that women are being used cheaply in thirdworld countries for lower-grade software tasks (Heeks 1993). Additionally, much teleworking employment undertaken by women is on a professional level. Yet women predominate in clerical jobs, while men predominate at the professional end of the computing profession to the extent that the numbers of women involved are quite small. Despite this there are significant benefits to be had from understanding women’s entry to and progress within the software professions themselves. This would not only achieve a better picture of how far measures to attract and retain women are actually working, but it would also help to address the broad question of how the gendering of technology and technological skills is achieved in the first place. This is part of the background to the WITCHES project which seeks to explore, through linked European case studies, the ways in which the design and use of ICTs can be enhanced by increasing women’s access to and performance within IT-based professions (Green et al. 1997). But this is only one such project, and is still seeking funding at the time of writing. It is clear that there is considerable scope for further studies in this area. THE GENDERED USER In the previous sections we have discussed women’s position in the labour market, arguing that gendered divisions of labour have been maintained and even magnified with the introduction of new ICTs. The example of teleworking demonstrates that much of the flexibility in the labour market is due to women’s flexibility, and in particular their willingness to accommodate flexible working patterns in their domestic arrangements. But although it is understandable that much of the energy devoted to research on gender and ICTs should revolve round women’s clerical roles in the office, we have argued that this is by no means the whole story. In seeking to understand how women relate to ICTs, the research spotlight needs to turn towards women’s professional roles. But whether as a clerical or professional worker, or in a role which stands outside the workplace and the world of paid work altogether, women in these various settings are all ‘users’ of the technology. Although this perhaps sounds rather obvious, there are, however, some
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special connotations attaching to the notion of ‘user’. In the world of computer systems development the user is the individual who is to use the computer. If we think about the idea of women as users, this is attached to a much less clear agenda than women’s IT employment, even if both are similarly under-researched. In software engineering, the move away from technology-centred design, towards user-centred and participative approaches and their successors in the Computer Supported Cooperative Work movement is a positive initiative, yet there has been little research which sees men and women as possibly separate social groups with different needs and requirements. It seems likely that the human-centred systems movement, with its emphasis on human values and empowerment, offers a much more promising basis for empowering women over older technology-driven approaches (Green and Pain 1994; Hales 1993). Human-centred approaches often assume, in common with their technology-centred predecessors, the notion of a ‘user’ or ‘users’ as individuals who work within a well-defined organisational setting. Yet with the widespread use of the Internet and other networked technologies, it is becoming clear that it is much harder to identify a definable user community for the new ICTs. Although these are technologies which will affect both men and women, it may well be the case that men’s and women’s needs and experiences will be different. Although women’s usage of the Internet is increasing, they are still in the minority (Pitkow and Kehoe 1996). Women’s access to or exclusion from Internet technologies takes place at more than one level. They must have access to the technological artefacts, which either means having professional employment or sufficient financial resources to supply the equipment at home. A second part of the access problem, one which is rarely discussed, involves having sufficient time to use and become proficient with the ICTs. In a workplace environment, this may mean having a considerable level of autonomy and choice in one’s working time. At home it means having enough leisure time to make use of Internet access. Both in the workplace and in the home, men and women’s time is differently organised, to the extent that women are much less likely to find the time to use ICTs, either as a fringe work activity or as a leisure pursuit. This also suggests that women’s relationship to the culture which has grown up around the new ICTs, or cyberculture, will not necessarily be the same as men’s, as that too is heavily dependent on leisure time.
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CYBERCULTURE Cyberculture is a curious phenomenon. If it can be defined at all, it is the rise of new practices, behaviours and concepts surrounding various ICTs (some, but not all of which are new) including artificial intelligence, Internet technologies and virtual reality. At one and the same time it has witnessed an extraordinary rise to popularity, both as a youth movement with countercultural leanings and as an academic subdiscipline in its own right. In itself, this conflation of academic and popular is worthy of note. At one level, it is hardly unusual for academics to study popular culture. But within the cyberculture phenomenon, we now witness academic culture trying to be popular culture. A fine example is to be found in the series of Virtual Futures conferences held at the University of Warwick in 1995 and 1996. Film screenings, music, virtual reality demonstrations, theatrical and artistic experiences supplant the usual round of stodgy academic papers. Small wonder, then, that cyberculture should find favour with jaded academics. At the same time, it is not difficult to understand its appeal to potentially disaffected youth. As Schroeder (1994) notes, technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the Internet offer the apparent potential for a seemingly endless supply of new consciousnessexpanding experiences. Although not a point which is currently emphasised in writings on cyberculture, on one level at least it seems to offer a legal and non-toxic alternative to hallucinogenic drugs. The growing interest in cyberculture feeds off the rhetoric of ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction, epitomised in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984). Indeed, some of the cyberpunk terminology has leaked into cyberculture language to a level where it is now taken for granted, most notably in the term ‘cyberspace’. Cyberspace is commonly used as the slightly more fashionable term for the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet. However, the futuristic cyberpunk version sees cyberspace as a fully immersive, shared, networked, virtual reality where we can download our minds into any virtual body we like. This is a far cry from using a conventional terminal and keyboard to log into the flat, two-dimensional and perhaps rather slow world of the WWW. This signals the element of wish fulfilment which is projected onto the technology. In Neuromancer the hero, Case, jacks into cyberspace, to leave his physical body behind in a future, just imaginably possible, version of our world. The ‘meat’ of the body is left behind in a world
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gone wrong. This is a world with the problems of today’s world horribly magnified into huge urban sprawls with only wasted no-go areas in between. The rhetoric of escape—escape from the body, escape from a world gone wrong—has seeded itself into contemporary cyberculture. However, the idea is predicated on the notion that all that is important about individuals is contained in their minds; that their bodies are literally ‘meat’. We might imagine that this is just another version of the old Cartesian mind-body split, extended into the more fanciful end of cyberculture. But we argue that it seems to derive not just from cyberpunk, but from the whole style of research undertaken in symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies. Much of AI, in its techniques for representation of intelligence and knowledge, is tacitly predicated on the view that it is feasible, not to say meaningful, to represent intelligence without a body (Adam 1998). This is not to deny the radical wing in AI, which takes embodiment seriously, in its attempts to build ‘situated robots’ whose intelligence lies in their robot bodies rather than explicit mental representations (Brooks 1991). Nevertheless, mainstream AI is strongly wedded to the separability of intelligence from the body. For instance, a roboticist well-known in AI circles, Hans Moravec (1988), suggests the idea of ‘mind children’. These are ‘postbiological’ children, created by downloading our minds into robots and then letting the robots take over, leaving our DNA obsolete. Moravec’s views are hardly mainstream within AI, yet his research captures a desire for transcendence amongst computer technologists because at one and the same time, it combines the will to escape the body with giving birth, surely one of the most bodily functions of all. FEMINIST RESPONSES TO CYBERCULTURE In the previous section we cast up a number of issues in the debate surrounding cyberculture without specifically relating them to women’s lives. In this section we want to ask how women can, and currently do relate to the concerns raised by cyberculture. In particular, we ask what feminist responses to cyberculture might look like. The most obvious place to start is with the idea of ‘cyberfeminism’ which arises from a mixture of interest in cyberculture in general and feminist cyborg studies more particularly. In the latter area, Donna Haraway’s (1991) much quoted ‘A cyborg manifesto’ offers an appealing transgression of ambiguous boundaries and has been used to stress the ambiguities and supposedly amoral quality of cyberspace. As Shields argues,
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Rather than new relations between women and men, the amoral quality of Net ethics throws into question essentialised identities and dualistic sexual categories…. Instead, notions of authenticity, of essential femininity and of the self are displaced in favour of multiple roles, alternative personae and a matrix of potentialities. (Shields et al. 1996:9) Hall (1996) describes two versions of cyberfeminism. Radical cyberfeminism refers to the upsurge in women-only online bulletin boards and newsgroups, in other words places for women to be without men. There is an analogy with ‘real life’ here, as both virtual women-only groups and real women-only groups are places for women to interact away from male harassment. By contrast, liberal cyberfeminism is identified by Hall as a view involving a gender-free utopia influenced by feminist science fiction, where women’s sexual liberation is seen as all that is necessary for equality and where freedom of self-expression is emphasised. Radical cyberfeminism would seem to be a pragmatic response to the ways that gender relations persist even in virtual worlds. For instance, both Herring’s (1996) and Adams’ (1996) studies on gendered interactions in cyberspace indicate that traditional gendered interactions are maintained and even magnified in cyberspace. In the face of such studies, it is difficult to argue that cyberspace will somehow level out inequalities. This suggests that, however enticing it might appear on the surface, liberal cyberfeminism is problematic. In particular, it seems to go against the grain of much of the modern feminist movement, arguing instead that women’s estate will be bettered but without reasons to support this assertion. It is liberal cyberfeminism’s desire to be apolitical of which commentators such as Judith Squires (1996) are so critical. Squires argues that cyberfeminism tends to the same position with regard to the transcendence of the body as cyberculture in general, and it also shares with cyberculture the unrealistic desire to be apolitical, to stand outside traditional moral boundaries. Whatever the positive aspects it may ultimately offer, cyberfeminism as currently construed appears to offer women a somewhat empty promise.
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CONCLUSION: GENDER, AGENCY AND LOCATIONS In this chapter we have brought together arguments on gender relations in ICTs in the workplace and in cyberspace. Our aim has been to examine the way in which agency is constructed, particularly for women, in relation to the diverse locations where ICTs are used. Thinking about gender and ICTs in the workplace gives a focus on the office as the key site. Yet the flexibility (for the employer) and deskilling offered to many office workers means that locations for using ICTs are moved away from the traditional centralised office workplace within a western industrial city towards offshore locations in developing countries and into individuals’ homes through teleworking. Although this may seem to offer women access to skilled employment, to offer a means of control over their own lives and hence an increase in their agency, it does so in severely circumscribed terms. Employment relating to ICTs may be better than other types of employment on offer, but it is still low-paid and demands that the employee be flexible rather than the employer. Looking at the upsurge of interest in cyberculture and cyberfeminism, physical locations, along with the primary physical location of the body itself, appear to be transcended altogether. Yet at the same time there is a very obvious physical location, i.e. that of the individual person using the hardware. This raises the question of how far women have access to such ICTs, both in space and time, since activities in cyberspace have as much of a leisure as a work component. In bringing together the two areas of employment and cyberculture, and considering gender relations in ICTs in relation to both of these, we are aware that we raise more questions than answers. Nevertheless, we have tried to show that to understand the causes involved, agency and locations must be considered in a wider context.
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Chapter 6 Ethics @ the Internet1 Bilateral procedures in electronic communication Duncan Langford
INTRODUCTION Wide-scale ‘networking’ means, in effect, that any person or organisation possessing a suitable computer, together with a telephone line and modem, has the ability to establish links between their machine and any other similarly equipped computers. Once joined to an Internetconnected network, a user has the ability to post messages to any connected electronic address, situated anywhere in the world. As is generally known, what is now known as the Internet was begun as a vehicle for military network research in the mid–1960s, and was originally designed to survive nuclear war. By definition, therefore, there is no central control whatever. Any part of the Internet may be removed without damage to the whole. Perhaps surprisingly, from such a specialised genesis, the Internet has subsequently developed into an essential international infrastructure for global communication between academia, business and individuals. When analysing its improbable functionality, it is essential to appreciate the very strong collective ethos of the Internet. From its inception, Internet users have always been passionately in favour of internal control and against outside influence. In effect, for many years the Internet has operated as a fully functioning anarchy. Until very recently, the majority of Internet users were technically aware individuals, who understood the technical background to this form of networking, and who (because of their experience and background) were probably biased in favour of academic freedom and individual autonomy. A British government report summarised the position well:
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13. The Internet is perceived to have flourished because it was free to evolve without interference from any powerful selfinterested groups (these are interpreted as including governments and multinational press corporations). This freedom is greatly cherished by Internet users, who believe that access to the valuable information resources that such freedom makes possible is too important to risk through regulation. 14. Unrestricted data communications are assumed to be vital to the UK’s future economic prosperity, and any legislation needs to be framed in this context. Accordingly, the central principle is that everyone should have unfettered freedom to discuss, but not the freedom to harm others, and that individuals must have the appropriate freedom to choose whether they wish to view items or not. Discretion should be the rule, not regulation. (Collaborative Open Group Report 1995) Of particular importance when considering the ethics of electronic communication through the Internet is the widespread conviction on the part of established users that individual users both can and should be trusted to use the system appropriately. Specifically, the very unusual genesis of the Internet has encouraged a belief that under no circumstances is external supervision or control of the Internet appropriate. In summary: most computers and local networks have the ability to become linked to the Internet, and a very rapidly growing number have already become connected. While external pressures seek regulation, use of the Internet is actually controlled by no person or organisation. Although diluted by an explosion of new users, the longstanding philosophy of the Internet is firmly against external controls. BACKGROUND Before discussing ethical issues in more detail, it is necessary to emphasise the difference between two major aspects of Internet use. The first relates to ‘traditional’ textual information—Internet newsgroups are a good example—which provide a longstanding method of circulating textual information through the Internet. The second is the new eruption of graphical and ‘multimedia’ information based on the WWW. Both examples are relevant to a discussion of Internet ethics, but their differing technical background involves special considerations.
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INTERNET NEWSGROUPS In simple terms, the text messages which make up newsgroups are constantly being sent along links between information providers, or ‘sites’. When a site receives a message, software checks are carried out —for example, that the newsgroup to which the message belongs is valid for that site. When checks are complete, the message is made available to a site’s individual members, usually by storing a copy locally. The site also sends a copy of each message onward, to the next site in the wider network. Millions of messages are continuously being circulated around the Internet in this way. Where do these news messages originate? Normally they are ‘posted’ by individuals. Posting an article simply involves sending mail to the electronic address of a relevant newsgroup. There is no restriction whatever on what may be posted. Not every Internet newsgroup is available from every information provider, but most providers typically accept several thousand groups, all of which are then accessible to their users. Although some newsgroups are ‘moderated’, where a human acts as a filter for postings, the huge majority have no such control. Whatever is posted to a newsgroup is therefore automatically distributed, and is available at every Internet site subscribing to the relevant group. Posting to an Internet newsgroup is consequently the nearest thing on earth to absolute free speech. As a response to postings perceived as improper—or unethical— there have been demands that the Internet and its newsgroups should be censored. Once the workings of the Internet are understood, though, it will be seen that, even if justified, such censorship is technically impossible. If we wish to censor or cancel a newsgroup, the configuration of the Internet becomes important. The pattern of its links forms a spider’s web; consequently, if the passage of information through one connection is censored, the censored information can easily be obtained elsewhere. The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and of course it was designed to survive massive damage. Consider the—very simplified—position in Figure 6.1. Four sites are represented as belonging to a group (this arrangement could be at any scale, from individual computers to an entire country). Site A receives an external feed of news items, which it circulates to B, C and D. What would happen if site A decided, for whatever reason, to cease circulating a particular newsgroup? (Figure 6.2)
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Figure 6.1 Simplified scheme of four Internet newsgroup sites
Figure 6.2 Scheme after A has ceased circulating
In practical terms, other site users would see no difference. In this example, only site C has an external feed; but even so, loss of material from site A is very easily compensated. The only effect that taking out a site would have, therefore, is to force ‘downstream’ sites—those previously relying upon the removed site for news feeds—to seek feeds elsewhere. Users depending directly on a site would experience similar problems, but by using a different information provider could readily find similar solutions.
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Of course, as an Internet connection can be made from virtually any telephone, even national action could not guarantee effective censorship. A direct analogy lies in the use of telephone ‘sex lines’ in the UK. After public and political disquiet, such lines were effectively banned—but the ban was only able to be enforced within the UK. Anyone wanting to make such a call is still able to do so—but now the target number is situated outside the UK. Without disabling the entire Internet, it is clear that external censorship of Internet newsgroups is not practicable. What, though, of the possibilities of controlling World Wide Web sites? THE WORLD WIDE WEB The ‘Web’ is graphically based and exceptionally easy to use. In structure, it can be considered as a static approach to information provision. Here, instead of the contents of a newsgroup being constantly transmitted around the world, an individual user establishes direct contact with a specific remote site containing desired information. A major advantage of this system is that websites are easily linked to each other—a user of the Web may move between the display of websites in different countries—or different continents—without realising they are doing more than moving to the next page of data. Consider Figure 6.3. The illustrated sites—two in the same country, the third outside—all host WWW pages. A user may easily move from viewing page 1 on site A, to the linked page 2 on site B. Page 3 is also hosted by site B, but page 4, to which it is linked, is located on a foreign site, C. Our user could access this page without even knowing in which country it is located. Companies and individuals may establish their own websites, after which users of any connected computer located anywhere in the world may read the presented information. Access to websites is very easy indeed—they form by far the simplest way of obtaining information from the Internet. Their purposes—location of desired information—may seem similar, but Internet websites and Internet newsgroups are very different. A newsgroup has no ‘real’ location, and cannot therefore be said to exist in any one place, while a website must, by definition, have a unique home address. It may seem that censoring a website is inherently easier than controlling an Internet newsgroup—after all, if a website has a fixed location, it can surely be controlled. In theory, this is true; but of course,
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Figure 6.3 How websites are linked
unlike traditional publishers, an electronic website has no fixtures and fittings. There is nothing to prevent a site moving to a new location and starting over. Given the international aspects of the Web, such a site can easily lie beyond the legislative reach of any would-be censors. To make regulation even more impractical, this whole process can easily be accomplished electronically—the organiser of a site need not even visit the country which contains it. There have been a variety of suggested methods of WWW censorship. Modifying individual Web browsers to ignore sites with certain addresses, or which match a list of keywords, is a current suggestion, analogous to television’s infamous ‘V chip’. The disadvantages and impracticalities of this scheme are obvious. SUMMARY Anyone with a full Internet connection may read from and contribute to Internet newsgroups, which cover the whole range of human activity. Such groups cannot effectively be banned. Graphically based World Wide Web sites also contain information, but such sites, unlike newsgroups, have specific locations. Both rely on the Internet, a paradoxically unorganised and ad hoc arrangement of connected computers. The Internet has evolved to its present position of global dominance from an origin as a nuclear-attack-proof research network— Internet censorship is consequently non-trivial.
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The underlying ethos shared by longstanding users of the Internet has always been very strongly in favour of freedom from external controls, and in favour of internal self-regulation. PROBLEMS IN ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION As part of research for a book on computer ethics (Langford 1995) I sought out the views of users of electronic communications, and have continued to gather such information. As most contributions came from individuals responding to requests posted to newsgroups directed at professional users of networked computer systems, respondents did not reflect a wide range of users. Actual responses were inevitably heavily biased to those with considerable computer experience. Even so, perceived problem areas are of potential interest, particularly because to date there has been little research into the ethical views and opinions of Internet users. Two principal areas of computer networking and communications were considered particularly relevant to ethical examination. The first relates to individual communications, defined as messages between people who use an Internet connection to convey information electronically. The second is concerned with publication—reading or publishing information widely, through access to newsgroups and websites. For reasons of space, in this chapter I shall only be considering publication issues. ETHICAL ISSUES IN NETWORKED COMMUNICATIONS Networked computers allow spreading of information in a way which is directly analogous to traditional broadcasting, or publishing on paper. Once distributed electronically, such ‘published’ information is potentially seen by very large numbers of individuals indeed. Of course, for many years consolidated files of electronic information have been be held on Internet-linked computers in ‘open’ directories. These directories may be accessed, anonymously, from anywhere in the world by use of ftp, or ‘file transfer protocol’. The well established ftp procedure is very similar in its operation to the way the World Wide Web operates, but lacks the graphic interface which makes the Web so easy to use.
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Listed below are examples of inappropriate Internet broadcasting. These are intended as illustrations and a base for discussion, rather than definitive cases. Personal examples: • • • •
‘Spamming’ Individual access to ‘inappropriate’ material Technical examples: Public broadcasting of ‘inappropriate’ material Unauthorised use of copyright material Personal: ‘spamming’
Although very easy to do, sending multiple copies of messages to many different newsgroups is always considered inappropriate. Doing so is called, in netspeak, ‘spamming’, after an old Monty Python sketch. Distributing many hundreds of thousands of copies of your message and presenting it to the readers of every newsgroup might, perhaps, be useful to you or your company, but the disadvantages to everyone else are very clear. Who does this, and why? The first example to achieve general notoriety may have been the 1994 Green Card Lottery spam, perpetrated by the US law firm of Canter & Siegel. The firm considered the Internet to be an ideal, lowcost and perfectly legitimate way to target advertising at people likely to be potential clients. Although spreading their spam message had cost others thousands of dollars and much inconvenience, they had done nothing illegal, or, they considered, improper. Among Internet users this was certainly a minority view—the reaction of the Internet population was overwhelmingly hostile. Users felt that, first, the Internet was the wrong place to conduct commercial business. Its origins and longstanding academic bias mean the net has had a long tradition of non-commercialism. Second, although it may appear so to users, operation of the Internet is not free. Several popular news readers, for example, display variations of the following message before they allow news items be posted: This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilised world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
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Canter & Siegel were alleged to have posted to over six thousand groups, which must surely have involved expenditure of quite a lot of other people’s money. It is also true that in order to be established, all Internet newsgroups have individual charters setting out their aims. Many of the charters of such newsgroups and connected sites specifically prohibit offers to do business, (a few do accept them, but restrict buyers and sellers to individuals, not companies). Of course, being part of the Internet, such charters have only moral force. Understandably, though, people reading a particular newsgroup can become very annoyed indeed by irrelevant postings concerning subjects outside the group’s charter. This is analogous to, say, a neighbourhood group meeting together to discuss the needs of a local school which is constantly interrupted in its debate by someone trying to sell double glazing. Respecting the rights of groups and individuals is part of the Internet ethic. Anyone who, for their own purposes, casually overrides the interests of other users by generating spams is consequently perceived to be acting unethically. Personal: individuals and inappropriate material Newsgroups dealing with sexual matters are among the most heavily trafficked. To one such newsgroup University of Michigan student Joe Baker made three postings. All dealt with brutal rape and murder, and were extreme, even for a specialist newsgroup. One posting was even more excessive. It used the name of a real person as the victim of the fantasy—a female Michigan student who had had the misfortune to share a class with Baker. The FBI arrested Baker, charging him under 18 USC s 875 (c), which makes illegal the transmission across state or international boundaries of a threat to injure the person of another. Although the case was eventually dismissed, there is no doubting the trauma Baker’s actions caused to an innocent student. However, the arrest and prosecution of an individual who had done nothing except post written material to the Internet precipitated a very strong and widespread reaction. This came both from advocates of free speech and from those concerned with the protection of individuals from sexist threats and potential attack. The Baker case was certainly excessive; but it encapsulates a central aspect of electronic communication. Are all electronic postings to be viewed as exempt from controls, or are they subject to regulation? Can individuals be protected from postings like Baker’s? There seems to be
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urgent need of debate and discussion, although unfortunately the issue of what constitutes ‘appropriate’ personal postings to the Internet is not one which is likely to be easily resolved. Technical: ‘broadcasting’ of ‘inappropriate’ material The Baker case involved an individual making use of an existing newsgroup to post material, but other methods of distributing opinions electronically are also possible. Once a computer is connected to the Internet, running appropriate software on it allows the easy creation of a World Wide Web site. Tens of thousands of such sites exist, and numbers are increasing exponentially. Most such sites are well designed and well conducted—but there are some websites, for example, which exist to distribute pornography, both hard and soft, as well as sites devoted to propagating extremist political views. Such sites are normally packed with colour illustrations. All that is needed to view them is the correct electronic address. As was mentioned earlier, Internet newsgroups are only controllable by refusing to allow news packages to enter an information provider’s site. Newsgroup access may also be made more difficult by a ‘censoring’ site refusing to pass information along the networked chain of computers. In contrast, a website cannot be controlled at all, beyond refusing it permission to exist at a particular location. Sites created by individuals but felt unsuitable by their information providers have been closed down, but there is no way whatsoever of forbidding them to exist. (Incidentally, the closing of a website by an information provider often follows generation of excessive traffic to it, rather than unethical views.) However, once closed, a site may just spring up somewhere else —potentially even outside the censoring country, perhaps in the Third World. As mentioned earlier, such use is directly analogous to attempts to ban telephone sex lines. The ethical issues involved here are both massive and complex, and it would be foolish to pretend there are easy or obvious solutions. The mix of Internet users is increasingly being diluted from its specialist origins by a vast influx of additional users from a range of different backgrounds. The well-established Internet philosophy of open access and free communication is consequently in direct conflict with the social and moral mores of many of its new users. Additionally, in contrast to the text-based newsgroups, the driving force behind expansion of the
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Web is strongly commercial. If these trends continue, the Internet ethic itself must, at best, be in a state of flux. What is certain, however, is the inescapable fact that censorship is not possible. Whatever decisions are eventually reached must inevitably reflect this reality. Technical: unauthorised use of copyright material Turning a colour photograph into a file viewable on a computer is a cheap and straightforward process—a scanner works in a similar manner to a photocopier, but instead of a paper image it creates an electronic one. Clearly, if individuals are able to include colour photographs on their web pages by simply scanning illustrations from magazines, there is a real danger of copyright material being misused. It is also possible, if slightly more troublesome, to scan and reproduce text —so printed material is similarly at risk. Copyright laws differ from country to country, too; so a text may, for example, be legally available on an Internet site in the US but illegal to download elsewhere. Illegality is of course also a wider issue, particularly obvious where a country with a tradition of free speech meets more repressive regimes. This becomes increasingly likely when an Internet connection may represent a potential link to freedom for dissidents—China is a good current example. Illegality of material is also seen as a problem in parts of Europe. Here, for instance, countries with a repressive attitude to sexual material, such as the UK and Ireland, are within easy electronic reach of countries with sharply different views, such as Holland and France, as well as more geographically distant ones such as the US. The problem appears intractable—exactly where does a photograph, legally displayed in the US, become illegal when accessed from the UK? Halfway across the Atlantic? As is often the case, simple transference to the Internet of an ethical code which works well with older technology may not be appropriate.
THE PROBLEMS I have so far discussed a selection of examples intended to illustrate some problems in using the Internet. These range from minor difficulties to the more serious, and potentially involve abuse or limitation of free speech. The impossibility of exerting effective censorship is hard for many individuals to understand. Politicians, especially, are understandably
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reluctant to consider anything other than legislation as the ultimate sanction on behaviour. Within the Internet, however, local or even national legislation simply will not work. There are two main reasons why this is so. First, policing the Internet is technically impossible. Assume a questionable file is being passed across the Internet. Even if it were feasible to screen all Internet messages, which it currently is not, given the huge volume of electronic traffic it would be very hard indeed for even the most automated of authorities to identify a needle of suspect material within the literally mountainous haystacks of normal traffic. The situation is rendered impossible by the advent and widespread distribution of effective electronic codes. Their use does not simply generate electronic messages which have been ‘obviously’ coded, although no agency has the funds or resources to randomly decode all such messages, on the assumption that some contents may perhaps be illegal. The situation is actually even more difficult. Using modern coding techniques, a covert photograph, for example, may be encoded, and the coded material invisibly included as part of an apparently innocent electronic message. Very efficient codes are freely available on the Internet. In practice, though, suitably coded text might be transmitted without further disguise. The chances of successful interception would still be vanishingly small. The second reason why policing is impossible lies in the fact that much of the Internet lies beyond the reach of any national police force. This means that any Internet site may make available whatever it likes, provided only that the country within which it is located does not object. Although access to such sites from the UK may be officially forbidden, anyone with computer, telephone and determination may nevertheless access them. In reality, enforcement is quite impractical. Given the impossibility of exercising political or technical control over the Internet, the need for appropriate education is growing increasingly urgent. In the past, the Internet worked well; it has done so since it was first established. The principal reason we are experiencing problems now lies in a dramatic shift which has taken place in the Internet population. No longer are the majority of users experienced in the use of computers, familiar with an academic approach to free speech, and aware of established expectations of user behaviour. Letting loose new users on the Internet without training or education can be compared with letting loose new drivers without instruction—except even the worst new driver does not have the ability to inconvenience
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several million people, a task well within the powers of even a neophyte Internet user. Quite apart from a massive increase in personal use, we are also seeing an explosion in commercial use of the Internet, principally through the World Wide Web. What was formerly a largely academic network is now a promotional goldrush. Hundreds, if not thousands of companies from the very large to the very small are racing to seize the enormous potential market represented by those with Internet connections. This commercial rush shows no signs of decreasing— indeed, all the indications are that it will continue to accelerate. What decisions should be taken on defining what is appropriate commercial use of the Internet, and who should be responsible for framing such definitions? How long can the established ethic—essentially a shared understanding on the part of users—be sustained under a stunningly rapid dilution of user experience? There appears a genuine and urgent need for establishment of an updated ‘Internet ethic’, if only an acceptable defining body can be found or established. CONCLUSIONS This chapter has outlined some of the practical and ethical problems concerned with appropriate behaviour in electronic communication. I have emphasised the impossibility of effective network policing, and the associated need for a greatly increased level of education. Before the advent of the Internet, few individuals working outside the mass media could expect to have their views and opinions considered by more than a handful of friends and acquaintances. In contrast, a simple posting to a popular Internet newsgroup may potentially be read by hundreds of thousands of people. It seems clear that automatic carrying over of ‘small-scale’ behaviour into a large-scale forum must lead to difficulties. Such difficulties are likely to be compounded by the greatly increased opportunities the Internet offers for antisocial behaviour. Users with even limited knowledge may, for example, employ electronic mail to spam newsgroups, while the more technically advanced may use the World Wide Web to distribute extreme political propaganda. Topics considered in this chapter largely evolved from the views of a selection of Internet users. Although it may be excessive to take loosely defined opinions too seriously, responses actually indicated a surprising uniformity of belief. Until now the Internet has worked through acceptance on the part of its users of this belief, which might perhaps be
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viewed as an evolved general ethic of behaviour. While reflecting what may be a purely pragmatic approach to Internet use, for some time this approach has proved both effective and functional. Of the points discussed, five were particularly emphasised: • The Internet is very strongly against external control, and in favour of internal self regulation. • Rights of groups and individuals should always be respected. • Individual actions should always reflect awareness of the wider Internet community. • No message should be broadcast without proper cause. • The ability to post globally is so powerful it must always be voluntarily limited. Repeatedly mentioned was the well-established Internet philosophy of open access and free communication. The number and variety of new Internet users is constantly increasing; the situation is dynamic, and prediction risky. However, I strongly suggest there is a case for some form of coordinated encouragement of appropriate ethical standards, ideally founded upon the proven standards established during the Internet’s development. If such standards can be agreed, initially locally, and potentially globally, they might then be included, perhaps, in appropriate education of all new users of the Internet. New users surely need to demonstrate awareness of the responsibilities as well as the advantages of Internet use. Further research into the philosophy of the Internet is clearly essential, and such suggestions may perhaps be premature. The Internet undoubtedly provides a tremendous global opportunity, and has been compared to the invention of the printing press in its power to educate and inform. Should it develop without an ethical foundation, we would all surely be the poorer. Exponential growth, however, means time is running out. It is for those who are responsible for the maintenance of the Internet to take a lead in determining how it should appropriately be used. NOTE 1 This chapter includes some material from my ‘Law and disorder in Netville’, New Scientist, 17 June 1995; and an early draft of ‘Ethics on the Internet’, Ethics and Behavior, vol. 6, 2, 1996.
Chapter 7 The Internet, virtual reality and real reality Joe Ravetz
Is the Internet simply a communications medium, an extension of the telephone with a few add-ons extending to party-line facilities and pictures, or is it a new medium, cyberspace, in which relationships and experience can exist disembodied from the reality that exists outside our computer screens? Looking at press headlines, we would be justified in our assumption that the Internet is a unique contribution to late twentiethcentury culture, capable of establishing new forms of relationships, of reconfiguring symbols and meanings and paradoxically reinforcing dominant trends in world culture. Scramble to Build a Super Showroom in Cyberspace, Monsters from Cyberspace and Is Anybody Out There? are only a few of the headlines in the myriad articles on the Internet.1 Closer examination reveals that in each case the story is far more mundane than the headline. These are articles examining marketing strategies on the Internet and raising issues of efficacy and practical questions of ‘reach’ and efficiency. Many companies have abandoned the Internet as an effective business tool, unconvinced that the medium has any but an ancillary role in marketing.2 Despite initial reservations, companies will be present on the Internet as access to the medium expands, though whether the corporate presence will extend beyond a sophisticated ‘yellow pages’ or electronic leafleting remains an open question. An article appeared in the Guardian in early 1996 headlined Trail of Cyber-sex, Lies and Floppy Disks Ends in a Divorce Suit. A New Jersey wife was ‘flirting over the Internet with a man whom she had never met, swapping erotic fantasies’. Her husband was suing for divorce on alleged adultery in cyberspace. Physical consummation had never occurred. The two cybersex partners had never met. The husband’s lawyer, in pressing the suit, ‘said that while the couple had not engaged
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in actual intercourse, “I’m not sure where technology is taking us these days.”’3 Where is technology taking us? Well, from this example not very far. Flirting and intimacy from a safe distance, mutual fantasy and unrequited passion are the stuff of eighteenth-century restoration plays and Victorian novels. What is unique about cyberspace and the Internet in this news article is the language. Apart from misconstruing a word like adultery, what is our understanding of cyberspace that leads intelligent human beings to take the idea of cybersex seriously? What may be unique with the new Internet technology is the facility for easy real-time multilateral communication, as yet limited to text and graphics but nonetheless a major change from the limited party-line facility of a telephone. Mark Slouka, in War of the Worlds: The Assault on Reality (1995) describes cyberspace villages and multilateral relationships built on people’s fantasies. He refers to outwardly sane individuals adopting personae and gender identities in contrast to their real embodied world identities. He gives a frightening picture of evil in cyberspace. Where I disagree with him is that, like the gurus who encourage the phenomenon by mystifying the power of good of cyberspace, endowing it with a mind-like capacity whose essence they assert is greater than the sum of the minds feeding into it, he also ascribes too much importance to it. He demonises the Net, censuring the Net and its gurus for the behaviour of individuals who either wish to deceive or whose personae are so fragile that the disembodied reality of cyberspace becomes a substitute for the real reality of everyday life. Unfortunately the disembodied reality of cyberspace offers more selfesteem and personal satisfaction for some people than the reality of everyday life, even to death. Sharon Lopatka was a reclusive woman aged thirty-five, outwardly content, who was operating on the Internet with web pages advertising psychic hotlines. She entered into an Internet relationship with a divorced, reclusive man, centred on sexual fantasy, torture and death. She adopted an Internet persona, ‘Nancy’, and played master-slave games with ‘Slowhand’, whose real name was Robert Glass. He described how he was going to sexually torture her and ultimately kill her. She travelled to meet him and wrote to her family of her impending death, saying she was at peace. He killed her (Guardian, 31 October 1996).
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The problem of the disembodied self is not a consequence of the Net, though the Net may offer new avenues for its expression. R.D. Laing in The Divided Self, first published in 1959, is worth reading for exploration of the phenomenon that Mark Slouka so graphically draws attention to and is so concerned about. The concerns he raises are not Net issues but ones of mental health and socialisation. I shall quote from the back cover of my edition. ‘The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience either himself or others as “real”. He invents a false self and with it he confronts both the outside world and his own despair’. Of course Laing writes that the false self ultimately collapses because it is not strengthened by confirmation from the embodied world. It is essentially a hollowed-out existence devoid of any commitment that will jeopardise the persona. The cyberspace world of Mark Slouka is a world that encourages superficiality and identity problems in vulnerable individuals. For those individuals who draw a vicarious or self-interested pleasure from deception, the Net affords new opportunities. But there is nothing new about the deception. When I talked about electronic mediated communication to a former Marketing Director for Toshiba and now Vice President, Marketing and Sales for a large Singapore microelectronics firm, a man with a twentyfive year history in new technology, he said, as you would expect, that while many routine management issues and business issues are regularly discussed using communication tools, important issues require his attendance in Singapore. Why, because on issues of importance dialogue requires each of the participants to get the ‘feel’ of the others with whom they are engaging, their sensitivities, their integrity, their intellectual acumen, their understanding of the issues and other personal qualities which are observable in prolonged contact in social and business settings; in short they build and maintain trust. So despite the cost, the quality of the technology at his disposal, the physical strain of outward twelve-to-fourteen-hour flights, the accompanying jetlag and the rigours of the return journey, personal contact is seen to be superior to electronically mediated communication when important issues are under consideration. My daughter argues that this need for contact demonstrates a generation gap. My generation hasn’t been raised with the tools, she says. I doubt it. There is an imperceptible quality about face-to-face communication over time which cannot be captured by electronically mediated communication introduced to make staged set-piece encounters possible.
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Cyberspace: what does it mean? Cybernetics is the discipline concerned with self-regulating mechanisms in animals and machines. It is a field concerned with building a general theory of machines independent of the material of which the machine is made. A particular machine is thus an instantiation of a conceptual or cyber-machine. The cybernetic machine has no physical reality. Cyberspace is the analouge of the cybernetic machine. Cyberspace is a metaphor for the communication potential of the Net. The Net can be conceptualised as a wide-area network that is infinitely open to expansion. The Internet is the umbrella term given to the information and communication technologt (ICT) links that allow for its communication potential. Many people share a belief that cyberspace has a potential greater than the some of its parts, likening it to an undifferentiated group intelligence with latent properties. Aloose analogy can be drawn between cyberspace as a disemboided mind with transcendental qualities and the Internet as the material reality of brain (for a detailed discussion of cyber-culture see loader 1997b). For most of us cyberspace and the Net is atool of communication that facilitates information-gathering and dialogue. Cyberspace simple refers to the potential of the Internet to provide an open communication not hindered by speed, by distance, by number of participants in an exchange, nor potentially by limitations of sensory data. By ‘limitations of sensory data’ I mean the capibility of the Internet to directly involve the human senses in a reality which has the appearance of reality but not the substance of reality, the potential for experience through simulation or virtualisation rather than bodily interaction. At this point in time, cyberspace is hyperbole for an electronically mediated communication system open toa limited number of participants and inhibited by the cost of the equipment and line access fees. however cost constraints will diminish over time. One of the exaggerated claims of the proponents of the new medium is that it is uniquely open and free, not subject to censorship, and a vehicle for transcending national and culture border. We have all been frightened with stories of pronography on the Internet, and of extreme political fringe groups making bombassembly instructions available on the Internet, as if these fringe groups were unable to communicate effectively or that schoolchildren were unable to make bombs in their science laboratories prior to the Internet. With the growth of the Internet, nations are looking for effective laws and technical means by which to regulate the subject matter of the Internet, just as they have
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consistently done so with other communications tools; radio, television, newspapers and the post. Societies need to regulate the transmission of materials that may be violent, grossly offensive or oppressive to legitimate interests and groups through attention to the potential impact on the right to freedom of expression. The United States Congress has recently passed a Communications Decency Act to control pornography on the Net. In Germany CompuServe was ordered to remove offensive neo-Nazi material from a server. The German authorities want international agreement on regulation. The Singapore government intends to license Internet service providers, though admitting the providers could move ‘offshore’ to avoid regulation.4 Government concern for legitimate regulation does point up the openaccess nature of the medium. But access does not equate with importance or uniqueness. Much website material does not warrant attention. The best material is useful to an informed audience familiar with the subject matter of the website; the worst has the elements of a poor-quality teenage magazine or is simply prurient. I would argue that without the Web our search for information would not be appreciably effected nor would our creativity be diminished. (I hope that it is clear that I do not include electronic mail, which I personally find invaluable!) Other media are and have been equally important in disseminating news and influencing the course of events. The fax, copier and telephone were instrumental in maintaining the pressure for change in the old Soviet Union. The requirements of modern economies for rapid communication systems and the increased compactness, portability, reliability and cheapness of the older communications technologies has meant that governments have limited ability to control access to or proscribe use of the readily available ICTs (Dickens 1992: Chapter 4). The Internet will complement the older technologies. There is, I believe, a potential of the Internet that does warrant increased awareness and some concern for the future: its potential to transmit a range of sensory data, respond in real time to sensory stimuli and incorporate the event with virtual reality programming and artificial intelligence techniques; in short, the involvement of the human senses in an event which has the appearance of reality but not the substance. It is experience through simulation rather than bodily interaction with the environment. Virtual reality implies simulation without constraints, not a substitute for experience but the belief that virtual reality is experience. These are constructed worlds outside the temporal and
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spatial world we inhabit. The virtual firm or the virtual city that exists everywhere may in truth exist nowhere. It should be noted however that existing examples of virtual cities and virtual firms do not have the simulation characteristics that would warrant the description of virtual reality. They are graphically pleasing hypertext Internet programmes. The term ‘virtual reality’ appears to have taken on two meanings. The first refers to the interactive qualities of simulation software, on which I shall concentrate. The second refers simply to a model programmed on the Internet sharing a limited prescribed range of core functions with its physical homologue openly accessible without limitations of distance. For instance, virtual Amsterdam (De Digitale Stad or Digital City) appears merely to be a tourist office for Amsterdam with additional information for residents with a choice of language (see Aurigi and Graham, this volume). Virtual reality, stemming from the notion of virtuality in which potentiality does not relate clearly to actuality, is an idea that has been taken up by the entertainment industry, and I speculate future takeup by the education industry. Wired up with individual screens and data gloves, it becomes possible to control an imaginary world without the bodily limitations and frailties of the real world. I spoke earlier of cybersex. In virtual reality cybersex, or the simulation of sex without the limitations of actual partner relations, becomes possible—the preferable term is masturbation. The stroll through imaginary buildings and the experience of the sensations across a range of senses can be programmed. But of course this is all done without the constraints, commitments and intentions that real reality places on us. It is not experience as much as the distortion of experience. In some of the wilder claims it is suggested you will be able to experience travel without moving. You will not need to travel to Mexico to have a Mexican experience, you will be able to touch, see and feel the experience in your home. To clarify with a comparison, a flight simulator for training pilots would not be referred to as a virtual reality machine. The simulator is not the aeroplane and the simulation is not the flight. There is no pretence in simulation but there may be in virtual reality. An interesting diversion from real reality, but confirming the pretence of virtual reality, is the marketing of virtual reality pets which are referred metaphorically in terms normally used for real reality pets. To quote from the headlines of an article entitled ‘The creatures are coming’, ‘they eat, they breed, they learn from their mistakes’.5 Of course if you don’t feed them and they metaphorically ‘die’ you are not
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going to face charges of cruelty to an animal. No real commitment is necessary. Virtual reality pets are simply a new style of game. The implications of multilateral virtual reality, in which events take place outside bodily involvement within a disembodied ephemeral community, is worrying. The blurring of the distinction between real reality and virtual reality has implications which need to be thought through. Should virtual reality programmes carry an intellectual and emotional health warning? Paul Frissen, in a paper entitled ‘The virtual reality of informatization in public administration’ (Frissen 1994) argues that decision making in public agencies may be enriched with intelligent processing and graphics capabilities, and suggests that ‘a virtual reality of constructed policy options arises, which do not arise according to a logic of organising and steering but according to a logic of informing and communicating’. He argues that the new links in public agencies will make the ‘classical organisation patterns’ obsolete. ‘An organisation becomes a derivative of information communication technology possibilities in which constraints of time and space are less and less important’ (see also Frissen 1997). Much has been written about the nature and pace of change with the introduction of ICTs to government. Paul Frissen goes further. He links notions of virtual reality, artificial intelligence technologies and techniques, and graphics, to suggest decision making processes as an outcome of active citizen involvement, simulation technology and artificial intelligence modelling. He does not offer any concrete descriptions. The problem of course is that virtualisation and artificial intelligence modelling are reductionist attempts to squeeze human reasoning to a formal rule-based rationality founded on a clear line of reasoning moving from an initial state to a final state. ‘Leibnitz dreamt of the “mechanisation of logic”: feed in the assumptions and arguments, turn the handle and the answers true or false drop out’ (Professor James Brown of UMIST, informal conversation, 1988). J.W.Forrester, a key figure in systems dynamics, working at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the 1950s, reasoned that it is possible to define the variables of human systems, model the complexity and run computer simulation to arrive at ‘true’ conclusions. To quote from Bloomfield on dynamicists’ general systems approach, ‘systems with similar structures tend to have similar behavioural properties, whether those systems be an electronic circuit, a stock-control system, or a city’. (Bloomfield 1986: 9)
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Paul Frissen’s vision will not democratise decision making, but will reduce creativity by formalising a set of options based on a limited set of variables and a finite set of rules and constraints inherent to formal systems. His approach is constrained by the technology and techniques of the Internet. The Internet cannot emulate the ‘town hall meeting’ which Frissen aspires to. The idea of algorithm creation and the reduction of open, complex human knowledge categories and experience to syntactical rule-based forms, is a powerful and appealing intellectual idea for solving problems but one with severe limitations of use in human societies. Yet all simulation and virtualisation depends on limiting variables and defining formal domains. Jacques Ellul argues that technology has a tendency to be ‘autonomous with respect to traditional values, to be selfdetermining, and to be totalitarian’ in its impact on communities, because of the suppositions designed into the technology and techniques (Simpson 1995:19; Ravetz 1996). Knowledge can be described as running along a continuum. At one end well-structured domains in which the inputs, processes and outputs are precisely related, measures of outcome are precisely defined and quantitative measures in many instances are generally accepted. Simulation can be applied. At the other end are illstructured domains in which qualitative and intuitive knowledge provide the basis for exploration. By intuitive I do not mean hunches, but sound experience and training resulting in a store of tacit knowledge as the basis of reasoning from context and content. Simulation provides at best a very partial model of reality. For example, if you go to town and park a car you don’t look for the optimal parking place, you look for one that is satisfactory. But the concept of satisfactory is intentional (Searle 1983) and changes depending on whether you have an elderly mother in the car, whether it is raining, whether it is a quick stop, whether the town is crowded, whether it is a day’s leisure shopping, or any combination of a multitude of environmental factors. You can design a programme to do the most complicated maths, create the most elaborate word-processing package or construct a sophisticated graphics and drawing package, but the decisions involved in determining where and when to drive to town and park a car may be too complicated for any virtual reality package designed from a set of defined variables, with discrete processes and outputs. Only ‘real world grounded’ qualitative reasoning, which includes the use of heuristics and experience and domain knowledge, can resolve this rather trivial human dilemma, let alone problems of great human complexity (Ravetz 1996).
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We all listen to recorded music in our homes but none of us believe it offers the range of experience of the live concert. Simulation and virtual reality separate us from the source of the experience. They are the distillation of the experience of the source and the simulator. To quote Jonathan Miller on reading from a computer screen: ‘I think that this is a sort of cognitive equivalent of a condom—it’s a layer of contraceptive rubber between the direct experience and the cognitive system’.6 My concern with virtualisation in cyberspace, and for that matter the use of simulation technologies integrated with artificial intelligence techniques, is that they are potentially powerful tools on the Net which are able to effect all our senses and blur further the boundary between real reality and constructed reality. In conclusion, the information communications technologies will have both instrumental and transcendental effects. The Net will extend the range and scope of participant communication; voice, pictures, simulations and virtual reality interactions will all be possibilities. Will we use it to enrich our lives, disengage into an unreal world of technology, or avoid engagement with the technology? Will some people colonise and control the new technologies in their own interests? What will be the impact on our understanding of distance and place, on the boundary between public and private and on our sense of identity and belonging? These are not new concerns but recurring themes in the social history of technology. NOTES 1 Independent, 4 February 1996; Observer, 9 June 1996; Independent, 10 March 1996. 2 Independent, 31 January 1996. 3 Guardian, 3 February 1996. 4 Guardian, 5 February, 14 March, 23 March 1996; Independent, 2 June 1996. 5 Independent, 21 July 1996. 6 Independent, 14 January 1996.
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Chapter 8 Why even scholars don’t get a free lunch in cyberspace My adventures with a tunnelvisionary Steve Fuller
Inveterate ‘netsurfers’ typically believe that electronic communication has removed all the material obstacles that have traditionally prevented scholarship from enjoying universal access and immediate impact. If you are one of these people, the odds are that your computer is connected to a university or corporate mainframe, which means that you are not directly charged any user’s fees and you rarely suffer from delays in transmission. However, if you log on through a modem connected to your telephone, then the ‘information superhighway’ fast loses its reputation for being a frictionless medium of thought. Depending on your location, telephone access fees can mount up very quickly, and the rate structure of commercial electronic carriers may force you into a suboptimal service that frequently suspends your messages in limbo while those of premium customers zip back and forth. Finally, if you are a technophobic scholar lacking connections to a major institution, the Internet merely widens the gap between you and the rest of the intellectual world. I start with these homely observations because as the electronic medium revolutionises academic communications, there is the inevitable tendency to hope that it will relieve scholars of the burdens of previous media without imposing any of its own. I shall dub prophets of the new medium who adopt this sociologically blinkered posture ‘tunnelvisionaries’. They have so far received the most media coverage in their attempt to shape the future of scholarship on the Internet (Kling and Lamb 1996). One imagines them also to be among the inveterate netsurfers. As they see it, scholars have a clear sense of what they want and sufficient resources to make it happen, even though a full transition to the electronic medium may incur some short-term institutional costs. The tunnelvisionaries envisage business-as-usual in academia becoming increasingly efficient, as scholars can access materials and audiences
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more easily, produce more text and receive quicker feedback. They never consider the congestion problems that will arise as more scholars log on, nor do they worry much about assigning intellectual property rights to tracts in cyberspace. In fact, the tunnelvisionaries tend to blame the publishing industry for anything that reminds academics that their work has an economic dimension. Perhaps the most visible and imaginative of the Internet’s tunnelvisionaries is Stevan Harnad, best known as the founding editor of the most successful open peer commentary journal in the social sciences (Behavior and Brain Sciences) and of the first peer-reviewed electronic journal to be supported by a major academic professional society (Psycoloquy, which is partly subsidised by the American Psychological Association). I enter the debate, also as the founder of an open peer commentary journal (Social Epistemology) as well as someone who sits on the editorial boards of Psycoloquy and the British Sociological Association’s electronic journal initiative Sociological Research Online. While enthusiastic about the potentially transformative powers of the electronic medium, I diverge from Harnad over exactly what those powers are, their costs and benefits, and how these matters are likely to be resolved. Our disagreement is more profound when it comes to the desirability of peer review as a scholarly regulator (as opposed to ‘open peer commentary’, which publishes alongside the original article criticisms that might constitute grounds for revision or rejection were they voiced as part of the peer review process). Harnad is much more satisfied than I with the normative sensibilities that the peer review process perpetuates. But this does not mean that I oppose all regulation. On the contrary, I believe that the increasingly specialised academic order extolled by Harnad—what he sees as its tendency toward ‘esoterism’—is precisely what needs to be kept in check by countervailing forces, including both publishers and the Internet. As might be expected, I first voiced my sentiments on an electronic mailing list devoted to science and technology studies in early 1995, shortly after Harnad had bombarded the editors of Psycoloquy with manifestos about the ‘Post-Gutenberg Galaxy’ toward which scholarship was supposedly heading. A reporter who had been lurking on the STS ‘listserv’ asked Harnad and myself to debate the matter in the Times Higher Education Supplement. The result was the 12 May 1995 centrefold in which Harnad and I literally faced each other, 2,000 words apiece. On that basis Rob Kling, newly appointed editor of The Information Society, asked both of us to expand our pieces to fullfledged articles and to respond to each other’s criticisms. This then became the centrepiece of
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Kling (1995), which is the main source for Harnad’s views in what follows. My strategy in dealing with Harnad stems from my work in social epistemology, a theory of knowledge policy that synthesises work in philosophy of science, historical sociology of knowledge, social psychology, and political economy—all with an eye to promoting the democratisation of knowledge production (Fuller 1993). Social epistemology counters theories that define knowledge or aspects of knowledge production without first taking into account its empirical character. Although Descartes has few followers today, nevertheless it is still common to define knowledgerelated activities in Cartesian terms, on the basis of first principles, and then to deduce from them consequences for action. Unfortunately, this only creates a serious strategic gap between the notional world in which the definition and its deduced consequences exist and the empirical world which already carries its own implicit definitions of knowledge and its own possibilities for action. Basically, the social epistemologist starts with the empirical world of knowledge production and then tries to move to someplace better, not—as most tunnelvisionaries do—the other way around. Fleshing out one’s vision of utopia from first principles is no substitute for a plan that gets us from here to there; it is merely to put the cart before the horse. A TALE OF TWO TECHNOPHILOSOPHIES: CYBERPLATONISM V. CYBERMATERIALISM A good place to start is with some scholarly name-calling. To do justice to Harnad’s historical roots, I shall call his position ‘cyberplatonism’. The Platonist’s holy grail is the frictionless medium of thought that can transcend time and space to get at The Truth. The cyberplatonist believes he or she has found the Grail in the Internet. There are two issues that need to be teased out before we go any further. First, does the Internet indeed approximate the frictionless medium of thought sought by Platonists? Here I use ‘frictionless’ as shorthand for the qualities possessed by the desired medium, i.e. relatively direct and reliable transmission at low cost. Second, do we have an adequate model of how such a medium would enable inquirers to get at The Truth? Harnad simply assumes this to be the case, which leads him to run the two questions together. The model he has in mind is the peer review system, whereby only qualified members in a field of inquiry evaluate
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the work proposed for inclusion in the field’s body of knowledge and public dissemination. As will become evident in what follows, peer review presupposes material conditions that render it no more than a ‘virtual cyberplatonism’. Nevertheless, according to Harnad, only the presence of paper-consuming intermediaries—the publishing houses— prevents this system from being fully institutionalised and thereby unleashing an era of untrammelled inquiry. This second question may turn out to be more important than the first, especially if academics and other professional knowledge producers remain personally insulated from the costs of maintaining and extending electronic communications. The Achilles heel of all forms of Platonism is an obliviousness to the material conditions of thought, and cyberplatonism is no different in this respect. The Internet is hardly the frictionless medium of thought cyberplatonists make it out to be, and perhaps more importantly, even if it were, it does not follow that the interests of inquiry would be best served by colonising it for the peer review system. Generally speaking, cyberplatonists can be found lurking behind any claim that a cognitive or communicative medium enables an ‘overall saving’ in effort or expense. By contrast, my own position on these issues is that of the ‘cybermaterialist’, one who does not believe that the search for a frictionless medium of thought is intelligible. Instead, what happens is that one form of friction is exchanged for another, as we pass from one medium to another. In more concrete terms, the costs are merely shifted around, sometimes from one aspect of our lives to another, sometimes from one part of society to another. Of course, a big problem with assessing the exact costs and benefits is that by the time the medium has become institutionalised, people’s lives and values will have adapted to it, so that even those who have limited access to the new medium will have a hard time imagining what life could be like without it. Of all aspects of human history, the history of technology is the one that cannot seem to shake off the Orwellian tendency of rewriting the present to make it look like straight-ahead progress from the past. To counteract this tendency, we have the cybermaterialist’s heuristic: Whenever presented with the prospect of a technological system that provides an ‘overall saving’ in effort or expense, look for what lies outside the system, because that is probably where the costs are being borne. The most straightforward way to interpret the cybermaterialist imperative is in terms of the economist’s concept of externality. Consider the relatively simple case of two media—print and electronic— whose general virtues trade off against each other. A convenient
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example is Harnad’s own interspersal of his response to my critique of his position. But contra Harnad, such commentary is not an innovation made possible by electronic communications—it is only made easier. Interlinear (and marginal) commentary to an authoritative text is a practice that reaches back at least to the twelfth century. Back then, manuscripts were written with wide margins and interlinear spaces to permit insertion of the scholastic reader’s notes, objections, and (as the original meaning of ‘inquisition’) examination answers (Hoskin and Macve 1986). Like electronic hypertext today, as manuscripts were copied and passed on to other scholastics, the comments would often be incorporated into the main body of the text, eventually making it difficult to disentangle exactly who said what. Credit, when assignable, would typically go to the person who assembled the most interesting array of texts, leaving aside issues of original authorship. This medieval practice declined with the introduction of the printing press (McLuhan 1962; Ong 1982). Printing enabled the production of texts that remained invariant as they acquired portability. The invariance resulted not only from the reliability of the printing process, but more importantly from the asymmetry that printing created between authors and readers: authors appeared in print, while readers were forced to scribble in ever diminishing marginal and interlinear spaces. As a result, it became much easier to assign authorship to a text, and for that assignment to be associated with a proprietary right over a determinate object. While I personally welcome the reinvention of medieval hypertextual practices in the electronic medium, they would wreak havoc on the credit allocation schemes that currently operate in the academic world— the very schemes that receive Harnad’s enthusiastic support—as virtually all of these depend crucially on the key Gutenberg practice of assigning authorship to text. As we shall see, the legal struggles over defining the Internet suggest that Gutenberg notions of authorship do not sit well with post- (or pre-) Gutenberg notions of hypertextuality. The emerging legal persona of the ‘infopreneur’ seems to owe more to the twelfth-century compiler-encyclopedist than to the nineteenth-century genius-author. It may be that the more we insist on the transformative powers of the electronic medium, the more we unwittingly enable the dissolution of institutions like authorship around which the peer review process and other mechanisms of credit allocation in academia revolve. Not being a technological determinist myself, I would not argue that this is a necessary consequence, but its probability is sufficiently high to raise concerns that as we wax ‘post-Gutenberg’, we do not, at the same time, remain ‘pre-McLuhan’ in our understanding of technology’s
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potential to shape thought. However, a charitable way of interpreting Harnad’s desire for some peer-reviewed channels on the Internet may be that he wishes to simulate in the electronic medium some of the virtues that emerged from the print medium, especially a stable text to which authorship can be readily assigned. In that case, it will be interesting to see just how much more regulation ultimately needs to be introduced into peer-reviewed cyberspace in order that the integrity of this highly artificial form of communication be maintained (Kahin 1996). At a more general level, the transition from print to electronic media incurs externalities that accompany the constitution of any social order: how to arrange fallible agents so that their collective capacity is more, not less, than the sum of their individual capacities? This problem is harder to solve than it may first seem because people are especially good at manufacturing scarcity, both at an object-level and a metalevel. In other words, even when people can get what they want, this usually means that what they get is worth less than they thought. In more formal terms, there are two general ways in which the collective capacity of society can be undermined: 1 If, by either ignorance or design, everybody interferes with each other, so that only some, if any, of them are able to get what they want. 2 If, by virtue of everyone getting what they want, they unwittingly diminish the value of what they have obtained (Hirsch 1976). These items represent the two kinds of scarcity:1, an object-level scarcity; 2, a meta-scarcity. A new technology introduces new opportunities for scarcity, and the Internet is no exception, a point duly noted by Hal Varian, the economist who has probably thought the most about alternative pricing schemes for the Internet (his current thoughts on the matter are electronically retrievable via http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal.) I will consider only the case of Item 1 here, though 2 becomes increasingly important once information becomes seemingly ‘superabundant’ (see Fuller 1994a). Because the Internet involves a ‘packet-switching’ technology, bits of messages from many different sources are transmitted through the same channel at a given time. This enables the channel to become congested, leading to the delay or deletion of transmissions. Moreover, it has proved difficult to regulate congestion because of the potential disparity in the size of transmitted messages
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(especially when advanced video or audio messages are involved) and the heterogeneity of their sources, as well as the ease with which periods of peak usage shift. Voluntary measures do not seem to work, yet governments appear inclined to privatise, or at least decentralise, whatever control they currently have over the Internet. Nevertheless, historically the only reliable way to prevent the introduction of a new technology from redrawing and sharpening already existing class divisions in society has been government regulation. Clearly, then, we are heading for a crisis in cost-accounting for the Internet. The failure by governments to anticipate the problems of scarcity associated with the Internet partly reflects its secretive roots in Cold War concerns about America’s ability to respond to a nuclear firststrike. To beef up its communication networks, the US Department of Defence drew upon some work then being done at MIT on resource-sharing between computers. From this came the idea of collaboration among different computer user communities. The prototype of the Internet, ARPANET, was thus launched in 1969 to connect Defence Department researchers working across America. No one at the time had expected that the network would colonise conventional forms of communication. Given this historical background, it would be a mistake to think that the future of the Internet will be resolved by ‘discovering’ what the Internet ‘really is’ and then applying some appropriate legal regime for its costaccounting. Rather, parties with an interest in the future of the medium are now at various bargaining tables proposing that the medium be thought of as, say, a toll highway, a cable television system, a telephone, a radio network, etc.—all in the service of advancing certain pricing schemes that will benefit their respective constituencies. Those with a sincere interest in making the Internet ‘the great equaliser’ would spend their time wisely by participating in the discussions already underway with the representatives of the information and communication conglomerates, corporate lawyers, government regulators and highlevel university administrators, in whose hands the future disposition of the Internet ultimately lies. These are the people who need to be convinced that it would be in their interest to allow both affiliated and unaffiliated scholars to surf the net with impunity. Simply appealing to its ‘low cost’ is not a particularly strong argument when the pricing mechanism is still up for grabs and the target audience may not be convinced that so much scholarly communication is really necessary in the first place (or who might want to manipulate the pricing mechanism so as to get scholars to communicate in other ways and about other matters).
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THE CYBERSCAPEGOAT: THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY Harnad is fixated on a piece of folklore of academic life. It pits scholars in the role of Faust against Mephistopheles, played by the publishing industry. In this ‘Faustian bargain’, academics agree to do whatever it takes to get their ideas across, while publishers take advantage of this sincere desire by charging the maximum the market can bear for books and journals. This is probably the closest that academics ever get to the experience of exploitation, and so it provides a ready vehicle for commiserating with the ‘working classes’. But equally, it provides a convenient excuse for why most of us never quite get our message across to all who could potentially benefit from it. Unfortunately, like all such self-serving stories, its grain of truth is buried under a mountain of mystification. The actual history reveals a complex, normatively vexed story of the relationship between academics and the publishers, one in which Mephistopheles often seems more the guardian angel. A plausible plot for the history would be that those with a genuine interest in promoting pure inquiry have stood opposed to both authors and publishers. The late eighteenth century was the watershed period for this complicated issue (Chartier 1994:32–6). According to such Enlightenment thinkers as Condorcet, the universal applicability of scientific principles rendered obsolete the very idea of authorship, an echo of a godlike, authoritative origin to knowledge claims. Instead, claims to knowledge—regardless of their brilliance or profundity—should be seen as the result of combining ideas that are, in principle, available to everyone, by virtue of the ideas corresponding to the structure of reality. Thus, from a legal-economic standpoint, it made most sense to reward inquirers for being the first to solve some well-defined problem, as that would capture the element of chance involved in one person rather than some other equally capable person arriving at the correct solution. However, this sporting image of scientific inquiry, though suitable for a period when most science was still conducted by non-academics, was eventually eclipsed by the sober nineteenth-century image of Wissenschaft as a ‘vocation’ that was justified in terms of inquiry being a noble pursuit, regardless of its consequences. However, a vestige of the old spirit of gamesmanship survives in the priority disputes that continue to punctuate the scientific enterprise. Designed as it was maximise the spread of ideas, the Enlightenment ideal of authorless inquiry took seriously the Platonist quest for a
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frictionless medium of thought. However, almost as soon as it was proposed, the ideal was met with two lines of resistance, one from publishers and the other from authors (it is worth recalling that before the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘author’ of a book most often referred to the impresario who organised and compiled other people’s work—little more than the first moment in the book production process). On the one hand, publishers supported strong copyright laws, as they were beset by chronic book piracy, which often forced them to cut authors’ commissions and even replace them with cheaper scribes (the replacement of authors was quite common, given that publishers commissioned most books, though authors—who would otherwise eke out a living as part-time lecturers or private tutors—were quite prepared to perform such contract labour). One might say that in this case the ideas were spreading too freely. On the other hand, authors whose ideas were not spreading freely enough also demanded stronger copyright laws, partly to retaliate against publishers, but also to protect themselves from an increasingly fragmented market. Authors argued that the quality of their ideas could not be measured by their sales, or even by their reception more generally, but rather by the originality of their expression. This was a quality that could be recognised immediately (as stylistic distinctiveness) but whose significance could be fully fathomed only through years of reflection. In short, the print may belong to the publisher, but the words are the author’s own. A cynic might say that modern copyright laws were thus designed to insure against low demand by upgrading the quality of what the author supplies. In any case, from this came the Romantic image of the ‘misunderstood genius’ whose works appeal only to an esoteric clique. Though it first applied to poets, philosophers and scientists soon refashioned this image for their own purposes. The connection between the unmarketable Romantic author and the self-policing of academic life known as ‘peer review’ may seem remote, but one way to understand the latter’s ascendancy is as simulating a market environment—one where peer citations replace sales figures—for work that would fail to survive in the conventional marketplace of ideas. Peer review was designed, not to allow academics to hide from their sponsors in esoteric splendour, but to dictate the terms on which academics accounted for how they used their sponsors’ resources. Instead of letting novel scientific ideas be directly evaluated by those who paid to have them generated (and hence risk immediate rejection for being too difficult or counterintuitive), the peer review process would forward only those ideas that had already received the
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stamp of approval of the scientific society, i.e. it was a version of the ‘we shall hang together so as not to hang separately’ strategy. Besides promoting a positive public face, there was also the need to erase any latent divisiveness within the peer group. Thus, when the first scientific journals were founded in seventeenth-century Britain and France, editors were cast in the role of trusted correspondents with the leading scientific minds, whose letters they would edit for gratuitous metaphysical jargon and personal nastiness. In this way scientific writing was first standardised (Bazerman 1988). Eventually the single correspondent was replaced by the editorial board and more specialised referees we have today. While standardisation is often said to be a prerequisite for genuine knowledge growth, a more pressing historical reason for disciplining scientific communication was to ensure that the scientists’ aristocratic patrons were not unnecessarily confused or offended. The aristocrats supported scientific societies in order to be amused, edified, and in some cases technically empowered. Peer review instituted the decorum needed to persuade patrons that their money was well spent. This brief history should serve to remind us that if there is indeed a ‘Faustian bargain’ in the life of the mind, it is the one that academics strike with their sponsors that buys them the leisure to collectively pursue their studies. Throughout the ascendancy of the peer review process, publishers have often functioned as correctives to the protected markets that constitute academic specialties. They have traditionally encouraged academics to write books that are suitable for either students or general audiences. Of course, publishers have also expedited the specialisation of academic journals. But that would not have become such an attractive financial proposition, had academics not been allowed to set their own paths of inquiries in the first place, and hence settle into ever narrower domains whose state-of-the-art is defined by one or two journals. Once academic specialists agree that a certain journal is ‘essential reading’ for their field, they deliver a captive audience to publishers that is too good to resist. The resulting higher subscription prices should perhaps be treated exactly as they are felt, namely as penalties for scholars veering toward esoterism. However, the ease with which such ‘penalties’ can be imposed has benefited publishing only as a business, but not as an art. Indeed, it has placed at risk the future of the most creative aspect of publishing: marketing (Horowitz 1986). Academics tend to ignore marketing altogether, seeing publishing instead as a matter of editing manuscripts on the one hand, and printing books and journals on the other. Such dualistic thinking breeds the kind
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of ‘us versus them’ rhetoric which infects tunnelvisionary thinking about publishers. Here it is worth noting that the main reason that most academics cannot even muster the attention of their immediate colleagues to read their works has more to do with the sheer quantity of literature than any hindrance specifically posed by publishers. If anything, cyberplatonism would exacerbate this problem. However, in their search for new markets, publishers have enabled non-specialists to locate relevant works that have often served to alter their home fields, thereby contributing to cross-disciplinary fertilisation and innovation. Thus one should think twice that specialists have any better sense of the ultimate constituency for their work than authors oriented to a broader, less differentiated market. In addition, publishers have helped give voice to groups whose interests cut against those of the established academic fiefdoms. Prominent recent examples include women’s studies and cultural studies, two fields that received considerable attention from publishers before receiving formal academic recognition. For all its intellectual short-comings, the publishing industry has operated with standards sufficiently orthogonal to academia’s to provide the only consistent check against the unreflective pursuit of normal science fostered by the peer review system. The offer—some would say ‘temptation’—of fame, glory and royalties has periodically succeeded in drawing out scholars, especially in the natural sciences, on what they perceive to be the larger significance of their research, which has then enabled the public to sympathise with work it barely understands. The names of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Lewis Wolpert and Steven Weinberg leap to mind in this context. ADDING SOME RESISTANCE TO THE FRICTIONLESS MEDIUM OF THOUGHT Harnad draws an oversharp distinction between ‘trade’ and ‘esoteric’ authorship that is symptomatic of his general failure to see scholarly work in systemic terms. In esoteric publishing, authors supposedly belong to a small community of specialists dedicated to following each other’s writings, and hence in principle capable of doing without the production and marketing costs of a publishing house. Harnad provides two criteria for counting a piece of writing as ‘esoteric’: 1 the author does not intend/expect to sell their words; 2 the author’s readership is not large enough to constitute a market.
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The social epistemologist deals with this distinction by looking for a context in which something resembling it makes an empirical difference in understanding the publishing industry, since literally speaking esoteric publishing does not exist. Both of Harnad’s criteria are sociologically unacceptable for the following respective reasons, which will be examined more closely in the rest of this section. First, no social practice can be sensibly defined simply by referring to the intentions of the particular people who engage in the practice (assuming that Harnad has understood those adequately, which I doubt); one also needs to look at the overall function that the practice serves in a larger social system, however specified. Therefore, even if ‘esoteric’ authors write only because they want to be read by their fellow esoteric authors, it does not follow that the practice of esoteric writing is maintained merely because that is what the relevant authors want to do. Other material conditions need to be in place that highlight the commercial character of esoteric publishing. Second, any social practice can be construed as a ‘market’ if producers are forced to compete to provide a good that is desired by some group (even if it largely consists of themselves) because ‘scarcity’, in some sense, is present. I take it that new research in an ‘esoteric’ field would count as such a good, that the limited search capacities of consumers would constitute a relevant sense of ‘scarcity’, and that the citation counts that the original producer receives would constitute the price paid by its consumers. In addition, this ‘peer market’ feeds into more traditional labour markets, as publication in a prestigious journal increases the likelihood that the article will be frequently cited, which in turn increases the likelihood that its author will be given a raise, a promotion, or a job at a better university. In case 1, sociologists who study the publishing industry have found something that vaguely resembles the trade-esoteric distinction, but it is drawn in terms of publishers’ investment strategies (Coser et al. 1982: 36–69). Large publishing houses are geared toward short-term profitabilty. They initially invest a lot of money in securing the author and in furnishing and marketing an attractive product, but then expect most of the profits to be registered within the first six months of publication; otherwise the book is effectively abandoned. In contrast, small publishing houses invest little at the outset but then live off the slow, steady sales of their backlist, which consists of authors whose reputations grow with each passing year. In this context, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the expression ‘symbolic capital’ to describe what it is that smaller houses ‘accumulate’ when they invest in
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a book that they know will sell poorly. Bourdieu’s point (and he is talking about semicommercial French academic publishers, not subsidised American university presses) is that in the long term, both the large and small houses may register roughly the same rate of profit, but whereas the former will be punctuated by remarkable gains and losses in a broad market for whom reading books is merely one among several consumer options, the latter will be marked by incremental growth from authors whose market consists mainly of authors of potentially similar calibre who may be drawn into the publisher’s stable. This sociological analysis of publishing differs from Harnad’s in that writing for publication is always taken to be more than simply corresponding with colleague. The prospect of wider fame, glory, and royalties is ever present, though manifested differently, depending on the segment of the market to which one’s writings appeal. On this analysis, the smaller publishing houses include not only academics but also poets and literary authors who appeal to elite audiences. Generally speaking, to compare the interests of a publishing house with those of the solitary scholar is to mismatch units of analysis. The relevant point of comparison is between a publisher and the scholar’s employer, the university. Both have similar sensibilities about the valueadded and profit-making character of scholarly products. Moreover, the production costs of scholarship go beyond the effort it takes to generate text (though phenomenologically a scholar may regard the physical generation of text as the only ‘cost’ they bear). In addition, scholarly production requires the computers, laboratories and libraries—not to mention colleagues and students—that constitute a proper research environment, as routinely provided by universities. A university’s investment in these facilities may vary according to the discipline and the anticipated rate of return, but the patterns will not be unlike those we see in publishing. For example, an enormous infrastructure may be set in place for a young chemist with Nobel Prize potential, but within a relatively short period, informal judgements will be made within the chemistry community as to whether the work coming from that person’s lab is living up to expectations. If not, the chemist may well fail to get their grants renewed, rendering their place in the university insecure. However, in the humanities and social sciences, subjects in which a university tends to make relatively small investments to support scholarly production, short-term expectations are correspondingly lower, just so long as scholars maintain a rate of publishing and quality of teaching that continues to attract likeminded people to that institution.
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In case 2, consider the protected nature of academic markets. When scholars give their words away, they expect something back in return. Even when they directly give credit to others (by citing their work) or enable others to derive credit (by sharing data with them), these are not selfless acts of generosity, but something closer to a mafia-style ‘insurance’ policy. For if one fails to give credit at the appropriate moments, sanctions are imposed that will make it difficult for one’s work to be published, one’s grants to be renewed and one’s students to be hired. This is one of the structural disadvantages of social systems that are relatively impervious to pressures not of their own creation. In academia we dignify them with the name ‘autonomous’. Moreover, there are hardly any studies of the significance of the peer-reviewed knowledge produced in academic markets for anything outside itself or the careers of its producers (a point repeatedly stressed by Daniel 1993). What we do know, however, is that the public is prone to distrust, say, medical professionals for obscuring and withholding potentially useful information so as to increase the public’s reliance on them. Many people, especially those with serious illnesses, seem perfectly willing to risk their own lives on treatments that have not passed all the proper scientific tests and government regulations. Moreover, there may be nothing especially irrational or desperate about doing such a thing, since the efficacy of medical treatments depends on much more than strict laboratory conditions and other trappings of the scientific method. Collins (1979) argues that if medicine were not protected by a strong, government-backed professional association, the public would take a more active interest in pursuing medical knowledge themselves, up to the point of personally experimenting with new treatments. Typically, the public would like to see the track record of a treatment’s consequences—something on the model of Consumers’ Reports—but is much less impressed by the research credentials of the laboratory or the impeccability of the methodology with which the treatment was first developed and tested. This ‘credential libertarian’ stance is extending to public attitudes toward science in general, as a ‘value-for-money’ mentality leads governments to divest support from an increasing number of peer-reviewed programmes that fail to meet consequentialist criteria. However, it is not clear that the divested projects can survive in an unprotected private sector, especially when they may be competing (in the case of psychology and maybe even physics) with ‘New Age’ knowledges that boast many satisfied, even if scientifically ill-informed customers (Hess 1993).
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PAPERLESSNESS AS PANACEA The mark of the tunnelvisionary is the capacity to raise phenomenology to the level of ontology: to treat the immediate as profound. For Harnad, ‘paperlessness’ is the means by which the Internet will bring publishers to their knees, ushering in the fabled frictionless medium of thought. No one can deny that rising paper costs make life increasingly difficult for publishers—and especially their customers, who ultimately absorb these costs. But to refuse the services of publishers in favour of posting one’s works on the World Wide Web would hardly reduce the amount of paper consumed. All it would do is diffuse the source of paper consumption, as each person prints out materials downloaded from the Web onto their own personal computer. Pool (1983:189–225) has argued that the flight from hard copy to virtual copy will actually increase the amount of paper consumed, the costs of which will be borne either by the individual user or the institution that maintains the user’s computer. Of course, it may be that these costs will turn out to be less than the ones currently passed on to consumers by publishers. In that case, we would see the continuation of the ‘xerox effect’, whereby increased paper consumption (i.e. number of photocopies) is accompanied by lower overall costs to the consumer. However, even this prognosis is probably hasty, since people use computers at least as much to produce text as to retrieve it. When scholars still worked on typewriters, it was common to write successive rounds of corrections on the margins of a single paper draft, saving the generation of a second paper draft for the final, ‘clean’ version. The advent of computers has altered scholarly sensibilities about paper use, so that now it is common to generate a new paper draft for each round of corrections, and to store the final, ‘clean’ copy in cyberspace. Admittedly, this development is very much in keeping with the cyberplatonist view that the ideal form belongs in a place that transcends corruptible matter, but to get there, it seems that the cyberplatonist needs to wade through more, not less, of the corrupt papyrus than the scholarly typist used to. Can this attachment to paper be severed simply with an extended lesson in the latest computer applications? Given our place in the history of the electronic medium, the answer is no—and the reasons do not require imagining the average computer user to be an idiot. Paper persists, not out of nostalgia or unexamined habit, but out of genuine convenience and, more importantly, risk management. It remains rational to keep generating hardcopy as long as computer systems crash as often as they do, and remain as vulnerable to playful and not-so-
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playful viral intruders. Only once those problems are tackled will it make sense to embark on a campaign to wean computer users from their attachment to paper. More generally, the liberatory rhetoric associated with scholars posting their works on the World Wide Web ‘free to all’ will become a literal reality only once all scholars have (and retain, through changes in the political economy) unimpeded access to the Internet. Until that time, the postal service remains the most equalising medium for communicating with fellow scholars, however much we may wish it to be otherwise. The illusion of a frictionless medium of thought is also kept alive at the phenomenological level by the hidden institutional costs of maintaining the average scholar’s computer system. Simply put, if you don’t personally pay the costs, you treat them as if they weren’t there. Consider this bit of cyberplatonist ‘analysis’: When things get cheap enough, they get absorbed into the overheads. Does your department charge you for every pencil you take from the office? Back two decades ago, when I was graduating, it was common for universities to have strict accounting of long-distance calls…. Nowadays, with telephone call costs lower, charges up to some limit are typically absorbed into the general overheads. (Odlyzko 1995) This testimony, unsurprisingly, comes from someone who works at an Ivy League university, not a community college. The situation is even worse for such financially vulnerable institutions as primary and secondary schools, because an unusually large percentage of their transmissions contain multimedia imagery, which travels in large packets that can easily congest the Internet, regardless of the speed at which they are transmitted (Fuchs 1996). Encouraged by both public and private sector investment in the 1980s and early 1990s, schools built substantial information infrastructures that ultimately aimed to meet all of their instructional needs. At that time, school administrators were led to believe that government would either continue subsidising the information infrastructure or regulate the markets in which it is transacted. However, the advent of Internet privatisation has thrown this tacit commitment into doubt, leaving schools literally adrift in the aethernet. Ultimately, the ideal of a frictionless medium of thought is based on one of the many philosophical distinctions—in this case, between
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medium and message—that fails to make a material difference. Harnad’s very insistence that the Internet is necessary for future academic productivity unwittingly betrays the fact that scholars already depend on this particular medium for transmitting their thoughts, so that it would be difficult for the scholarly community to revert to another medium, should Internet accessing fees rise significantly for universities (as in the case of Carnegie-Mellon University, whose fees jumped from $30, 000 to $300,000 per year with the privatisation of the Internet). Universities would either have to make scholars bear the costs themselves on the model of rents (as in the Scandinavian practice of deducting rent on university office space from the monthly salary) or ration Internet access by some formula that will probably be to the advantage of scholars whose productivity has already been enhanced by electronic communication. Either scenario would bear witness to what I have called the ‘commodification of knowledge’, or the hidden political economy of public goods (Fuller 1991; 1992; 1994b). In the case of the Internet, there are at least two other ways of capturing the dependency of thought on medium. First, successive technologies tend to be more expensive than the ones they replace, even though their own costs tend to go down over time. Thus, while computers drop in price, they are still more expensive than typewriters, which are, in turn, still more expensive than pens. In economists’ terms, ‘entry costs’ for each new technology are higher, thereby potentially disenfranchising a larger segment of the population each time around. Of course, computers are much more versatile than typewriters or pens, but the additional power provided by computers had not been constitutive of normative scholarly practice when typewriters or pens were the dominant media of knowledge production. Rather, scholarly norms adapted to the capacities of the new technologies, and so we see Harnad extolling the virtues of a quick turnaround time in editorial judgement, as if that had been a scholarly desideratum down through the ages, when in fact its desirability is intimately linked with the ‘publish or perish’ imperative of academic survival. Second, information industries tend to converge on all sectors of the information market (Pool 1983:23–54). Whereas in 1880 one could still identify distinct firms that fell along the orthogonal axes of ‘products v. services’ and ‘content v. conduit’, today, largely as a result of the revolution in electronic communications, an historically serviceoriented firm like American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) competes in every sector with an historically product-oriented firm like
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International Business Machines (IBM) (Cronin 1988). Given this history of categorical fluidity, publishers should have little trouble adjusting their raison d’être in cyberspace from that of manufacturing a product to that of providing a service—especially if publishing houses continue to be sold to newspaper chains with multinational interests in providing financial services and cable communications (Aitkenhead 1995). Moreover, the integrity of books and journals—let alone the distinction between them—may yield to the customised pay-per-view world of hypertext and weblinks, which, if anything, will diminish the likelihood that anyone will possess a complete text of any single work. Rather, once publishers colonise cyberspace, it will be more common to have personal access to the equivalent of several photocopied pages of many different works that have been consulted for specific research needs. IS PEER REVIEW PEERLESS? An important historical aim of peer review has been to pre-empt efforts to make scientific research more directly responsive to the public interest by assuring non-specialists that a guiding hand is already in place, however invisible it may appear. As we have seen, the appeal to peer review was made more with an eye toward whom to exclude (patrons, politicians, and people who might alert them) than include. ‘Peer review’ has been successful, at least rhetorically, in that the expression has exchanged its original connotation of ‘clubbiness’ for ‘autonomy’. Nevertheless, peer review remains empirically elusive, with the parameters of peerage for a given academic speciality often amounting to little more than the choices that journal editors make to have certain people review certain articles (Chubin and Hackett 1990: 83–124; Daniel 1993). Since these people have typically worked in the specific area, peer review seems well-designed to reproduce existing disciplinary boundaries, if nothing else. Yet editorial agreement on appropriate reviewers for a given article, and even agreement among reviewers on the criteria by which the article should be judged, by no means ensures that a common verdict will be reached. But what to make of such dissensus, the value of multiplying reviewers (which usually means multiplying judgements) and, most importantly, the very pursuit of reviewer consensus? The last may be a spurious goal, since there is little correlation between articles that reviewers rate highly and articles that subsequently receive high citation counts (Daniel 1993:5).
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Given these uncertainties, we might wonder exactly which features of the peer review system would be worth transferring from the print to the electronic medium. Here Chubin and Hackett (1990:85–91) provide considerable guidance in noting that most of the praiseworthy features of academic journals have little or nothing to do with the peer review process as such. The communication of results, the allocation of credit, and the creation of an archive all reflect the publicity function of journals. What peer review supposedly adds is a means for authenticating the results and evaluating their significance, which in turn licences the scientific society to take collective responsibility for the individual scientist’s (or team’s) work. In other words, peer review supplies authors with intellectual insurance policies in case their results are subject to attack. If the results are shown lacking, it will be attributed to honest error and not incompetence or fraud. However, in practice (at least as judged by reviewers’ reports) relatively little authentication takes place during peer review, mainly because it would demand too much effort from the reviewer, who typically believes they can judge authenticity simply from the text of the article. Instead, reviewers spend their time negotiating with authors the size of the knowledge claim that their articles entitle them to make. Not surprisingly, authors wish to claim more than the reviewers will allow them. Of course, in principle, this haggling could transpire in public. However, most editors and reviewers seem to believe that if peer review itself were absorbed into the publicity function of journals, the variability of its workings from case to case would undermine the legitimacy of the entire process. The upshot of the research on peer review, then, is to suggest that it is not clear what peer review adds to the knowledge system, aside from a certain kind of professionally sanctioned regularity at the subsystem level of academic disciplines and specialties. But it remains unclear how such regularity bears on other quality measures. In that case, peer review should be foisted upon the Internet only if the present ‘functional differentiation’ of the knowledge system is deemed appropriate. Even then, there is sufficient sociological variation in the constitution of these fields as to make it unlikely that a mechanism as purely formal as that of peer review could account for the research advances these fields have made. Thus there is little reason to think that the success of journals in fields as different as high-energy physics and Harnad’s domain of cognitive science can be explained in terms of their common characteristics. Whereas high-energy physics is probably the most intellectually focused and socially stratified speciality in science today,
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cognitive science is a very active, but relatively amorphous, interdisciplinary field. The elites in high-energy physics coordinate their activities to dictate to the rest of the field, and sometimes to the entire physics community (Redner 1986:122–65). By contrast, the success of Behavior and Brain Sciences may be better explained in terms of the bandwagon effect caused by several elite cognitive scientists from different parts of the field publishing early in the journal’s history. CONCLUSION: PURIFYING CYBERPLATONISM’S MOTIVES It should be clear that Harnad’s call for the peer review system to migrate to the Internet constitutes a corrupt version of the cyberplatonist utopia, one that would simply transfer existing academic hierarchies to the new medium; hence its status as a ‘virtual cyberplatonism’. Were we to take cyberplatonism at its word, then not only should paper publishing go by the wayside, but also the whole idea of seeking personal credit for as many articles as possible in peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is not intrinsic to pure inquiry, but the result of academics having to account for their activities in a competitive environment involving the allocation of scarce resources. Even Harnad’s superficially populist call for everyone to post their articles on the World Wide Web plays to this point, as such a move would only strengthen the knowledge system’s elitist tendencies. Faced with a plethora of titles on a common topic, an author’s name recognition will count more than ever. The sheer availability of a work does not guarantee that it will get into the hands of the people who could most benefit from it (here marketing can make all the difference, thus providing a fresh challenge for the twenty-first-century publisher). Nowadays, a relatively democratic cross-section of the academic community can be found on the ‘listservs’ and ‘usenets’ that populate the Internet. Teachers, administrators and students do not merely consume the knowledge that cutting-edge researchers generously deposit on the World Wide Web. They are themselves knowledge producers, and often incisive critics of what passes for quality in the print and electronic media. The result is a multiple-registered, roughand-tumble atmosphere that has put off some elite inquirers but has empowered many more. Admittedly, women and minorities remain under-represented, but that is being quickly remedied. Virtual cyberplatonists like Harnad tend to downplay the heterogeneity of the Internet, perhaps hoping that it will all eventually come under the
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decorous thumb of peer review, or if not, at least enough of it will to entice major researchers across the disciplinary spectrum to submit their works to cyber-scrutiny. Intellectual property lawyers have been struggling to draft appropriate ‘zoning ordinances’ for regulating the Internet’s virtual real estate, even though the status of ‘owners’, ‘renters’, ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ is continually shifting. For example, Jaszi (1994) has proposed that the freedom to cut, splice and forward material across listservs and usenets may cause the concept of ‘authorship’ to revert to its eighteenth-century meaning of a packager of other people’s material —an ‘infopreneur’ in the current term-of-art—that could make copyright almost unenforceable. Whether this prospect encourages or discourages people taking their best ideas into cyberspace remains to be seen. However, were we to take Plato’s Socratic dialogues as a model for ‘free inquiry’, such legalised anarchy would not seem so bad: anyone would be allowed to participate in any line of thought wherever it may lead. There would be no expectation of a discrete publication, but if one did happen to result, it would be only after considerable discussion, by which time it would be difficult to identify who deserved credit for which idea. Crackpots and ignoramuses—assuming we know who they are—would be given their say, but then one would do the obvious: refute, ignore or delete. The filtered world of anonymous refereeing would thus dissolve into open peer commentary, thereby erasing a distinction that may not be particularly clear even in the minds of peer review’s defenders. After all, one way to explain the negative correlation between reviewer ratings and citation counts for journal articles is to say that articles are highly cited because they attract criticism, which, in the private context of peer review, could have led to the paper not being published in the first place. In short, elements of the pure cyberplatonist vision are certainly worth pursuing. For example, tardy referees are not the worst problem facing journal editors today. More troubling is that authors read referees’ reports pretty much as editors do, namely as a red or green signal for publication. Harnad’s enthusiasm for quick turnaround times from acceptance to publication only nurtures this mentality. However, the reports may wind up playing little or no role in shaping an author’s thought, at least as long as there are other journals to which they can submit a rejected piece with minimum alterations. No wonder referees find theirs to be a thank-less lot! The source of the problem is simply that authors are encouraged to submit their work in a finished form. By that time, they have normally become so attached to it that they are
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psychologically incapable of grappling with substantial criticism. However, because there is so little to which one can become attached on the Internet, authors are more prone to submit drafts with holes that others may be better positioned to fill. Thus a genuinely collaborative inquiry may be fostered. However, this purer version of cyberplatonism will be confined to Plato’s Heaven, unless academics pay greater attention to the political economy of electronic communications and the historical sociology of peer review.
Part III Strategies for social inclusion
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Chapter 9 Confucius or capitalism? Policies for an information society Nick Moore
INTRODUCTION We are living at a time of profound change. The introduction of new information and communications technologies is having farreaching effects on individuals, on organisations and on nation states. It is changing the ways in which we work learn and play; changing the relationships between individuals and the state; changing the nature of business and commerce; and in the long run, it will change fundamentally the characteristics of cultures that have evolved over centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that governments are trying to find the most appropriate responses to deal with this situation. What is unusual is the fact that this has produced a flurry of policy formulation, the like of which we have never seen before. Just five years ago, for example, Singapore was alone in having a clearly formulated set of national policies that were concerned with information and its use in society. Today, just about every country of significance has produced some form of information policy or is making an attempt to position itself as an information society. Across the world, the goals of these information policies are surprisingly consistent. What differs are the mechanisms that have been selected to achieve the goals. Two dominant models have emerged in the last few years—each has different origins and characteristics and each is likely to produce different effects. It is now becoming possible to assess which is likely to produce the most successful and enduring model of an information society.
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THE GOALS OF INFORMATION POLICY The goals of information policy are remarkably similar. The hopes and aspirations of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the USA are, when it comes to the development of an information society, uncannily like those of Jiang Zemin and Li Peng in China. They are a set of aims that are shared by the G7 nations, by developing countries like Thailand, by newly industrialised countries like South Africa and by small but mature economies like Belgium or Finland. Broadly, what all these states are trying to achieve is first, cheap and efficient telecommunications infrastructures that will enable individuals and organisations to communicate with one another. Initially the need is to extend the reach of these networks so that there is universal service. Increasingly the pressure is on to expand the capacity to accommodate the larger and larger flows of digital information. An efficient telecommunications network is the single most important element in a successful information society. The second goal is to improve industrial and commercial competitiveness and productivity by making organisations use information as a resource. The productivity gain can come in many ways —through better use of research to speed innovation; through automation of administrative processes; or through the application of information-intensive management techniques. The secondary expectation is that, once individual companies and the overall economy become more competitive, it will be possible to make a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy by moving into more informationintensive operations that increase the value added by each worker, and in so doing bring about real increases in per capita incomes. A prerequisite for this is a skilled workforce or, more properly, an educated workforce. The third policy goal is therefore to improve education and training. All citizens must have basic information and technology skills. Many need to develop these to a high level so that they can meet the needs of the information-intensive organisations. What is more, the education and training system must accommodate the need for lifelong learning and a constant process of extending and enriching skills. An information society is seen as a means of promoting social harmony and cohesion. In developed countries, this goal stems from a concern about the level of fragmentation that has developed in the last thirty years. Rising levels of crime, unemployment and social deviancy worry politicians, and they see the creation of an information society as
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a means of halting the slide into chaos—although it is never made very clear how this will come about. In less developed countries, the same goal of social cohesion is identifiable but here the motivation comes not from rising levels of fragmentation, but from a concern to ensure that everyone benefits from economic growth. Thus the intention is to reduce the disparity between rural and urban areas, to lessen the gulf between the poor and the prosperous, and in countries like Malaysia, to ensure that there is racial and religious harmony. This is closely related to a set of political goals. Al Gore sees the information superhighway as a means of promoting more informed democracy and a higher level of participation. It would be stretching the point to say that such aspirations are shared by Li Peng in Beijing, but even here there is a recognition that centralised planning is a brake on economic and social development and that it is necessary for the central organs of the state to become more transparent so that sensible and better informed decisions can be made in a devolved structure. Throughout there is a concern about culture. There are those that perceive Hollywood and the American information complex as a means of exerting a new form of hegemony. Some of these people reside in the USA and regard this as a good thing. Many more reside elsewhere and have a different view. What they have in common is a desire to ensure that the development of an information society enhances and strengthens the home culture and, wherever possible, promulgates it elsewhere. Finally, most of the information policies seek to provide some form of support for the information services sector. This is seen as a key strategic asset for the future and most states are trying to do something to nurture it. MOTIVATION When we consider the underlying motivation for these policy aspirations the differences begin to emerge. Very broadly, it is possible to identify two distinct clusters of motivation. The first is dominant in the developed world and particularly so in North America and Europe. It is motivation through fear. The dominant economies in the global economic system are seeing their positions eroded. New economies are emerging and changing the balance of power. This is producing a widespread concern about the loss of dominant economic positions and the consequent loss of influence on the world stage.
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At home there is a corresponding concern about social disruption brought about by high levels of unemployment and by other structural changes in society. All this produces pressure to exploit an economic opportunity in the hope that by maintaining or if possible increasing levels of national income it will be possible to stave off social dislocation and, critically, bring more of the workforce into employment. The way out is seen to be a return to economic prosperity which will secure the country’s standing in the world pecking order while tackling deep-seated social problems at home. Such a rationale is admirably set out in the 1997 election manifesto published by Tony Blair’s New Labour Party. The alternative is a cluster of motivational factors associated with a similar desire for long-term economic growth and expansion. But here the starting point is different. In the less developed and newly industrialised countries, an information society is seen not as a means of hanging on to an existing position but as a path towards future prosperity through accelerated economic growth. This accelerated growth is, however, also seen as the key to solving long-term socio-economic problems: those of rural stagnation, urban blight, disparities in income, poor education and inefficient public services. All can be addressed, so it is thought, by better use of information. In this way it becomes possible to achieve a desired degree of social cohesion, and further, to bring about conditions where economic growth reinforces cohesion instead of weakening it. There is also in some countries a desire to move towards a new sociopolitical order. In many of the countries concerned, democratic systems are relatively new and are settling down after a period of disruption. Clearly, information systems and the creation of an information society have a distinct bearing on the way in which the political system operates. Getting it right in a country like South Africa can be important. THE POLICY MECHANISMS The wide variations in motivation contribute to the diversity of approaches in the mechanisms that are chosen to achieve the policy goals. Here it is possible to identify two distinct models which we might designate as neo-liberal and dirigiste.
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Neo-liberal The neo-liberal model is, unsurprisingly, market-led. Private capital, operating through efficient markets, is seen as the driving force for the achievement of the policy goals. This carries the clear implication that the scope of the information policies is determined by what the private sector deems to be important, or profitable. In this model the state acts as a facilitator. Its essential role is to create the conditions that will enable markets to flourish. It should intervene only in cases of market failure, and even then its intervention should seek to create the conditions where market mechanisms can operate. This approach is clearly enunciated in the G7 information policy documents and it is a strand that runs through the National Information Infrastructure policies of the Clinton administration, and through the Bangemann approach to the creation of a European information society. It is an approach that finds its purest expression in the approach of the previous Conservative government in Britain, where the current Information Society Initiative is primarily concerned with using relatively small amounts of government money to stimulate investment and the takeup of information technology by the private sector. If the state is a facilitator, then the private sector is the doer. It is the private sector that mobilises the capital, makes the investment decisions, carries the risk, and if all works out well makes the profit. In many developed countries this makes real sense. In Britain, for example, the privatised British Telecom generates very substantial flows of income and can channel these into infrastructure investment in ways that benefit both the nation and the company. Similarly, if foreign companies can be persuaded to invest their funds in a national infrastructure, then the nation is a net beneficiary. A similar rationale applies to the development of multimedia products. To create these investment conditions, however, it is necessary to place due emphasis on competition. Markets must be opened up, stateowned companies must be privatised and competition must be encouraged. The key to this, so the orthodoxy goes, is to deregulate. But, as the British government is discovering, introducing competition into an industry previously dominated by a state-owned monopoly is not an easy business and calls, paradoxically, for a high degree of regulation. So it is possible to observe an increasingly vigorous role being adopted by the Office for Telecommunications Regulation (OFTEL).
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The emphasis on markets tends also to create a perception of people as consumers. Companies need to direct their products at these consumers and if they are sufficiently powerful, to shape individuals’ consumer preferences. There should be little need to educate consumers in order that they can use the information products, rather the emphasis is on ease of use—what Peter Cochrane of British Telecom calls the ‘three clicks maximum’ approach. Education and training is not neglected altogether. The private sector needs to be able to draw on a skilled workforce, and ensuring that there is an adequate supply is one of the state’s most important roles as facilitator. The educational reforms are therefore determined primarily by the requirements of the employment market. Clearly, this approach to information policy draws on neo-liberal, post-Keynesian economics. It is therefore most evident in those countries that advocate such economic philosophies. In the USA this approach underpins the information policies, although it is tempered and alleviated in a characteristically pragmatic way. In Britain the marketled approach predominates, with the government conceding only reluctantly that it even has a role as facilitator. Working from this extreme, it is possible to identify a range of countries which have basically the same approach but which is moderated to a greater or lesser degree—Australia, Canada, all of the European Union member states and South Africa have moderated a basically neo-liberal approach to their information policies. Dirigiste At the other extreme is the dirigiste or interventionist model. Far from being led by market forces, policy implementation is driven by the state acting in accordance with a predetermined set of objectives. Clearly, in such circumstances the state is a key player, possibly the key player. As such it has many different roles. It can be the provider of investment funds; it can be a producer of information products and services; it can own major assets such as the telecommunications network; it can use its functions as facilitator, contributor, consumer, regulator, arbitrator and leader to advance towards the achievement of policy goals. Above all else the state is seen as the leader, setting the goals and writing the policy agenda. But the private sector also has an important role to play. Many of the states that have adopted a dirigiste approach to their information policy are fiercely capitalist, and private sector companies play a major part in
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present and future information societies. The critical difference lies in the perception that there is a partnership between the state and the private sector. The trick is to determine which functions are best left to the state and which are best delegated to the private sector. Many of the countries following a dirigiste approach are developing or newly industrialised. In some cases it makes sense for the public sector to lead investment in the infrastructure; in others it is inevitable. The large amounts of capital investment required are not sufficiently attractive for private capital: the returns may be too uncertain; the payback period may be too long; the investment may be required in areas that are never likely to show a profit, or the existing companies may be too short of capital resources to take on the high level of investment needed. So in countries like China, Thailand and Vietnam the state has taken on the task of financing the building of the infrastructure, introducing competition into the construction and operation of an asset that remains in state hands. It is worth noting that this was the strategy used by nearly all developed countries to create their transport infrastructures. Where the private sector is deemed to be the appropriate player, the aim of policy is to create conditions where competition can be managed rather than left solely to market forces. This approach stems from two beliefs. First there is the need to protect local industries until they are in a position to compete on equal terms with global players. This is the rationale behind the Korean industrial policy that produced world-class companies like Hyundai, LG and Samsung. The second belief is that markets are not always the best allocators of scarce national resources like capital and skilled labour. The requirements of capital, particularly international capital, frequently call for short-term returns when a longterm approach is needed. In Japan for example, multimedia producers found it difficult to attract adequate levels of investment—the risks and uncertainties associated with multimedia deterred venture capitalists. So the Ministry of International Trade and Industry established a capital guarantee fund to underwrite investments in multimedia companies. To counter the inadequacies of the market, a system of managed competition has arisen. And it is being applied in the information policy arena, particularly in the telecommunications and broadcasting markets. Entry to certain markets is restricted. Local companies are offered licences as monopolies, duopolies or oligopolies so that they can build up a strong home base without having to worry too much about obliteration by powerful multinationals. Even in mature markets like the
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USA competition is managed so that entry by foreign-owned companies is restricted and controlled. The recent merger of British Telecom and MCI is a case in point—it is far from certain that the US regulators will accept such an incursion into their telecommunications industry. In such circumstances regulation is seen not as an evil to be eradicated, but as a policy instrument that can be used to achieve certain policy goals. The most obvious example is the need to achieve universal service. Open, unfettered competition will never ensure that telecommunications are provided universally, other than perhaps in a compact city-state like Singapore. It is, however, possible to achieve the universal service goal through regulation and by placing conditions on the companies licensed to provide telecommunications service. The other striking difference in the dirigiste approach is that it views people as participants in the information society of the future rather than simply regarding them as consumers or as potential workers in information-intensive organisations. There is therefore a much greater emphasis on education at all levels. The information policy of the Thai government, for example, places the highest priority on education and training, the aim being to create a whole population with the skills and abilities needed to function in an information society. This dirigiste approach to information policy reflects, as we have noted, the general political economy of the countries concerned. As such it draws on wide range of influences, including Confucius, Marx, and Keynes. The theories put forward by these and other individuals have been reinforced by the practical example provided by countries like Singapore, Korea and Japan which have rapidly grown strong through the use of dirigiste economic policies. There is little reason to suggest that they will not continue to do so.
THE EFFECTS It is still very early to say with confidence what the effects of the different policy approaches will be. But we are getting to the stage where it is possible to venture some observations. First, there is the speed of change. The technology is developing rapidly and, riding on this, dramatic changes are taking place in national economies as well as in individual organisations. The challenge is to restructure national economies so that they can take better advantage of the opportunities presented by an information-intensive world. The structural change that has taken place in the economies of countries like
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Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and more recently China, is frankly breathtaking. Within a very short space of time they have made a transition which is every bit as fundamental as that which took place in Britain in the 200 years since 1780. Contrast this with the very slow pace of structural change that is taking place in Britain and in our European partners. Within individual companies there is an even greater degree of change. In a short space of time, for example, IBM switched from being one of the world’s most prosperous and stable companies to a lame duck and then back again into prosperity. New industries have emerged and with them have come powerful new multinational corporations. Which policy approach seems better able to accommodate such rapid changes? The neo-liberals would say that competition creates the conditions that are most amenable to rapid change. And given the relatively inflexible and inefficient political systems of the West, they may be right. But the dirigisme of East Asia seems to have produced companies that are much better equipped to cope with major structural change. There is, it seems to me, greater stability, allied with rapid expansion, in companies like LG, Samsung, Fujitsu and Mitsubishi, than there is in comparable western companies like Compaq, Intel, Apple or even Microsoft. It is this combination of stability linked to rapid expansion that is, I believe, the key to successful organisational development. Markets may provide one means of responding to changing conditions. An interventionist industrial policy, backed by a clear government vision, certainly seems to offer an effective alternative. Closely related is the question of relative rates of economic growth. Here the neo-liberal approach seems to be out-performed by the dirigiste economies of East Asia and increasingly those of Latin America. During the last twenty-five years, in the neo-liberal economies of the West we have achieved modest rates of growth—around 3 per cent a year. In Britain the long-term growth rate is much lower—closer to 1.5 per cent. Over the same period the dirigiste economies of East Asia have achieved average growth rates that are closer to 10 per cent. As they pass western levels of GDP per capita, they show few signs of slowing down. Within those rapidly expanding economies, informationrelated organisations will flourish. The demands for information will grow; the ability to pay will increase; and there will be sufficient capital to invest in new products and services. There will also be a sufficient surplus national income to finance the needed investment in education, in social and cultural information services and in the overall development of an information-intensive society.
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We have noted that in both neo-liberal and dirigiste philosophies one of the aims is to achieve stability and cohesion. How have the two systems performed? Market forces seem to be doing little to increase social cohesion. If anything, levels of alienation and isolation are increasing. The dirigiste systems are also under stress. The promised reductions in rural isolation, for example, have yet to materialise in countries like China, Vietnam and Thailand, although in Malaysia the differences between rural and urban areas are being reduced. What is perhaps the most notable achievement of the last twenty-five years is the high level of stability that has existed in the dirigiste systems. Rapid change, dramatic growth, racial and ethnic imbalances, all exist within the dirigiste economies, yet there has been remarkable stability. A major challenge lies ahead in testing whether the political systems that have evolved are sufficiently robust to survive the increased transparency that will come as the societies become more informationintensive. Finally, we should consider what is becoming known as the cultural ecology of the information society. That is, the impact on cultures of the information and communications technologies. Broadly, will the shift towards a global information society mean that national cultures become subsumed within a world culture shaped in Hollywood and controlled by Rupert Murdoch? Or will we be able to use the technologies to enrich the diversity of global cultures? A neo-liberal approach of leaving such questions to the market would almost certainly result in American cultural hegemony. The alternative is to resist such incursions so as to protect and nurture local cultures. The French government led an attempt in the European Union to limit the amount of non-European material shown on television in Europe, but their efforts were largely defeated by the neo-liberals, led by the British government. Whereas countries like China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam are implementing policies that will constrain the impact of undesired cultural influences. I feel sure that the pressure to protect indigenous cultures will grow in the years to come. THE LESSONS What lessons can we learn from this analysis? The first thing that strikes me is that we are dealing with a pervasive phenomenon, one that will have a significant impact on the social, economic, political and cultural life of a country. Information is a key element in the whole fabric of a
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society and the changes that are taking place in the technologies used to manipulate information will have a profound effect. For this reason, if for no other, I believe that policies that are derived from narrow economic philosophies are inadequate. The neo-liberal approach which attempts to subject all issues to resolution by market forces may be an acceptable way of dealing with industrial and commercial policies but moving us towards an effectively functioning information society requires more than changes in the economic system. Information policies need to address a wide range of social, political and cultural issues in ways that both accommodate and facilitate economic change. The dirigiste approach, in marked contrast, emphasises an holistic approach and, it seems to me, it is almost certainly a more appropriate means of developing an information society. It is therefore encouraging to note that it is possible to identify a more interventionist approach emerging in Europe as concern moves away from information industries towards information societies. The interim report from the European Commission’s high-level group of experts sets out a policy agenda that goes way beyond a reliance on market forces and private capital. Although it has to be acknowledged that the overall thrust of EU policy is still essentially neo-liberal. I am not at all sure how long Britain and Europe will be able to hold the line. We do not have a market that is as big or as homogeneous as the United States. We also do not have the dynamism and impetus of growth that exists in the Asia-Pacific Region. We therefore face severe competition from both the East and the West. And consequently we have an information services sector that is steadily losing out to American competition and that is failing to capitalise on the rapidly expanding East Asian market. We have yet to crack the difficult task of introducing effective competition into the monopolistic telecommunications industry, with the consequence that our telecommunications infrastructure is expensive and inadequate. Yet we continue to follow the dogma of deregulation. We are very slow to introduce information-intensive working practices into our organisations, whether in the public or private sectors, and so we are slipping down the world competitiveness league tables. We are failing to make the quantitative and qualitative changes in the education system that will produce people with the skills and abilities needed by information-intensive organisations. We are not even able to produce an acceptable basic level of information literacy in our school graduates. And we are proving to be very slow at reforming our social and
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political systems to accommodate a new information-intensive social order. The neo-liberal approach does not seem to have served us well. Success is not obligatory and the price of failure will be high. The time has come to, I believe, develop a different approach, one that does not rely wholly on market forces but that recognises the need for a clear vision and for a radically different approach to the achievement of the goals.
Chapter 10 Information and citizenship in Europe Jane Steele
INTRODUCTION: CITIZENSHIP INFORMATION Only by being well informed is it possible for citizens to exercise their rights, fulfil their responsibilities and play their full part in the democratic process. Approaches to issues of citizenship, and the information required to support it, have traditionally been very much national ones. But recent developments in many European Union member states mean that there is a great deal of experience to be shared between them about the most effective policies on information provision. In addition, the process of European integration creates information needs at a European level. The European Union places increasing emphasis on the important role of information in shaping the lives of European citizens. And the Commission itself is doing more to disseminate information. At the same time, information and communications technology presents new possibilities, and poses new challenges, for policy makers and information providers. In response to these issues, the European Commission funded a study of the demand for, and provision of, information that is needed by European citizens in five member states. The overall aim of the project was to explore the extent of the current and potential demand for citizenship information within the European Economic Area and to identify the contribution that the information services industry can make to meeting that demand. Within this broad aim there were a number of specific objectives:
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• To provide a definition that helps to clarify the concept of citizenship information; • To assess the nature and extent of the demand for citizenship information and to estimate what changes in demand are likely to take place over the next five and ten years; • To identify the services that currently exist to supply citizenship information and comment on their likely development over the next five and ten years; • To assess the extent to which the supply of citizenship information balances the demand for it now and in the future; • To identify the potential role of the European information services industry in contributing to the supply of citizenship information; • To assess the policies and regulatory environments affecting the provision of citizenship information in the European economic area. The project was carried out for DGXIII/E under IMPACT 2, by five research organisations: • The Policy Studies Institute in the United Kingdom, the main contractor and project leader; • University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany; • COMTEC, the Communication, Technology and Culture Research Centre at Dublin City University, Ireland; • NBBI, the Project Bureau for Information Management, The Hague, Netherlands; • INETI, the Institute Nacional de Engenharia e Tecnologia Industria, part of Portugal’s Ministry of Industry and Energy in Lisbon. The study was carried out in these five countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal). In addition, a study was also made of Norway, to include the experience of a non-member state in Europe, and of the European Commission itself. The work was carried out during 1995. The study took place in two phases: a literature review was followed by interviews with key informants. This article brings together the main themes from all the individual country reports in order to address the overall objectives of the study. As such, it cannot do justice to the depth and range of information contained in the individual country reports. These are contained in the full report of the project: Jane Steele (ed.) Information for Citizenship in Europe, Policy Studies Institute, 1997.
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INFORMATION FOR CITIZENS: DEFINING CITIZENSHIP INFORMATION Citizenship information is, broadly, that which relates to the relationship between the individual and the state. Classic theories of citizenship focus on three elements: civil, political and social. All of these elements involve rights and responsibilities for both the individual and the state, and require access to information if they are to be fulfilled. The rights are wide-ranging: they include political rights to vote, to hold institutions to account and to participate in democratic processes; and the social rights to services and benefits. They also include civil rights which do not feature so regularly in day to day life but which form an essential framework, such as the right to freedom of speech and equality before the law. Responsibilities include the duties to pay taxes, to do jury service and generally to comply with the law. The details of individual rights and responsibilities vary between states, reflecting the detail of a state’s political, civil and social structures. But there is a broadly similar pattern, and citizenship was broadly accepted in all states as having political, civil and social components, each involving rights and responsibilities. In the European Union, citizenship is complementary to national citizenship. It brings certain rights, such as the freedom of movement, and the right to work and claim social security in different states, but no direct responsibilities for the citizen. Citizenship has been shaped in various ways. Not all countries have a written constitution and some have developed their constitutional arrangements over a very long period. In the UK, citizens are actually subjects of the crown and there is no written constitution which establishes any formal rights of citizens. This contrasts with Portugal, where the constitution, which followed the arrival of democratic government in 1974, sets out specific rights for citizens. The German constitution also defines specific rights. The extent to which citizenship information is recognised as a concept or a matter for public policy varies widely between states. The reasons for this are partly to do with the historical development of citizenship. The cultural and political traditions of a country, as well as its social and economic conditions, also influence the priority given to information. The formality of citizens’ rights in a constitutional sense does not necessarily determine the prominence of citizenship information as a policy issue. The Portuguese report describes a ‘mismatch’ between a modern state and constitution and an operational reality, in which
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citizens are ‘passive’ and information provision is only an emerging concern for the administration. The German constitution also establishes certain rights to information, but there is little in the way of policy to deliver this information. Political traditions and developments have a key role. Countries with a strong welfare state generally have a more established pattern of information provision to support it. Norway describes a strong sense of rights to welfare and services amongst its citizens, accompanied by a more widely recognised concept of citizenship information. In some countries recent political events have pushed citizenship information on to the political agenda: the Irish report describes the emergence of a more pluralist society and a series of political crises which have led to demands for greater openness of official information in order to ensure accountability. And in the UK, a political initiative which has the broad support of all parties promotes a ‘Citizen’s Charter’, promising among other things better information about public services. INFORMATION NEEDS Defining ‘need’ Defining ‘need’ for information, and particularly for citizenship information, presents some difficulties. Individuals may frequently be unaware of an information need, either because they are not conscious of their rights and duties or because they are unaware that information could help to solve a particular question or problem. So a usual concept of need, which is to do with the consciousness of something lacking and a desire to do something about it, is inadequate in this context. The German report points out the distinction between subjective and objective information needs. Subjective needs are those of which the citizen is aware, while objective needs are those which are actually required to be satisfied. These are particularly far apart in citizenship information. As needs are frequently not recognised or articulated, it is difficult to quantify them, as we shall see in the discussion of demand. An alternative definition of need is proposed in the UK review: the prerequisites for successful, and if necessary critical participation in a social form of life. Applying this definition to the components of citizenship we arrive at a three-part classification of citizens’ information needs, which was broadly accepted by all the researchers and their interviewees:
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• Information about civil, social and political entitlements, rights and protections; • Information to enable people to participate in democratic processes and to hold institutions to account; to enable critical judgement of the civil, social and political aspects of the state; • Information on the civil, social and political responsibilities of citizenship. This classification of need is the basis for classifications of types of information. The German report suggests that five types of information are needed: • Simple information for orientation and guidance (such as where to go with a particular problem); • Detailed information on rights and responsibilities; • Structural information about administrative procedures and political processes; • Case-specific information about an individual’s situation or a particular policy issue; • Day-to-day or factual information about services and activities. Citizens and consumers The distinction between citizens and consumers is formally recognised in some countries, perhaps most explicitly in the Netherlands where the government assumes two types of relationship with citizens. The citoyens are joint designers, with government, of the environment, services and regulations. They are active participants in planning and decision making. Consumers are the users of these public services and regulations, who need information to exercise choice and control over their personal situations. To accept this distinction is to give individual members of society two roles: they can be both consumers and active or participant citizens. It is a distinction which is the basis of much criticism of current information provision. In the UK, for example, the Citizen’s Charter has generated a public debate about the relationship between the individual and public services. It is widely criticised for being, in fact, a consumer’s charter, based on an inappropriate model of the consumer of private sector services. Here the consumer would have purchasing power and a consumer choice, including the option not to use the service, which is not available to the user of public services. The
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citizen, it is argued, has a legitimate interest in the policy making and allocation of resources which shapes public services, and this is inadequately recognised by the information made available under the Charter. It is important to remember that individuals are both consumers and citizens, and to make too strong a distinction between them can be damaging. Their information needs overlap. But the distinction does provide a basis for understanding information needs in rather more detail and for evaluating the information which is made available. The first type of need, for information about entitlements, rights and protections, is wide-ranging. Information about social entitlements and rights to services and benefits is mainly the domain of the consumer or user of the services. But active citizens, in particular, will be concerned with civil and political rights and entitlements. The information needed for accountability, participation and critical judgement of public institutions and their services is the major interest for the active citizen, but consumers also need information to assess the standards of services they receive as individuals, and to make choices about options. Both active citizens and consumers need information about responsibilities and duties. THE DEMAND FOR INFORMATION Need and demand Need for citizenship information is difficult to define, as we have seen. This is partly because a proportion of need is not manifested as a demand. Needs go unrecognised and unexpressed. In looking at the demand for citizenship information, then, we have to consider both the evidence which does exist on demand; and use other indicators to show us the extent of those needs which have not been expressed as demands, and of which the people concerned may not be aware. This second category may be described as ‘potential demand’. It represents information needs which will not be met unless people are made aware of their needs and the possibility of satisfying them, or another agency recognises the needs and provides the information to meet them. The size and nature of the potential demand raises important policy issues, particularly when we recall that this need is for
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information defined as a ‘prerequisite for successful, and, if necessary, critical participation in a social form of life’. Evidence of demand We cannot gauge the demand for citizenship information in the way that we might estimate the demand for a commercial product, by looking at the market and the willingness of users to pay for products. It is in the nature of citizenship information that most if not all of it is expected to be available without charge, as a means of enabling citizens to fulfil their rights and responsibilities. Further, many of the people with the greatest need have no or little purchasing power. The involvement of commercial information providers in the citizenship field is minimal at present. The structure and supply of information services themselves shape and determine demand. Statistical and informal evidence from many information services shows a high level of use, with trends of increasing use over time. Where new services are created, the demand appears to fill the extra capacity. One example will suffice to illustrate a point made in several of the reports: the UK’s National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux reported that 7.6 million enquiries were made to its offices in 1993–4, an increase of 7 per cent since 1990–1. There are many examples of overstretched services which have had to reduce their opening hours, simply in order to cope with the workload generated by enquiries. It would be misleading to suggest that all new services immediately create a demand. Some clearly do not and there are examples of technology-based and other services which have failed through lack of use. In other fields, lack of takeup has been attributed to lack of awareness amongst the public of the service’s existence. Opengovernment provisions in the UK, which give the public access to information about policy making in government, have been criticised for minimal advertising and consequent low takeup. But the general experience of providers of citizenship information is one of high demand.
Evidence of potential demand Evidence of potential demand (and thus an indication of unmet need) can be found in many quarters. Almost all countries have substantial
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proportions of citizens who are entitled to benefits such as tax rebates and housing subsidies but fail to claim them. Lack of knowledge of their entitlements is one factor. Research has also shown a low awareness and understanding of public services and administrative structures. People do not know where to go for help, or what might be available. Several countries point to the complexity of administrative structures in the public sector, which confuse and deter citizens from seeking information. A body of research demonstrates a considerable level of unmet needs for information amongst particular groups in the population. Much of this research has taken place in the UK, although there is no reason to believe the situation is very different elsewhere. Research into the experience of different groups and the problems they experience in dayto-day life has uncovered significant levels of ignorance or confusion about citizenship rights and responsibilities. Much of the research concerns those groups who are likely to need public services, and therefore have a significant need for information about services and entitlements. These include the elderly, the disabled and the unemployed. It follows that environmental and demographic conditions can serve as indicators of likely levels of need for this type of information in a particular area. Indicators of high levels are likely to include: • • • • •
An ageing population; A high proportion of people from minority ethnic communities; Poor health or high incidence of disability; Poor quality housing; High levels of unemployment and poverty.
The expressed demand is also likely to be high, as shown by levels of service use. Supply and demand There was general agreement amongst all the researchers and their interview partners that there is a wide gap between the current level of provision of citizenship information and the demands it is able to meet on the one hand, and the extensive potential demand on the other. Both needs and demand are likely to increase in the future, as we show below. The greatest demand, both expressed and potential, is for the first category of citizenship information, concerning entitlements, rights and
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protections, especially to services and benefits. When the need to consume public services arises, it is often a pressing one, demanding a quick response. The second category of information, concerning accountability and participation, is less in demand. The need for it arises less frequently, and to a large extent individuals can choose whether they wish to become ‘active’ citizens who pursue these interests most vigorously. Some information in this category may be less easily available and thus more difficult to obtain. But the objective needs in this area are probably quite extensive (when we consider public debates about accountability and democracy) and demand may well increase. The need for information about rights and duties remains pretty steady —these responsibilities tend to be stable, and to change little over a lifetime. The background to all these needs for information is a lack of guidance and orientation to help citizens locate the appropriate place to make their enquiries, and which lets them know the types of information which are available. Trends and expectations There was general agreement that demand for citizenship information, both expressed and potential, will increase. There are a number of reasons for this: Legislation New legislation and other changes to people’s rights and responsibilities continue to generate new information needs. Many countries feel that the pace of change is high and increasing, as governments enact farreaching programmes of reform to welfare provisions, for example.
Demography A changing population structure, and particularly the growing proportion of elderly people throughout Europe, increases the number of people with a call on health and welfare services and a need for information about social services and benefits. Multicultural societies include groups with specific information needs: information which concerns their own culture, or more general
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information available in appropriate languages and delivered through acceptable services. Another aspect of demographic change is the maturing of more educated generations who are less accepting and more questioning of authority than their predecessors. Portugal, for example, expects educational reform to produce a less passive citizenry. And the German report points to the ‘generation of 1968’ creating a more assertive middle age. Structural change in the public sector In some countries, particularly the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, structural reform in the public sector is greatly increasing the number of agencies involved in providing services to the citizen. This is being done through privatisation, contracting out or devolution of responsibility to a local level. The result is to increase the number of agencies about which the citizen needs information, and the need for signposting around them. The European dimension The European Union is likely to make more decisions which affect citizens directly, and more rights may derive from the Union itself. Increasing mobility within the Union will generate needs. The provision of more information In many countries there is an increasing amount of consumer information being made available. Much of it calls on an individual to make choices or take individual responsibilities for decisions. This in turn generates a need for help in interpreting the information and deciding on options.
Openness, transparency and accountability In some countries, notably Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands, there is a lively public debate about standards in public life and institutions. There is a demand for greater openness and information to ensure accountability of politicians and decision makers.
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Technology Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are creating an expectation of greater access to information. More and more people are familiar with obtaining information this way. It is interesting to note that some commentators expect the use of ICTs to lead to an improvement in the provision of information through traditional means as well, as those responsible seek to prevent too great a divide between those who have access to information and those who do not. POLICY DEVELOPMENT Policies for citizenship information As we have seen, citizenship information is broadly about the relationship between the citizen and the state. It is in the nature of citizenship information, therefore, that the state, the public sector, generates the information and has the responsibility to ensure it is provided. The public sector also needs information from the citizen. Information is allpervasive in these relationships and transactions between state and citizen. It is also expensive. One might expect, therefore, to find policies and strategies in place both to establish rights and duties to provide information (on both sides) and to guide service development and resource management. But the very fact that information is all-pervasive may impede policy making— it is an integral part of many different functions of government and may not be seen as a separate responsibility. Information is not always recognised as a resource or an important aspect of citizenship in its own right.
The existence of national policies European countries vary widely in the extent of policy development at national level. Policies may be mandatory, in the form of legislation and regulations, or take the form of guidance and codes of practice, which have different levels of enforceability and means of redress. Policies may be general, covering all or many aspects of information for citizens. But it is more usual for policies to be specific to a particular aspect of information. Policies can be grouped into two main areas: those which govern access to official information and are concerned mainly with
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accountability and democracy; and those which require the state to inform citizens about their rights, responsibilities, entitlements and protections. In the countries studied for this project, only Norway had an overall policy on information provision by central government, issued in 1994. This takes the form of recommendations and guidelines for central government departments and agencies, with the strong endorsement of Parliament. The objectives of the Norwegian policy are also more specific than most. They are: to provide real access to information about activities in the public domain; to ensure every citizen has information about their rights, duties and opportunities; and to provide general and equal access to active participation in the democratic process. Other countries have less specific policies. In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Interior Affairs has published a series of policy documents which show a shift over time from a concern with information flows within government to a concern with the quality of service to the public, and a strengthening of the democratic state. A stark contrast is Germany, where the report notes a ‘widespread lack of policy and strategy’ despite constitutional rights to information. The European Commission’s ‘Information, Communication and Openness’ policy, issued in 1993, establishes a number of broad principles: information must be open, complete, simple and clear; it must be relevant and demand-oriented; it must take a coherent approach; and responses must be user-friendly and rapid. Of the countries included in this study, only the Netherlands has general information disclosure legislation which provides a legal basis for access to government information. The United Kingdom has a statute on access to local government information, but central government is regulated by a code of practice (mandatory for central government departments and some other agencies) introduced in 1994. Ireland is presently discussing freedom of information legislation. Portugal’s constitution makes reference to public access to official information, and legislation of 1993 and 1995 governs rights of access to administrative documents held by government and public bodies. Policy on information about rights and responsibilities tends to be more fragmented, often contained within statements on other policies or services, of which information may be an aspect. But the Netherlands, for example, has practical guidelines on information provision which apply to all ministries. Policies in this field tend to be concerned with the provision of information rather than rights of access. In particular, strategies for the
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improving quality and efficiency of public services generate a concern with the effectiveness of information provision as well. In the UK, the Citizen’s Charter is the umbrella of an overall programme of change in public services. Initiatives associated with the Citizen’s Charter also impose strong requirements and give guidance to departments, local authorities and other agencies, some of which are then monitored through inspection systems. In Portugal the programme of administrative reform is having an impact on communication with the citizen. Factors influencing policy development and content Where policies do exist, they are almost all very recent, or recent updates of older documents. The latest versions show more detail and sophistication. Even in countries where citizenship information is less of a topical issue, there are still signs that it is becoming more of a concern for public policy. Political, economic and social factors are all influencing policy development and content in Europe, although most of the influences at work fall into more than one of these categories. There are nine main factors at work here: A written constitution As we have seen, some countries have a written constitution which includes commitments to access to information. However, this is not necessarily translated into a policy to realise these commitments. Germany is an example. The Portuguese have the most recently written constitution amongst the states in this study—it was first produced in 1976 and has been revised twice since then—and this contains a commitment to an administrative reform process. It is this process, which is intended to direct the administration towards serving the citizen rather than the state, which has brought a greater recognition of the importance of information. Concern with democracy and participation Such concern is a stronger tradition in some countries than others. The consumer-citizen debate is highlighting this issue, even if it is not itself acknowledged as significant by government policy. In the UK, for example, it can be argued that the Code of Practice on Open Government, which gives access to information held by central
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government and its agencies, has been stimulated by such pressure to demonstrate accountability. Public participation and democracy is a theme of policy development in Norway. The same is true in the Netherlands, though here the government is sometimes criticised for the way it implements this policy in practice. For the European Commission, this concern has been the main drive behind attempts at citizenship information policy so far. Political crises Political crises can precipitate action on particular aspects of information policy. The Irish report describes a series of government crises which has shaken the authority and stability of political structures. All involved questions of rights to information and resulted in two significant policy changes: a constitutional amendment over women’s rights to information on abortion and health; and the promise of freedom of information legislation in autumn 1995. Public relations It would be naïve to overlook the concern with public relations when reviewing factors in policy development. Administrations are concerned to present a good image to the electorate and the public, and many have a well-developed machinery for media relations. However, a press office-based policy is insufficient on its own, as it fails to deliver information to individuals at a time when it is needed, and it can be suspected of relaying only the ‘good news’. Structures of government The structures of regional and local tiers of government differ widely. Germany has four layers of administration, to which regions have recently been added. The structure works on a principle of subsidiarity, with functions taking place at the most local level possible. In Ireland, in contrast, there is a very centralised government and administrative structure, in comparison with other, larger member states. The autonomy and functions of local government are very restricted.
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Modernisation and administrative reform Citizenship information policy may be an integral part of administrative reform. In different cases, it is both an objective and a by-product of a modernisation programme. Administrative reform is a key theme of public policy in several European states, as governments seek both greater efficiency and a better quality of public service. This process is facilitated in many cases by information technologies, which make new ways of working possible. In Norway, the particular difficulties of a very sparse rural population has stimulated efforts to look at ways of coordinating the functions of the different levels of government, as it is not feasible for them all to have a presence in every community. In Portugal, the programme of administrative reform and modernisation called for by the 1976 constitution has led, particularly since 1987, to a strategy for ‘a faster, more transparent, better qualified and more competitive public administration’. Policy has evolved from structural, technical and procedural changes to a proactive approach towards citizens, which involves both improving the quality of service and encouraging their involvement in decision making processes. The United Kingdom is the most prominent example of the privatisation and contracting out of public services to a proliferation of agencies and suppliers in the private and not-for-profit sectors. This process is intended, amongst other things, to bring greater consumer choice, but it raises unresolved issues about the responsibilities of these agencies for complying with information policy requirements, and for providing information of use to consumers and active citizens. Standards of public services Policies to improve the standards of public service are closely linked with programmes of administrative reform. This is probably most prominent in the UK, where the Citizens’ Charter was a major political initiative at the time of the last general election. It is concerned broadly with the responsiveness and accountability of public services, their quality and delivery. The political parties differ in the details of their individual proposals, but information provision is a key part of all of these.
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Economic development The least-developed economies have less to invest in information. The Irish report explains that low disposable incomes combined with the small population make some commercial information services uneconomic. In our study, Portugal, a less-favoured region of the European Union, describes itself as semi-peripheral in terms of the world economy. Plans for the economic and social development of Portugal are explicit about the importance of higher-quality public servants and improved communications and information systems. They emphasise the goal of a better quality of life, which requires the updating of legislative and information systems, and better communication and information dissemination to the public. Information and communications technology Information technology is not yet an important influence on policy development, but it is expected to become so. The Dutch government has said that it looks to ICTs to achieve four things: the optimum functioning and safeguarding of a democratic, constitutional state; safeguarding privacy; openness of government information; and broadening the basis for decision making through citizens’ participation. But policies to achieve these goals are not yet in place. Public debate about the Information Superhighway has brought attention to the dangers of widening the gap between information haves and have-nots. The technology raises new policy issues which will have to be resolved, such as questions to do with charging, privacy and openness, standards and cooperation. The study of the European Commission reports a view that information policies in member states will converge in the next decade or so, as they all become subject to the same influences and concerns introduced by the technology. PROVIDING AND FUNDING INFORMATION SERVICES It is in the nature of citizenship information that the state or public sector generates the information and has the responsibility to ensure it is provided. The way in which this provision is delivered and funded varies between states, as does the role played by an independent (not-forprofit) sector. Everywhere the involvement of the private sector is slight.
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Information provision by government The majority of citizenship information is provided directly by the state and its agencies. Actual patterns of provision largely depend on administrative structures, with the general rule that information is provided by the service provider or agency responsible for the particular function or service concerned. A few countries have established a central agency to take responsibility for some central information functions, at policy level and/or delivery of information, and particularly for handling national information campaigns. This is in addition to the responsibilities of individual departments and agencies. The level of activity and interest in information provision appears to be rising in most countries. Although different in degree and the form it takes, there appears to be a shift from what was described as ‘the come and collect it yourself’ approach to something rather more active. The factors influencing this are a combination of rising demand and political, economic and social pressures on governments.
Coordination between government information providers The degree of coordination between information providers is one indicator of growing interest and concern. This is particularly important in the context of public confusion or lack of awareness about where to seek information. Portugal has INFOCID, a system of kiosks which provide information about a wide range of government services and functions. The cooperation of different agencies has been achieved through guidance and persuasion, rather than instruction. In the Netherlands, ‘Box 51’ provides a single contact point for enquiries and runs government information campaigns. In Norway, the National Centre for Information Services provides direct information services as well as policy guidance. It deals with 40,000 telephone calls a year; it also sold 20,000 copies of ‘Who knows what in government’ in 1994. At a more local level, there are a series of experiments in providing single access points for a range of local services. These represent attempts to provide a public interface which does not depend on the public understanding the structure of public service, in itself a major source of confusion and information need to many. Norway has Citizens’ Information Centres in half of its 445 local administrative areas, and
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Germany reports that Citizens’ Advice Centres are successful where they are integrated into local administrative structures and supported by them. However, it is interesting to note that recent policy in the Netherlands shows a tendency towards separate access points in the ‘electronic highway’ for each ministry. Attempts to provide a single access point for centrally and locally run services are more ambitious, and are fraught with administrative, bureaucratic and political difficulties. Norway has eight ‘one stop shops’ and Germany reports a lot of interest in the development of citizens’ bureaux to achieve the same aims. Independent information provision The role of the independent sector is very significant in those countries with a tradition of independent and charitable welfare services. From this has developed a dedicated information and advice sector. This is most extensive and highly developed in the UK, where there are over 2, 000 independent agencies (including citizens’ advice bureaux) but they are also significant in the Netherlands and Ireland, with some presence in Germany. The significance of this sector is its independence. It exists to provide objective and impartial information and advice to the citizen, to advocate on their behalf where necessary and to provide a holistic service which covers all aspects of a citizen’s problem, rather than only those which fall within departmental boundaries. By using the expertise, training and specialist information at their disposal, advisers are able to provide a spectrum of services, from simple information to representation and advocacy. In the latter case, they can be highly effective advocates, ensuring that a citizen obtains their full entitlement to services in a situation where they might have been denied by bureaucracy, confusion, mistakes or even obstruction by the agency concerned. The private sector The involvement of the private sector in the provision of citizenship information is very slight. Where it does happen, it is more likely to be a by-product of being contracted to run other services or functions on behalf of government rather than because the industry has seen an opportunity in citizenship information.
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Citizenship information has very limited commercial appeal. The information is needed as part of the citizen-state relationship and as such is expected to be made available free of charge or very freely. Many of the people who need information about services, for example, have little or no spare cash for information. And much of the information which is needed is required on a one-off basis related to a particular case or policy. Such enquiries are more expensive to handle than those which can be dealt with by standard packages. The policy issues surrounding the involvement of the private sector in citizenship information are quite different from those in the debate about the information market and the encouragement of private sector access to and development of information held in the public sector. Here there is a very limited market for citizenship information. The role of the private sector is likely to expand substantially only if the government contracts out or subsidises information provision.
CONCLUSIONS Citizenship information is a key part of the relationship between the individual and the state. Although not all countries recognise the concept of citizenship information, to varying extents they all have policies and systems in place to deliver information to citizens. The formal definition of citizenship varies, as does the existence of a written constitution which defines citizens and their rights. However, a classic definition of citizenship, involving civil, political and social elements, each of which involves rights and responsibilities for both state and individual, was broadly agreed as a basis for understanding and classifying information needs. There are three broad types of information needed by citizens: information about rights and services; information for accountability and participation in democratic processes; and information about duties and responsibilities. There is a significant distinction to be drawn between consumers and citizens. It is this distinction which has brought the debate about citizenship information to the fore in some countries, as part of a debate about standards of public services and the accountability and transparency of policy making procedures. The consumer is the user of public services, while the citizen has an active interest in the policy making which shapes them. This distinction helps us to understand information needs. Information about entitlements to services is predominantly the domain
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of the consumer, while information for participation and accountability, and information about civil and political rights and protections, is needed most by those who choose to become active citizens. Information about duties and responsibilities is needed by all, at a fairly constant level. Much of the need for citizenship information is not expressed and therefore not manifested as demand. There is no market in the usual meaning of the word, so demand is difficult to quantify. However, there are a number of indicators, and broad agreement that there is a large and growing gap between supply and demand. Many services are already overstretched and other social, economic and demographic factors point to increasing demand in future. The greatest demand at present is for information about rights and services, but demand is also expected to increase for information about participation and accountability. Relatively little specific policy on citizenship information exists, and certainly not policy which covers more than one particular aspect of the whole. Policy development is patchy, despite the all-pervasive nature of citizenship information. Although information is all-pervasive, it is not seen as a separate function or resource. For these reasons, it is impossible to know how much money is spent in providing citizenship information. However, it is clear that despite the level of unmet needs, considerable resources go into citizenship information already. Citizenship information is becoming more of a policy concern in all countries in the study, and for the Commission itself. The reasons for this include: • • • • • •
An awareness of its role in economic development; Its role in administrative reform; Concern with the standards and quality of public services; Concern with the health of democracy; Political crises; The potential of technology.
Almost all citizenship information is provided by the state and its agencies at various levels. But an independent sector of informationand advice-providers is very significant in a few countries. Such agencies play a key role in representing clients’ interests, as advisers who are independent of the services with which the advice is concerned. The methods of providing the information are very traditional; there is a great reliance on print and the telephone. But certain extensive
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needs for citizenship information, particularly those concerned with an individual’s rights and entitlements, require a human intermediary and one-to-one interaction with an adviser. It is widely accepted that most citizenship information should be available free of charge to the citizen, as an integral part of the status of citizenship. Further, the ability of those with the greatest need for information about rights and services to pay for it is very limited. There is little possibility, therefore, of charging for most types of citizenship information, and a limited role for commercial information providers. The possibility of using technology raises new policy issues about charging for information, as it becomes possible to offer more ‘addedvalue’ services, but this in turn raises concerns about equality of access. Most citizenship information is delivered without the citizen making use of any information and communications technology except the telephone. The possibilities for using ICT in the future raises the importance of the whole subject of citizenship information, as well as specific questions about the technology. Future use will depend on the level of priority and financing, and the ways of extending what is a very limited role for the private sector. Non-technological factors are of equal if not greater importance than the technological ones in determining future developments. Policy makers and commentators are concerned with the need to ensure equality of access, particularly in national systems, and with the nature of users’ needs. There are indicators that greater use of technology is likely to come about through the development of systems for the administration of services, rather than through the development of systems specifically for information provision.
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Chapter 11 Managing the cyberspace divide Government investment in electronic information services Puay Tang
INTRODUCTION William Gibson, originator of the word ‘cyberspace’, described it as a ‘matrix of bright lattices of unfolding logic [and] a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system’. Cyberspace provides the medium for the transfer and exchange of information and data, and communication through ‘icons, waypoints and artificial realities’ (Gibson 1984:67). Advanced information and communications technologies have facilitated the construction of this medium. Cyberspace, therefore, can be conceived as a ‘virtual information space’ in which exists the connectivity provided by computers and telecommunication networks to process and transmit the information (Barnatt 1995). The much-discussed information superhighway represents much of what cyberspace is about. The superhighway is envisioned to be ‘a seamless web of communications networks, computers, databases, and consumer electronics that will put vast amounts of information at users’ fingertips’ (Information Infrastructure Task Force 1993). This not-sofuturistic superhighway, as illustrated by the exploding growth and use of the Internet, has spawned a new vernacular of ‘cyber’ words, but more importantly it has become a metaphor for wealth creation, sustained economic development, enhancement of the quality of life and social cohesion.1 Analysts and commentators have come to regard information as ‘rapidly replacing energy as society’s main transforming resource’ largely because of the pronounced growth in the use of, and demand for, information for an ever-increasing range of public and private activities (Wriston 1992:xiii). Political economists also point to the rise
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of the ‘knowledge structure’ or the ‘informatised’ economic order, or more popularly, the ‘information society’ (Drucker 1989; Strange 1988) in which businesses are using information technology (IT) to run leaner and smarter operations, and deploying information resources more efficiently and effectively within and beyond the organisations, as large categories of workers are increasingly replaced with ‘knowledge workers’. This chapter seeks to explore how UK government measures to prepare British society for the information age are serving to bridge the ‘cyberspace divide’ that critics and proponents of the information society warn is liable to deepen and widen in the absence of forwardlooking public information policies. For the purposes of this paper, the cyberspace divide refers to an electronic arena, or electronic ghetto, in which some citizens, the computerised haves, will have access to electronic information, while others, the undercomputerised or ‘uncomputerised’ have-nots, will be increasingly disadvantaged. There are many ways in which information policies can be devised to close the gap. One is to distinguish the policies by the audience at which they are targeted (Hill 1994; Moore and Steele 1991); for instance, these policies can be aimed at the manufacturing industry, education or citizens. The other is to address the policies in terms of the type of instrument to realise them, such as legislation, regulation, infrastructure or service provision (House of Lords 1996). This paper focuses on a combined policy approach of the above two, that is, it involves the target group—the citizens—and the policy instrument—service provision—to provide access to electronic public information. The service provision that will be addressed here is that of government information. This informal approach is based on the argument that a combined approach for the formulation of policies demands a rigorous consideration of the aims and objectives, target constituency(ies) and the means to accomplish the objectives. The chapter first reviews the plans of the UK government for the provision of electronic information services, and argues the need for government to have a well coordinated and coherent information strategy which places as much emphasis on service and content as it does on the physical network itself. The article postulates that an information policy must fundamentally aim at making a wide range of public information and services available to the public so that a declared objective by government to institute ‘open, flexible and responsive government’ as a means of promoting social cohesion and integration is credible and realisable (CCTA 1995). Most particularly, it notes that
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insufficient mechanisms for wide access to information in an ‘informatised economic structure’ will result in failure by government to bridge the cyberspace divide, and thereby fall short of its ‘bridging’ attempts. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some main elements of a coherent and well formulated strategy for the implementation of government delivery of information services. In particular, it highlights the crucial role of government leadership in the adoption of IT as a first measure in the implementation and provision of electronic information services. Equally importantly, the paper also notes that a necessary condition for government to span the electronic ghetto lies in the provision of useful public information and the explicit right of citizens to such information. BRIDGING THE DIVIDE: UK GOVERNMENT MEASURES Measures by governments to raise public awareness to the existence of public electronic information services and to stimulate their takeup are integral to government attempts both to promote social cohesion and to the development of an information society. Central to the provision of these services is the type of information that will serve the public interest and the means to deliver the information. Governments will be judged by the resources they actively commit to their claims to promote a radically new process in which the public can obtain and retrieve information rapidly. A threat to these initiatives, and hence their objectives, is under-developed demand resulting from lack of awareness, insufficient information and accessibility. These imperil the bridging of the cyberspace divide. Evolution towards bridging Two influences have largely helped to shape UK policy toward the information society. In 1993, government published a White Paper, ‘Realising our potential: a strategy for science, engineering and technology’—which highlighted the vital role of technology in achieving national, economic and social goals, and alerted government attention to the opportunities of electronic delivery of services and information. The second influence was reflected in a White Paper published by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) entitled ‘Creating the superhighways of the future: developing broadband
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communication in the UK’, which applauded the liberalisation of the telecommunications market, proclaiming it as a major condition for the establishment of a UK information superhighway. ‘Realising our potential’ helped launch the Technology Foresight Programme. The Programme brought together industry, academics and government to consider the ways the UK can take advantage of, among other things, the opportunities that IT can contribute to wealth creation and the enhancement of the quality of life. Among its major recommendations, the Programme emphasised the necessity of establishing a national information superhighway initiative that would help secure the position of the UK ‘as one of the top three players in the construction and exploitation of the emergent global Information Superhighway as a means of wealth creation’ (Office of Science and Technology 1995:46). Specific mention was made of the importance of generating information-based services. The DTI is charged with the development of the national broadband communication network necessary to support the use of information superhighways, for promoting their use by industry and encouraging industry to develop applications for the superhighways. Its report on Competitiveness: Forging Ahead unequivocally maintains that continuous improvements in the standard of public service must entail enhanced management in government processes.2 To do this, government must ‘reinvent’ itself and show leadership in the use of IT for the purposes of making itself more efficient (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology 1995). The latest annual report of the UK government’s Centre for Information Systems (now known as the Computer and Communications Technology Agency, CCTA), a publicly administered executive agency, highlighted the urgency for government to better manage its information so that services will become ‘easier to use, quicker and better targeted’ (Taylor 1996:iv).3 In July 1995 the CCTA published its Report on the Information Superhighway, which discussed a number of issues focusing on the development of services.4 Its previous 1994 report on Information Superhighways: Opportunities for Public Sector Applications, also addressed widely the importance of services for the superhighway; in particular, it stressed the importance of ‘open access’ to electronicbased government information for the citizen, and the contribution of technology to government efficiency and effectiveness. In May 1995 the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) published its report Information ‘Superhighways’:
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the UK National Information Infrastructure, which gave due attention to the important role of information services to all sectors of the population. Discussions of alternative modes for delivery of these services, apart from the computer, however, remain insufficient. In July 1996 the Select Committee on Science and Technology of the House of Lords published its report on The Information Society: Agenda for Action in the UK. Principally, the report examined how society will be affected by advances in technology and recommended appropriate government actions.5 The report is replete with recommendations which include the formation of an Information Society Task Force along the lines of the US Information Infrastructure Task Force, to help raise public awareness to the vital aspects of the superhighway, and subsidies and assistance for ‘wiring’ schools and public places (the idea of a task force was not followed up by government; see below). Yet arguably, the most significant message of the report is its implicit suggestion that government needs to get itself wired directly to the electorate so as to show leadership in the provision of public information. Unlike the UK Parliament, which is markedly lacking in a two-way electronic communication with its electorate, all US Members of Congress can be reached via electronic mail. Most congressional committees have their own web page. Stated differently, the ‘wiring up’ of government could stimulate increased takeup of technologies, for example, if it is made known that priority is given to enquiries that arrive by electronic mail. This means that government employees should have their own electronic mail addresses and dedicated resources to respond to these requests. There is a widespread public impression that government information is available only if one visits the relevant offices. Similarly, government, through two-way communication, could know what information the public wants to read by auditing information requests, something which could be done relatively easily with electronic requests (Jackson 1996). At the present, very little is known about how and if government systematically knows what information the public wants. The report also strongly implied that a coordinated approach was elemental to the formulation of effective information policies. White papers and consultation documents identify important issues and are perhaps necessary precursors to the formulation of policies. Yet one body should be charged with pooling the identified issues in order to devise a coherent policy framework. Instead, fragmentation, in large
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part, is a defining trait of government’s approach to, and praxis of, formulating its information policies. Different departments and agencies, such as the Department for Education and Employment, the Department of National Heritage, the Office of Science and Technology, the Department of Health and the CCTA, are all involved in the Crafting of information policies, with each having its own visions and ideas. As a result, little interdepartmental cooperation towards a common policy framework has been evidenced or promoted. More damaging is the ‘turf rivalry between departments which has hampered the progression of a focused policy framework (House of Lords 1996). In sum, there is a delicate balance between the need for ‘political visionaries’ possessing innovative and leadership skills and the need for citizens to have a sense of involvement and identification with national life (Pye 1967). Communication helps to structure the balance. In theory and in practice, political leaders are largely expected to have a sense of the future and to use their leadership to steer the nation state towards that future through the setting of some ‘standards’ and policy goals. Also, it can be maintained that as people are exposed to new ways of thinking and encouraged to adopt new attitudes and ways of working, steady progress towards the collective ‘product’ of economic development, social progress and political maturity is more likely to be possible. In this way too, the cyberspace divide may be spanned. The bridging measures The overdue move to address the ‘imperatives’ of coherence and coordination generally required of policy making, particularly for policies which affect the public as a whole, resulted in the establishment of the Central Information Technology Unit (CITU) in November 1995, a move spearheaded by Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine and Roger Freeman, Minister of Public Services. The main task of CITU is to devise a set of strategies and policies which will enable government to exploit the opportunities provided by information and communications technology in order to provide simple to use, integrated and rationalised services, which are tailored to the needs of business and the citizens, and are easily accessible when and where required. (House of Lords 1996:40)
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This move also was undertaken to side-step some of the civil service resistance which had been partly responsible for frustrating delays in the implementation of these technologies. CITU will comprise a mix of selected civil servants and staff seconded from industry, who will devise a complete Whitehall (the British civil service) computer strategy to be implemented with the aid of the private sector. CITU and the CCTA will jointly undertake a strategic review of the use of IT by government. Second, in February 1996 the Prime Minister set up a committee comprising the President of the Board of Trade (DTI), the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Parliamentary Under-secretary of State for Science and Technology. The mission of this ministerial group, known as GEN 37, is to identify and promote cross-departmental initiatives that would result in the deployment of IT across a wide spectrum of administrative and public activities. Third, in February 1996 the DTI launched the Information Society Initiative (ISI), which ‘for the first time, and within a single framework, a comprehensive package of activities [has been] designed to promote the beneficial use of information and communication technologies in the UK’ (DTI web page). A specific aim of the ISI is to encourage small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt the use of IT in their business operations, although the longer-term objective is to promote the use of IT by the larger society. The ISI will run for four years up to the year 2000, and government is investing £35 million, with the hope that industry will match this amount. Another programme, IT for All, which also was launched in 1996, is aimed to raise public awareness of and access to new information and communications technologies. This programme is a ‘one-shot’ attempt to raise public awareness, for example, by providing Citizens’ Advice Bureaux with computers. In November 1996 the government published its first Green Paper specifically on the provision of government electronic information services and which, importantly, invited public response to its aims and implementation strategy. The Green Paper was titled ‘Government direct’. ‘Government direct’: aims and objectives The Green Paper, prepared by CITU, laid out the aims and means by which government would provide electronic information services.
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Public response to the Paper was robust, and submissions were received from public, private and voluntary constituencies. The government intends to start implementing a wide range of electronic services by the year 1988 and expects that implementation, which will be done in stages, will be completed in five to ten years time. Several pilot projects for the delivery of a selected number of services will eventually be conducted. Three pilot projects, however, were launched after the publication of the Green Paper. These involved providing public access in a variety of locations, giving information about Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise taxes and duties and National Insurance contributions; an Internet service, called Direct Access Government, providing access to government forms and information relevant to business; and a land and property information service for Scotland. The government hopes that the results from these pilot projects will inform it of the ‘workability’ of these services, and to further instruct it of ‘best practice’ for the delivery of public services. These results also will form the basis of a White Paper which will be presented to Parliament for debate and enactment into legislation. The main aims of government services ‘going online’ are 1 to provide better and more efficient services to business and citizens; 2 to improve the efficiency and openness of government administration; 3 to secure substantial cost savings for taxpayers through the delivery of an assortment of public services (Green Paper 1996). In setting out the strategy for the implementation of electronic information services, the Green Paper focused on a number of key elements: choice, confidence, accessibility, efficiency, rationalisation, open information and fraud prevention. Choice and access refer to the means of delivery that will be made available to the citizenry to access these services, and these include terminals and information kiosks which will be placed in a variety of locations. Special note was made of the continuation of paper-based communication and transactions for those who preferred this mode of information delivery. The electronic delivery infrastructure is expected to be provided by the private sector, and government will contract for the electronic delivery of its services. Alternative means of delivery were inadequately addressed.
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Instilling user confidence was addressed largely in terms of privacy of personal data. Security of transaction was addressed separately under ‘fraud detection’. There was scant attention paid to the issue of public awareness-raising with respect to the potential availability and benefits of electronic services. Consonantly, there was scarce discussion of how the public would be ‘educated’ in, and informed of, the use of these services. An integrated government electronic system is expected to enhance efficiency and rationalisation through the use of common services, for example, by providing a ‘one-stop-shop’ for government information and services, or by electronically linking various areas of government to accelerate the exchange of information for various purposes, for instance to improve policy coordination. Government aims to provide more public information than is currently available from the websites of individual departments and agencies. Although the quality of the information was not explicitly addressed in the Green Paper, there is at least an acknowledgement that the range of publicly available information should be increased, for instance legislative and regulatory matters, and publicly collected statistical data. Significantly, electronically available parliamentary proceedings are now obtainable; electronic accessibility to these proceedings had catalysed much discussion among consumers, interest groups and information producers throughout 1996. Other forms of useful public sector information, however, such as remote access to the publications and records held by the British Library; government publications published by HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, the main government printer); online school/college information, including remote tuition; employment information and vacancies; and online data and statistical summaries for market research and forecasting are not yet available. Similarly, it could be useful for investors and businesses to have data on demographics, environmental development, crime and access to geographic information services. In contrast, some of these services such as digital library catalogues, several government publications, college and legislative information, remote tuition and statistical data are already extensively provided on the Internet by American, Canadian and Australian governments. For instance, the US Government Printing Office in conjunction with the Northwestern University Library has opened the first ‘gateway’ site in Illinois, giving public access to several important federal documents via an Internet connection. These documents and federal databases are now available to off-site users on
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the same day of publication via the gateway. There is no charge for this service, which is being funded by the congressional Federal Depository Library Program. It is arguable that these services will have a wideranging impact because of the scope of interests they serve. But it is worth noting that government has accepted the importance of providing publicly collected and generated information and data electronically. A useful suggestion advanced by the Green Paper is the introduction of an electronic complaints procedure. This will largely entail a government website which allows people to lodge complaints and make suggestions about public services. It is, however, not yet clear if there will be a directory of all e-mail addresses for Members of Parliament, although some MPs do communicate electronically with their constituents. For the prevention of fraud and the security of electronic transactions, government is focusing on the introduction of electronic signatures for recipients of welfare benefits and other services. For requests for information, smart cards are being considered for use in publicly located terminals, as they are also for increasing the privacy and confidentiality of personal data that may have to be given for the use of any electronic service. To assuage the fears of users, government has strengthened the scope and powers of the Data Protection Act and the Data Protection Registrar. As noted above, public response to ‘Government direct’ has been vigorous, and government has declared that it is considering some suggestions forwarded by public submissions, such as strengthening further the powers of the Data Protection Registrar, ensuring that smart cards will not be used as national identity cards, and that electronic accessibility will be provided partly through public monies. The plethora of ‘electronic’ attempts and initiatives by government are less than cosmetic, but it is troubling to note that these measures, as they are, are still largely aimed at business, the educated and affluent groups of the population. Much less effort has been addressed at reducing the gap between access to these information services by the ‘computerised’ and the ‘less computerised’ communities. What are the alternatives that government can consider in electronic delivery of information services, besides the computer and public terminals? Significantly, how is government raising public awareness of the existence and utility of these services? Most importantly, does government accept the concept of ‘freedom of information’, despite its avowal of providing public access to public information?
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SUCCESS IN BRIDGING THE DIVIDE? While some government attempts at trying to disseminate information and deliver its services more efficiently are noteworthy, there remain barriers that will thwart the successful formulation of information policies if left unattended. This section addresses three issues that are vital to closing the gap between the information have-nots and the haves. Quality of information There has been no discussion of standards for the quality of information that should be published electronically, nor is there a timetable for making available the information in electronic form. There also is no clear objective of making information freely available because of the constraints placed upon public documents by Crown copyright (see below). Continuing lack of public enthusiasm for using the UK Code of Practice on Access to Government Information, which came into force on 4 April 1995, continues to imply that the process for locating and asking government for a document is time-consuming and highly procedural.6 Moreover, this Code is not widely publicised for citizens to use despite the distribution of 30,000 new leaflets explaining the Code in five minority languages: Hindi, Urdu, Gujerati, Punjabi and Bengali.7 Furthermore, the Code does not make clear that citizens have a right to public information. For many others, the Code implies more regulations for the access and use of government information.8 For instance, government, despite revisions to its Code, such as for facilitating access to immigration records and supplying actual documents rather than summaries, is still resisting the idea for a freedom of information act. Instead, the revised code makes it very difficult and expensive to obtain some information, which could be free or inexpensive under a freedom of information act. Notably, it has made it harder to challenge a decision to with-hold information affecting the environment, for example. A request for environmental information could still incur a cost for the information plus a further bill for legal advice that the department providing the information may require to decide whether it can in fact release the data.9
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Crown copyright and limited free government information The continued monopoly of HMSO over Crown copyright retards the free and public dissemination of government information. In the US such information is disseminated freely and no copyright is claimed against government information. For instance the USPTO patent database is now available on the Internet. EDGAR, the database of the Securities Exchange Commission, is also available on the Internet, and users can download vast quantities of company data. The THOMAS Web, a joint project between the Library of Congress and the University of Massachusetts which went online in 1995, hosts searchable versions of House of Representatives and Senate bills, summaries of bills and legislative histories of bills and amendments, and browsable lists of bills and searchable records of daily proceedings in Congress.10 It registered more than 300,000 hits within three months of its launch in March. Every public document delivered to the White House press corps is published electronically and via the Internet. The GPO-University of Northwestern Library service to most government documents and databases has already been noted. More than 300,000 copies of what the Clinton administration considers as important to public interest, such as the National Performance Review on reinventing government, the National Information Infrastructure agenda for action, and the Information Infrastructure Task Force White Paper on intellectual property rights, have been electronically distributed. As long as HMSO continues to license and charge for works produced by a government officer, it is unlikely that there will be widely and freely available government information. Crown copyright subsists in every Act of Parliament for fifty years following royal assent, and parliamentary material such as parliamentary proceedings and bills, parliamentary papers and reports, papers of government departments and Crown bodies, charts, maps and navigational material produced by the Ministry of Defence. HMSO currently produces about 9,000 new items per annum and has some 50,000 titles in print (Saxby 1996). In 1991 the government decided to turn public sector information into a profit-making commodity, and under the Trading Fund Act, amended in 1994, HMSO is now obliged to achieve a return of 5 per cent per annum on its activities, with new annual targets set from then on (Saxby 1996). The contemplated sale of HMSO to the private sector is likely to
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worsen the situation as long as the extreme regulatory regime of Crown copyright remains. Neither will charging mechanisms by government for access to electronic government information be a solution, as citizens, increasingly exposed to the free availability of electronic government information, domestic and from elsewhere, will be loath to give up these rights.11 The relaxation of Crown copyright with respect to electronic publications, bolstered by government policy on treating access to information as a right, will help go a long way towards bridging the divide. Access Access, in this paper, refers to the awareness of electronic public information services and the means required for receiving the information.12 What could therefore be of immediate concern to policy makers is how to stimulate the use of existing information services. Recognition of the existence of multiple categories of users and uses of public information must also be given, and this implies that various delivery mechanisms need to be considered. Increasing awareness and spurring the takeup of these services could start in schools in which students can first learn of them, access them and then bring home ‘the good news to their parents’ of the availability of public information. This presumes that schools are hooked up to the Internet. At the moment only 4,500 out of the 25,000 schools in the UK are connected to the Internet. Moreover, usage has been limited, according to the Office of Standards for Education, for two main reasons: 1 Local area networks within a site to allow access from various classrooms have been very limited. 2 Few teachers have shown real interest in using the Internet; the reason for this indifference has been identified as the lack of a clear curriculum strategy that a coordinated national programme should provide (House of Lords 1996). The two consultation papers on broadband communication, ‘Superhighways and education’ and ‘Superhighways for education: the way forward’, produced by the Department for Education and Employment, describe in great length the educational benefits of the superhighway which can enhance the process of learning and teaching. In particular, the papers emphasise the opportunities that IT could
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provide for lifelong learning and training; distance learning; in-service training; special educational needs; types of educational needs and administrative purposes; user-friendliness and cost of electronic systems; and applications for further and higher education. These ambitious objectives suggest that sustained support for these facilities will be necessary for effective implementation. The Schools on Line project is backed by the DTI, and aims to encourage students to pool their research on science projects and develop foreign language skills. The initial scheme cost £600,000, of which the Department underwrote about half the cost. The Department has committed another £750,000 for a full programme in 1996 which is intended to eventually connect all of Britain’s 5,000 secondary schools. On the whole, the UK ranks fifth among OECD countries in ‘school nets’, with the US, Canada, Australia and Japan in the top four positions respectively. In November 1995 the Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine announced a £10 million initiative to link schools and colleges to information superhighways. The main aim of this initiative is to ensure that Britain maintains its international competitiveness by ‘raising standards and attainment in education to the highest levels’ (Department for Education and Employment 1995). This scheme is the culmination of a number of consultation exercises on government involvement in the provision of educational services. The above notwithstanding, four problems of ‘superhighways for education’ remain. First, there must be resources to ensure that schools are able to sustain the ‘network’ hardware to use the information being sent to them. The second is whether funds will be available to ensure and maintain wide student access to the information, by having, for instance, more than the usual single telephone link to the school net, which is currently the situation. Third, will there be resources designated for the costs of staying online, given that classes are held during the peak telephone charge hours? Lastly, the telecommunications networks of the schools, which are integral to successful ‘wiring together’ are in several instances obsolete and developed in a piecemeal fashion, and school authorities lack the technical expertise. The significance of providing access at the younger end of the educational vine as opposed to the more mature end as represented by universities, cannot be over-stated. But privately funded projects are beginning to make headway in providing public access to, and raising public awareness of, electronic information services. For instance, the South Bristol Learning Network,
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funded by British Telecom (BT, the predominant UK telephone company), CompuServe, United Artists Communications and South Bristol College, has initiated ‘cyberskills workshops’ which are free, community-based multimedia workshops. They are aimed at raising awareness of electronic information services. This project is being closely watched by the US and Canada as a blueprint for some of their awareness-raising projects. Similar publicly sponsored projects could be undertaken to provide access and increase awareness. In sum, increasing awareness and promoting the takeup of electronic public information services can start in schools, where students can be increasingly exposed to the Internet for the current delivery of government information. But the story cannot end here, since parents, and others who have had their awareness raised, need means to access these information sources. The means for accessing electronic information services are the natural companion to awareness if the information society is not to be an exclusive club of the privileged. Although the cost of personal computers and modems is falling steadily, these are still beyond the means of the average household. An electronic publisher aptly summarised the situation when he said that ‘the personal computer is still the province of the upper middle income; the VCR belongs to the masses’.13 Computer penetration in the UK is estimated at 22 per cent of households; less than 50 per cent of small businesses employing under 100 people have no computers (IDC 1995). These small businesses comprise 95 per cent of the UK industrial landscape. Modem penetration in the UK is 14 per cent among business, education and household users (Taylor 1995:11).14 The share of households with a modem is 4 per cent. At present, BT’s residential lines are used for an average of four to five minutes per day. These telling figures suggest that an over-emphasis on the computer as the main means of electronic dissemination of information could require reconsideration. Television penetration, on the other hand, is recorded at 97 per cent in the UK, with 84 per cent penetration for the VCR (Tang 1996). Government could thus improve information delivery through teletext and interactive television services. It could also focus delivery of information through audiotext (telephone); voice and data information services, recordings, voice-based interactive services and fax-based services. At a recent workshop on ‘The Economics of the Information Society’, convened by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Korean Information Society Development
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Institute in Seoul, experts and policy makers highlighted the importance of a variety of delivery mechanisms so as to avoid deepening the extant information gap between the computerised and the computerless. Nonetheless, the growth of electronic networks and the use of computers will continue. According to Roland Perry of UK Online Ltd, there about 150,000 UK ‘home individuals’ who are connected to the Internet, and households are connecting to the Internet at about 1,300 per week.15 Television set-top boxes that convert the television into a personal computer could eventually be an effective channel for distribution. Prices for these sets are forecast to be less than £500. To sum up, public accessibility to electronic delivery mechanisms will be reflected by the policies government adopts for providing it. Therefore, a policy challenge is first to raise public awareness to the existence and benefits of electronic information services, as well as to encourage their use. A broadband infrastructure capable of ‘piping’ highly advanced services and which will be used only by a small segment of the citizenry violates both spirit and letter of the Green Paper. Insufficient public access to these services perpetuates the ‘electronic ghetto’. Importantly, the political elites in the UK must understand that there is a key relationship between developments in communications and the provision of information, national growth and social dynamism. There are several policy strands that can be suggested and which actively capitalise on domestic strengths in the production of electronic information. The following section outlines these policy aspects. FRAMEWORK FOR BRIDGING THE DIVIDE Government leadership is required for a coordinated policy of electronic service delivery. The provision of public electronic information services requires the identification and consistent promotion of a coherent information agenda within government-wide management initiatives. In the absence of a coordinated approach to promoting information needs, the needs of many stake-holders may well be given inadequate attention. Likewise, governments must recognise that the transition to new procedures entails ‘institutional instability’, and offer opportunities for departmental and interdepartmental adjustments and training, and for interdepartmental cooperation and coordination. Governments could undertake a concerted public relations campaign prior to the introduction of electronic service delivery, in order to raise public awareness and stimulate takeup of services. Importantly,
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governments should consider planning for public education and outreach activities to gain feedback, involvement and support from users. If, however, government takes the view that public opinion is unimportant for policy issues and success, the result is likely to be the absence of any forward-looking and comprehensive policy (Gaubatz 1995; Rosenau 1960). Accessibility to services could include the consideration of a variety of modes of delivery in addition to the computer, as noted above. If the preference of government is to provide computer-networked information services, then widely accessible and affordable computer networking must be provided, for instance in schools and libraries; electronic kiosks in shopping malls, town halls and public areas; and community one-stop centres. The development of ‘electronic road maps’ to help the public identify and locate relevant services would be an important consideration (Congress of the United States, Office of Technology Assessment 1992:19). Sustained public financial support and provision of incentives for local agencies, schools, colleges and universities to develop community-based programmes and projects for the use of the Internet could be thoroughly considered. Similarly, government could assist with providing grants to nonprofit organisations such as libraries, schools, community groups, hospitals and local authorities that develop innovative applications of new information and communications technologies. In the US for instance, the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP) of the Department of Commerce provides matching grants to these organisations. The project is beginning to demonstrate positive results. In Oregon for example, students in ten rural county school districts will get Internet access and desktop videoconferencing. Students will also use the network to take advancedplacement maths and science courses, and teachers will take continuing education courses towards advanced degrees. The Louisiana Children’s Network, also a beneficiary of TIIAP, will allow law enforcement officials and children’s social service agencies to share information on issues such as child abuse, runaways, childcare facilities, gang-related activities and child predators. The Michigan Public Health Institute plans to develop an electronic ‘childhood immunisation’ network for the greater Detroit area, which will allow healthcare providers access to the immunisation history of the child, generate automatic reminders for parents and doctors, and improve the ability of schools to monitor a child’s immunisation status.
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Private sector involvement could be fostered by encouraging joint public/private sector projects for the development of services and information based on various modes of electronic delivery. A range of inducements also could continue to encourage and provide opportunities for industry to furnish training and to equip public areas and educational institutions with equipment and electronic information products, as is happening in several primary and secondary schools. In particular, the capabilities of the private sector could be harnessed to experiment with various technologies and applications so as to develop best-choice, customer-oriented and user-friendly information services. Network operators could be given incentives to adopt pricing structures to allow schools and libraries, for instance, to use online services during peak hours. Similarly, private sector experience could be employed to assist governments more widely with the production and marketing of public information.
CONCLUSION This chapter has provided a broad sweep of the issues that government could consider in the electronic delivery of public services and information. The review of the provision of electronic government information services by government has pointed to a need for a wellmanaged, coherent and coordinated superhighway strategy. The importance of acknowledging citizens’ access to public information as a right is fundamental to the success of any project for the widespread distribution of government information. The objective of freely disseminating public information must deal with the current issues of Crown copyright. Equally notably, government could systematically promote the use of these services by, first, using IT throughout its administration on a coordinated basis; second, producing useful information; and third, by raising public awareness of these services and generating demand for them. The crux of the policy challenge is to provide public access to these services, regardless of location and personal circumstances of the citizen. In conclusion, there is an overarching need for governments to countenance a culture favouring the wide distribution of information and improved communications. The information society, as it is politically envisaged, will need such a culture to flourish; in other words, governments must recognise that public feedback and opinion is
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crucial for the success of policies (Stimson 1991; Inglehart 1977). Bridging the cyberspace divide without focused and forward-looking information policies that recognise the public’s right of access to, and provision of, timely and useful government information, along with a widely available delivery infrastructure, is likely to be difficult. NOTES 1 The Internet is a system of internetworked computers, comprising about 50,000 thousand computers and 30 million users. 2 This publication can be found on the Internet at http:// www.hmsoinfo.gov.uk/hmso/document/dti-comp/dti-comp.htm. 3 The CCTA comprises civil servants within the Cabinet Office’s Office of Public Services. It undertakes independent appraisal of government systems, and advises departments on the kind of computer services they should buy and adopt in order to provide improved government services. The CCTA’s accumulated experience from twenty-five years of involvement in government systems has made it a unique source of assistance, an evaluator and a catalyst for technological development. 4 This is available on the Internet at http://www.ioen.gov.uk/ccta/ cctapubs.htm. 5 This report can be downloaded from http//www.hmsoinfo.gov/hmso/ document/inforsoc.htm. 6 In 1993 the government published its ‘Open government’ White Paper. Its key provisions require government departments to review all material currently withheld for longer than thirty years to see if it can be declassified and made publicly available, to consider releasing material less than thirty years old, and to consider requests from historians to release material that is closed longer than thirty years to be released. 7 Each leaflet contains a tear-off form for requesting information, along with a list of contact names and addresses for relevant bodies. They are being distributed to libraries, Citizen’s Advice Bureaux and community organisations across the country. 8 Conversations with barristers and commercial information providers about access to and use of free public information. 9 Nicholas Timmins, ‘Tories campaign against information act’, Financial Times, 10 January 1997, 6. 10 See http://thomas.loc.gov. 11 These charging mechanisms do not refer to government’s commercial electronic-information service providers. These services often ‘add value’ to the organisation, structure, searchability and retrievalibility of the information.
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12 The network infrastructure for the deployment of electronic information, and with the pricing for the use of these services, are important issues and have been explored extensively elsewhere. See for example House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee, ‘Optical fibre networks’, July 1994. This chapter will not discuss them. 13 Interview with a leading producer of games for a project on electronic publishing, sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the DTI, of which the author is the principal investigator. 14 Compared to this, one in four home personal computers in Britain has a CD-ROM drive. The statistic is from Inteco, (1995) Multimedia in the Home: Europe, Woking: Inteco; as cited by Paul Taylor, ‘Home computer boom is illusory’, Financial Times, 18 November 1995, 11. 15 COG policy discussion on the Internet, 14 December 1995. There is little information on the income types and spatial distribution of Internet users.
Chapter 12 Connecting Wales The Internet and national identity Hugh Mackay and Tony Powell
In Wales the media have for decades been attributed with considerable significance in processes of cultural transformation (Jones 1993; Osmond 1983). The press, radio and then television have each been seen as playing a key role in constructing Welsh identity and the contemporary Welsh nation. Alternatively, the media are seen as failing in that project by acting as the voice of England, of mass culture, or of a version of Welsh culture which has little relevance to most people in Wales today. So the arrival of new communications technologies— accompanied as they are by new media organisations, new regimes of regulation and new media forms—can be expected to provide threats and opportunities for the media in their construction of national identities. Raymond Williams (1974) identifies the moment of the arrival of a new communications technology as critical: the history of the radio and television show how the nature of the technology, its meaning, its institutions, its regulation and its software (or programming) were not foreseen. His analysis shows that the shape which these technologies have taken is neither inevitable nor immutable. Sociologists—in the ‘social shaping of technology’, social constructivist and other schools— have shown us how the nature or form of a technology is the outcome of complex processes of contest. More than that, work mainly in cultural studies focuses on users, or audiences; with how technologies are transformed in their very use: users ‘work’ with technologies and shape them to meet their needs; and this shaping feeds back to processes of marketing, design and production. This paper is a preliminary empirical study of the use, or shaping, of what is commonly heralded as a new media technology of enormous significance—the Internet. Today is the exciting moment of transformation: the technology has arrived, has a sizeable and very fast-
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growing takeup, but has scarcely begun to develop its own cultural forms and institutions. We explore its use in relation to Welsh culture and politics by focusing on two fora on Welsh culture. As we shall explain, these constitute minority use of the Internet in Wales; but we examine them as a case-study of the possibilities of this new technology for Welsh culture and the Welsh nation. We conclude by addressing briefly the relationship of this new technology to emerging media institutions and developing patterns of media regulation. Any discussion of the Internet in Wales takes place within the discourse which surrounds new technology more generally. Historically, predictions about the capacity of such technologies for cultural transformation have commonly proved to be exaggerated. Nonetheless, from a range of government agencies, the media and the education system we hear of the liberating possibilities for new technology—eliminating drudgery, generating profit, providing fulfilment and enabling boundless instant communication (Lyon 1988; Webster 1995). Despite the absurdity of so many of the claims for new information and communications technologies, the Internet seems worth exploring because of the apparently vast and rapidly growing levels of usage. It is being taken seriously by all sorts of people—including practitioners in the media industries and radicals who see it as having tremendously progressive possibilities. In this paper we provide an empirical exploration of some of the claims which are made for the Internet. The Internet seems of particular relevance to Wales for two reasons: first, Wales is commonly seen as a victim of its geography and of the physical infrastructure which follows. Roads and railways link North Wales with Liverpool and Chester, Mid-Wales with Shrewsbury, and South Wales with Bristol and London, but make travel across Wales itself extremely difficult. Such infrastructure is thus seen as a hindrance to, even the cause of, the fragmented culture that is Wales. But whereas newspaper distribution follows road and rail routes (and the vast majority of newspapers consumed in Wales are produced in England), with the Internet such physical links become irrelevant. Second, ‘community’ has for long been seen as a particularly strong element of Welsh society. Clearly, communication is central to community, so any information or communications technology is potentially significant for the construction of community. The Internet has the potential to empower and develop local communities, and to link them with the world beyond—enabling, for example, decentralisation of decision making or the linking of the Welsh diaspora.
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Through 1996 we read the ‘Soc. Culture. Welsh’ newsgroup on the Internet, and the ‘Wales’ section of CompuServe’s ‘UK Forum’. In what follows we draw on these data; more specifically we draw on one week’s (beginning 30 August 1996) contributions to the former forum and four months’ (May, June, August and September 1996) to the latter. Before moving to the content of these fora we need to sound a note of caution. Like the discourse surrounding the Internet, data suggest that usage of the Internet is vast (Browning 1996; Mackay and Powell 1997). CompuServe, the UK’s largest access provider, has over 400,000 subscribers in the UK. Extrapolating from that we would expect about 20,000 subscribers in Wales—via this one access provider.1 Yet we found in the whole of one week only eight contributors to the Internet newsgroup on Wales; and in four months only eighty contributors to the CompuServe forum.2 These figures seem astonishingly low given the claims which are made for the Internet and the numbers in Wales with Internet access. With this serious caveat, we move to the data. First, it is quite clear that these fora do indeed link the Welsh diaspora. Contributions to both fora are made from a variety of locations across Wales, from England, from the USA and from elsewhere in the world. On the CompuServe ‘Wales’ forum, fifty-three of the eighty contributors are from a known location;3 of these fifty-three about a third are from each of Wales, England and the USA, as shown in Figure 12.1. By length of contribution, however, we find a predominance of the USA, as shown in Figure 12.2. In four months on the CompuServe forum there were fifty-four threads, or discussion topics. Each drew on a small number of the total number of contributors: thirty-three threads were contributed to by noone from Wales; thirty threads received no contribution from the USA. Regarding the Soc.Culture.Welsh forum on the Internet, we can say less;4 but it had less contributors than the CompuServe forum. Turning to content, in both fora we find reference to a repertoire of elements which, taken together, constitute a particular version of Welsh culture. Broadly, if unsurprisingly, we found a strong interest in matters pertaining to Wales. The title—and length—of each of the fifty-four threads is shown in Figure 12.3. The Internet newsgroup, by comparison, could be characterised as more political and less information-led. Unlike the CompuServe forum, it is not moderated. Within the version of Welsh culture to be found, the main concern is the language. Such a concern resembles the dominant emphasis of the nationalist movement (Philip 1975). Although commonly invoked as
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Figure 12.1 CompuServe Wales Forum: contributors by country of origin
Figure 12.2 CompuServe Wales Forum: length of contributors (percentage of characters) by country of origin
the defining characteristic of the Welsh nation, Welsh is spoken by only about 20 per cent of the population. In the fora the status of the language is very high. CompuServe’s forum had discussion topics on ‘Promoting Welsh’, ‘Learning Welsh’, ‘Welsh tutors’ and ‘Welsh language’; and five of seven contributions to the Internet newsgroup were about the language. CompuServe’s weekly online conference
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Figure 12.3 CompuServe Wales Forum: thread titles and lengths
sometimes took place entirely in Welsh. Below is an example from each forum of a contribution relating to the language.5
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A Would anyone be kind enough to provide me with the Welsh for the following two lines? 1. Spoken as though by an old man (native of Bangor) to his granddaughter: ‘And where do you come from?’ 2. Spoken as though by his grand-daughter, a Welsh-learner: ‘I come from wherever I am.’ Tentatively, I have: O ble rydych chi’n dod, te? B The second-person singular would be used when speaking to a grand-daughter, so a Bangor lad like me, aye, would say Ac o ble ti’n dwad, te?. Dwad is a dialectic form of dod. And Rydw i’n dod o ble bynnagrydw i. C You say that the grand-daughter is a Welsh learner. She’d probably say just what you’ve written, and it’s quite natural. I might say Dw i’n dwad o ble bynnag yr ydw i. I’m neither a grandfather nor a grand-daughter, though. (Soc.Culture. Welsh newsgroup)
A I’d be grateful if anyone on this thread could translate Pren Awyr for me. I come up with ‘air tree’, but: a. I’m only a plank, b. what the hell is an air tree? B It’s nothing major, it’s just a horse’s name. C ‘Wood Air’ is the literal translation—Air Wood. Pren can also be a stick. A Horse owners have strange naming conventions. (CompuServe ‘Wales’ forum) We found very little argument (in our sample week and months) that the language was worthless or even undesirable in any way—though such perspectives are argued quite commonly both in Wales and England. The fora also addressed other ‘traditional’ elements of Welsh culture. When the CompuServe forum opened, one of the first things to happen (on St David’s Day 1995) was a cyber-eisteddfod—with contributions of Welsh recipes and poems from around the globe. (Somewhat bizarrely, the prize, failing to take account of the global nature of entrants, was a meal for two in a pub in Carmarthen!) In a similar vein, ‘Celtic music’ featured on both fora. A I am reading Rev. Edward Jones’ book The Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards of 1794. In it, he makes mention of Welsh pipes. Does anybody have any more details? I assume they
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would be fairly simple, since the references are so old and since the more complicated developments especially seen in Uillean pipes are more recent. B I believe that the Welsh Folk Museum has three examples of the pibgorn, a sort of shepherd’s pipe. You may find that someone at the museum can help you—perhaps Dr Roy Saer. The address is… (Soc.Culture. Welsh newsgroup) A The American-Welsh have zeroed in on the Gymanfa Ganu tradition, the singing in harmony of traditional Welsh church hymns. This is a national meet, to be held in Utica, New York, this year, August 29 through September 1. I’ll get more specific details for a later posting. B What is unique about this American-Welsh love of harmony singing is that it is closely associated with the churches which have developed on this side. Whereas there is a tendency to keep these old stirring hymns going by the young in the pubs in Wales, here in America the tradition remains with the churches. More later. Hwyl. (CompuServe ‘Wales’ forum) Somewhat less traditionally, though certainly falling into the ambit of the popular stereotype, was discussion of ‘Welsh beer’—the best in Wales, where to get ‘Felinfoel’, and the reputation (or otherwise) of the Welsh (and Dylan Thomas) for drunkenness. So we find a discussion of Wales, or Welsh culture, which is distinctly recognisable, albeit with a particular ‘take’ on Wales. Tom Nairn (1977) has discussed the emergence and rise to pre-eminence of tartanry and the Highlands in representations of Scotland—which he attributes to the ‘kailyard culture’ of Scottish intellectual émigrés in London. It may be that the comparable emphasis of contributors to the fora reflects a similar process. Certainly we find clear indications of hiraeth—roughly translated as ‘homesickness’. Such hiraeth involves the invocation of shared blood or genes—often of a rather diluted nature—rather than d shared experience. Obviously, an interest in genealogy is widespread throughout the UK and especially in the ‘New World’ and in relation to countries which have experienced emigration. So the many contributions which relate to genealogy, re-establishing links, learning about long-lost friends or relatives, seeking other contacts, or expressing
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a desire to return, are far from a distinctly Welsh phenomenon; but they are ways in which the fora serve to link the Welsh diaspora. Anyone out there went to Aber. Coll. around 59–62 and remembers John Gree or Liz Allen (who married me!)? Would love to say hello! John. (CompuServe ‘Wales’ forum) I have been told my great-grandmother was Welsh. My greatgrandmother’s name was Jane Eagle Hill. Is ‘Eagle’ a common name in Wales? Does anyone know if it comes from a particular place there? Thanks. (CompuServe ‘Wales’ forum) In such contributions we find the fora fulfilling a rather similar role to the letter from afar in the provincial newspaper seeking news about long-lost (quite commonly members of the armed forces) friends or relations. On the fora, however, we find something rather more than this— perhaps the nearest that we found to Rheingold’s community which we discuss below. This mutual support is perhaps best understood by considering the quite frequent requests which imminent visitors to Wales make for information or advice. Such requests, like the one below, nearly always generated responses, which sometimes provided extended histories and far better advice than any tourist office would be likely to offer. A We’re going to be staying in the Tenby area over this coming weekend. We’ve not been to Wales before, and are hoping for a fairly relaxed and quiet weekend. Any ideas of what to see and do that is not too strenuous—although I have been told walking in the area is great. Thanks. B In the Wales section of either the UK forum or the UK travel forum there is a document that describes the south-west corner of Wales. There’s a couple of ideas: if you can’t think, describe what your interests are and I’ll fire off some suggestions. A Thanks for the info. I will have a look at the forum and see what I can find. Basically this weekend we want to be very lazy, try and
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catch up on some much needed sleep, and be looked after by the hotel staff! Very decadent, but at the moment that is what we need. Other than that we will try and get a few good walks in and perhaps a boat trip. Thanks again. B The weather should hold up—a boat trip along the coastline or over to Caldy would be nice. A good walk can be had from Tenby to Amroth on the coast path. If you do it at low tide, about 3/4 can be done along the beach to avoid a lot of climbing. The sand is good and firm so the walking is easy. There are regular buses (about hourly) from Amroth back to Tenby (wave as you go by). There are a few potteries around the area and a glass blowing centre at Kilgetty (five miles out). Tenby itself has some fine old buildings including a Tudor Merchant’s house, a fine old church and a bit left of a castle. There’s also a museum/art gallery and the lifeboat station to visit. You can pick up town trail guides from the Info centre which will take you round some impressive town walls. Best preserved castle nearby is at Manorbier. Also some good walking around there too. Alternatively head for Pembroke, which has a really impressive castle. Inland walks near Tenby can be pretty boring—oh look—a hedge—a cow—another hedge. Alternatively good forest trails in Slebech woods—follow the signs to BlackPool Mill near Canaston Bridge. There are some long inland walks which have historic interest such as the Knights (Templars) Way up from Amroth or the Landsker Borderlands Trail. A Thanks for all the information. The boat trip sounds great. Apparently dolphins are quite common around Solva. So I’ll have my eyes peeled. We’re looking forward to our first visit to Wales. Thanks again. (CompuServe ‘Wales’ forum) Finally, it is worth saying a little about what was absent from the fora. In our sample periods we found only one contribution with a focus on what might be called popular (as distinct from traditional) culture—a notice of car racing. We found no contributions on rugby—claimed by some to be that which most unites Wales, although not a part of the repertoire of traditional Welsh culture. The other notable silence—more on the CompuServe forum than the Internet newsgroup—was on questions of power and politics—in sharp contrast with provincial newspapers. On the rare occasions when questions of politics were raised (discussions of Welsh independence, the monarchy and poverty in Wales) we found contributors from the
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USA generally unsympathetic to anti-establishment (in the broad sense) arguments. Summarising the fora, we found that they were visited by very few people, and only by those with an interest in Wales. The subject and tenor of debates reflected traditional notions of Wales and Welsh culture. The style of interaction was inquisitive, and the responses supportive—in the spirit of electronic interaction that is commented on so frequently. It was personalised, and regular contributors got to ‘know’ one another. The content ranged from the banal to the serious and intellectual. More than this, we sensed something empowering or democratic about the equality of access and diversity of contributors (notwithstanding the bias of those with access to the Internet, for which see Mackay and Powell 1997) deriving from the open nature of the fora. Even in our very small sample we found contributors who were (or claimed to be) unemployed, a successful entrepreneur and an Oxford academic. Whether the group constituted a community seems doubtful. Community is a term with many meanings (Williams 1976), all of them positive and most of them about an unchanging, harmonious and mythical state. But whilst the binding together of communities by conflict and boundary maintenance is well documented (e.g. Cohen 1982), we found a reluctance to address questions of power and conflict in discussions on the fora. Howard Rheingold (1994), veteran of the 1960s Californian counter-culture, is one of the staunchest advocates of the capacity of the Internet to (re)establish community. For Rheingold, community and the public sphere have been declining, and the Internet offers possibilities for interactive, public discussion, a public space for communication and the development of civil society. The computer can be the new hearth, around which gossip is global. Whilst Rheingold’s represents an extreme variant, his is an argument which enjoys reasonably widespread support. For Welsh culture as represented on these fora, however, Rheingold’s analysis has to be seen as somewhat problematic. According to Rheingold there is no need to create new communities; we can simply choose between those that are available. Yet it could be that the vast choice of the Internet meets minority tastes but serves to fragment the nation, as niche markets and interests prove more popular than the more restricted offerings of traditional versions of Welsh culture. The high level of Internet access in Wales and the incredibly low level of contributions to these fora suggest that this may be the case. Alternatively it may be,
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inter alia, that those with an interest in traditional Welsh culture are under-represented among Internet users. Whatever the implications of the narrowcasting and interactivity of the Internet vis-à-vis traditional versions of Welsh culture, it seems to us that the fora can scarcely be seen as communities. A community, as commonly understood, involves a shared history, shared values and a mutual involvement in a complex web of relationships. This would seem to be an altogether more multifaceted and complex phenomenon than the textual exchange between people who have never been physically co-present. More than this, usage of the Internet cannot be seen as constituting an expansion of civil society unless its use ties in with civil institutions. We have no evidence of how these Welsh fora feed back to face-to-face interaction; but our study of Internet usage gives little support to the notion that it is sustaining democratic, inclusionary, progressive politics. In terms of policy, the Internet is clearly seen as something particularly important in Wales. Wales seems to be developing a publicly funded electronic infrastructure—which is quite remarkable given government policy for over a decade. We have experienced the peculiar situation of John Redwood (as Secretary of State for Wales) providing government funding for establishing local points-of-presence and coordinating a network in Wales—when private sector firms were already doing the same. Most recently the Welsh Office, the Welsh Development Agency, the Development Board for Rural Wales, the University of Wales, local authorities and the EU have been involved in initiatives (e.g. the Rural Wales Information Society Initiative) for EU, central government, local government and quango funding of a broadband network around Wales. The existence of such infrastructure is obviously no guarantee of any significance of the technology for Wales. However, it does mean a possible challenge to existing Welsh media forms and institutions (which we review elsewhere, see Mackay and Powell 1997). No-one doubts the cultural mission of the Welsh broadcasting institutions (Davies 1994); their focus has been on making television about Wales (Hannah 1990) and with playing a key role in the construction of the contemporary Welsh nation (Anderson 1983; Davies 1994). A global media technology such as the Internet offers a challenge to this relatively inward looking media, but also a challenge to the nation it has been so crucial in constructing. However, unlike other threats to terrestrial broadcasting, the Internet is being developed in Wales with
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the close involvement of existing media organisations. In the same way as BBC radio took over television when it arrived, we may see the Internet falling into the ambit of existing media organisations and elites. Such local, Welsh involvement or control could be significant for the ways in which the new media unite or construct the Welsh nation and for possibilities for the emergence of a democratising, participatory media. Others, of course, argue that it is precisely such local, Welsh, control which will save Wales from the homogenising grip of the global (or US) culture industries and conglomerates. According to such a position, the dangers lie with CableTel, Sky and Murdoch; and salvation with HTV, BBC Wales, S4C and the Western Mail. One should note, however, that there are profound limits to the globalisation or homogenisation of media output (Morley and Robins 1995)—despite the economic or deregulatory pressures which push in such a direction (e.g. the Broadcasting Act 1996). Rather than culture being ‘read off’ from the political economy of the media, what we find is a less determined relationship. At the same time as the growth of cable and satellite television and the other elements of globalisation and homogenisation, we find the opposite pressure: the reassertion of cultural distinctiveness, the strengthening of local cultural identities (Thompson 1997). The Welsh language is a perfect example: it has experienced a remarkable revival in recent years, and now enjoys a level of legislative support unprecedented since the onset of the UK; numbers of speakers are rising fast. The history of the media in Wales shows us that the length of time for Welsh to become established has shortened with each new media technology: there was nearly fifty years of radio broadcasting in Wales before the establishment of the Welsh language channel Radio Cymru; from the time of significant television ownership to Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C) was about twenty years; papurau bro, community broadsheets which depend on desktop publishing technology, have taken off mainly in the Welsh-speaking sector; and our study of the Internet shows that it has been using the Welsh language extensively from the outset (although not without resistance: see Atkinson and Powell 1996). In Wales there are many institutions which work with the common boundary of the nation—universities, government bodies, quangos and others. All of these have policies of equality in relation to the language; web pages, for example, have from the outset been bilingual. Indeed, translation software is now available which seems to work with 95 per cent accuracy, making language of origination much less significant and providing a huge boost to
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languages other than English. More than this, the Internet works to make languages such as Welsh more visible, whereas with the onset of national, British, newspapers Welsh became less used and noticed. Thus a global technology can contribute to a strengthening of cultural distinctiveness; and, despite the placelessness of the Internet, it can serve to reinforce place. In conclusion, we have argued that the technology needs to be kept in perspective. The impact and outcome of a new media technology depends on matters relating to the global culture and communications industries and their regulation but also, crucially, on their audiences or users. Despite the dramatic claims for the cultural significance of the Internet, the ways in which it is used are little researched. We would like to see further research on users; and, given our interest in Wales, on the role of the Internet in the construction of national identities. More than this, it would be interesting to go beyond an analysis of texts to see how Internet usage is embedded in everyday practices in households: how the Internet is being domesticated as it enters the homes and how it, in turn, transforms the domestic routines in those households where it is used. NOTES 1 Though this extrapolation is problematic, since Internet users, as well as younger and two-thirds male, are more affluent than average, which means they are likely to be under-represented in Wales. 2 It is interesting that the CompuServe forum has more contributors and contributions, despite its more restricted access. Regrettably, we have no data on ‘lurkers’—those who read but do not post on the fora. 3 By a ‘known location’ we mean that the location of the contributor was revealed in their contribution, or the contributor was listed in the CompuServe subscriber directory. 4 Most of our quantitative analysis is of the CompuServe newsgroup, because with the Internet forum one knows nothing about the location of a contributor, unless this is revealed in their contribution. Also, it is hard to count the length of contributions because, in varying ways, contributions include the original posting. 5 In citing these we would argue that the copyright holder is not suffering any loss.
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Chapter 13 The Internet, other ‘nets’ and healthcare1 Justin Keen, Brian Ferguson and James Mason
INTRODUCTION On the face of it, there should be many fruitful applications of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in healthcare. Healthcare is an information-intensive activity, which depends crucially on communication between professionals and patients, and health services are characterised by rapid uptake of a wide range of new technologies. Yet ICTs have made relatively little impression in healthcare in the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) to date (Keen 1994) and a number of major ICT initiatives have experienced serious problems (Committee of Public Accounts 1993; National Audit Office 1996). Experience in other countries suggests that experience in the UK is mirrored elsewhere (US Congress OTA 1995). Now, though, the arrival of the Internet and other large-scale networks brings new predictions that the benefits of ICTs in healthcare will—finally—be realised. This chapter examines the opportunities and problems associated with adopting ICT networks in the UK NHS. To focus the analysis, the paper considers the practical implications of networking in primary care— where the greatest volume of healthcare is provided—and adopts an economic perspective to analyse current developments. General Practitioners (GPs) are currently having to make decisions about linking their practices to networks, and the central role of GPs in healthcare means that the success of networks will stand or fall on the decisions they take. So this paper considers a situation where networks are not yet available, and people have to make decisions about designing and joining them.
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The next section provides some contextual background about the NHS. The following section considers the key relationships that GPs have with patients and other actors, and identifies some of the potential costs and benefits to GPs of joining networks. The chapter then moves to a different perspective, and examines the benefits that networks may bring to GPs and other users, drawing on the network economics literature. The final section outlines the main economic issues that will influence the course of developments in the NHS over the next few years. CONTEXT The UK NHS has undergone major structural reform during the 1990s. The key feature of the current arrangements is the separation of the purchasing and provision of healthcare. District Health Authorities purchase services, and on the provider side community and hospital Trusts have been created. The role of GP practices is more ambiguous: on the one hand they are key providers of health services, but larger practices have the option of becoming fundholders, which allows them to purchase a limited range of services such as minor surgical procedures. Increasingly, groups of GP practices in a locality are forming alliances with DHAs to coordinate the purchasing of services (Audit Commission 1995a; Mays and Dixon 1996). There are thus different models of purchasing emerging. The main point for this paper is that there are new information flows in and around general practice associated with both purchasing and provision of care. The new information flows associated with the structural reforms overlay the continuing, complex flows that characterise healthcare delivery and management. Taken together these flows now include: 1 Information provided by patients about their problems during a consultation, and advice and instructions from professionals to patients—much of this information goes nowhere near a computer and is recorded only in highly summarised form (a ‘one-to-one’ exchange); 2 A subset of the information generated in a consultation, which involves sending a message to another provider of health services. Historically this has been captured in the writing of prescriptions, or in referral letters or telephone calls to other professionals (one-toone);
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3 Administrative information, which is generally aggregated up from individual contacts, and both used by general practices themselves and sent to local purchasers; and information from providers about such variables as waiting times and treatment prices, which are of interest to purchasers. This now includes the information required to negotiate and monitor contracts (‘one-to-some’); 4 Information about effective and cost-effective treatments, collated by government-funded centres and available on paper or via the Internet (‘one-to-many’); 5 Information in various forms about changes in drug licensing, guidelines from the Department of Health, Royal Colleges, etc. (one-to-many); 6 The role of many charities and pressure groups, where patients and others can exchange information about specific conditions, sometimes with support from health professionals and sometimes independent of them; and newspapers and magazines now carry substantial quantities of information and advice (‘some-to-some’ or ‘some-to-many’). These categories are quite different from one another in both form and content, but they define the role of the GP in relation to patients and others. Currently, almost all of it is exchanged orally or on paper. The first is one-to-one communication (the designation is pragmatic, designed to highlight important issues in the context of this article). These data are private (in economist’s terms a private good), relating to individual patients. Most clinical information will never leave the practice, and can be recorded in traditional medical notes or in computers in the consulting room. One-to-some information is generated within a particular practice or by a Trust, and then sent on to a specific but limited number of other parties. Administrative information, including that required to negotiate and monitor contracts, will typically need to travel small distances, between local district purchasers and GPs. One-to-many information is collated in a single place and distributed widely. For example, some performance data are published annually by the Department of Health, and information about effective treatments is analysed and distributed by the NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination in York. The last set of examples in the list above are described as some-tosome and some-to-many. These are important types of information exchange, and are one of the most important routes whereby members of the public can obtain information about appropriate treatments, and in
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some cases challenge their GPs. They are not, however, the focus of this paper. The information in and around GP practices is a mix of private and public goods. Information about individual patients is a private good, and in general there is no reason to make it public (the main exception is in cases of outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases, where it is necessary to trace people who might be at risk of infection). In contrast, information that does not relate to individual patients and which may be of general use, such as research evidence about cost-effective treatments, is a public good. The status of much information generated and retained within the NHS is less clear, falling somewhere between the two examples, and whether it should be public or private is a moot point. At present, most is treated as private by professionals and managers. The distinction is important because the role of ICTs is likely to be different for public and private information. One might guess that networks must be valuable for one or more of the listed types of information, and that ICT networks linking GP practices to other purchasers and providers would be seized upon. Yet as hinted in the introduction above, the NHS has had some difficult experiences with ICTs (see particularly Audit Commission 1995b; National Audit Office 1996). Most GP practices now have computers, but many of these are several years old, and currently many have only very basic links to external networks, which allow only the exchange of limited administrative data. Moreover, recent systematic reviews of general practice systems (Sullivan and Mitchell 1995) and of systems designed to support clinical decision making in a variety of clinical settings (Johnston et al. 1994) found only limited evidence of positive changes associated with their introduction. The situation appears to be no better in NHS hospitals (Lock 1996), and international evidence (US Congress OTA 1995) suggests that the UK’s experience is fairly typical. This provides a sombre backdrop to any discussion of the potential of ICTs in primary care. In spite of these problems, the NHS Information Management and Technology Strategy (NHSME 1992) proposes the creation of major networks linking all parts of the NHS. The Strategy has both local and central elements—which can be likened to the peripheral nerves and spinal cord. At local level there are initiatives to support the linkage of GP practices to District Health Authorities and to local hospital and community services. These are still in their early stages, and it will be some years before links that can handle large volumes of data on local networks are generally available. The key central network is NHSnet,
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which is an NHS-wide dedicated network service, currently provided under contract by BT Syntegra. The NHS Executive envisages that NHSnet will carry both administrative and clinical data between NHS sites, and believes that it will reduce the administrative costs of the current ‘paperchase’. It is suggested that NHSnet will bring benefits to patient care, although the basis for these beliefs is at best unclear. The advent of NHSnet and local networks has raised a number of fundamental issues, not least the political aspects of a large-scale network. On the one hand, the NHS Executive has stated that the NHSnet will save the NHS £100 million per annum on existing systems (evidence to Public Accounts Committee, 8 May 1996). On the other hand, the British Medical Association has advised its members not to use the network, partly on the grounds that the network will not be secure, and patient data will therefore not be secure. The Data Protection Registrar (1996) has suggested that work on the NHSnet should stop until security and confidentiality issues are resolved. These national discussions hint at a broader political agenda of ownership and regulation of data lurking beneath the surface. Whether GPs will or should invest in new systems and join networks begs a number of economic questions. The questions can be listed as follows: • What are the costs and benefits of systems to support one-to-one communication within GP surgeries? • What are the costs and benefits of joining local networks (one-to-one and one-to-some)? • What are the costs and benefits of joining national networks (which might support one-to-one, some or many)? • Which national network—if any—should a GP join; for example the NHSnet or the Internet? The next two sections outline some of the key economic issues that GPs should consider in addressing these questions.
PRINCIPALS AND AGENTS One way of addressing these questions is to assess the situation from the perspective of a GP. In the absence of compelling empirical evidence, the best way of doing this is to develop a theoretical analysis. One of the
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main theoretical strands in economics focuses on the relationships between economic actors, and on the costs of maintaining relationships. Principal-agent theory Consider a single consultation between GP and patient. This is a private, one-to-one relationship. The patient (principal) and the GP (agent) both want the patient’s problems resolved, but whereas the patient is generally only interested in their illness, the GP has a range of other concerns, which includes having at least some leisure time, and ensuring the financial viability of the practice. The interests of the two diverge, not for any pejorative reason but simply because they have different—though overlapping—objectives (see Mooney and Ryan 1993). Limiting the divergence between the two incurs costs and tends to reduce efficiency (Myerson 1979). A fundamental problem is that the principal cannot know whether the agents are acting in their best interests, since they lack information about the best course of action that the agent might take—in healthcare, the patient often does not know what treatment is best for them. In order for the consultation to achieve the optimal outcome, it is necessary for both parties to take time to exchange information, and hence incur time and other costs. For example, any good GP will explain the reasons behind any advice she gives—but this takes more time than simply writing a prescription. In principle, ICTs might be used to reduce the costs of a consultation, for example by helping the GP to write prescriptions or referral letters more quickly, or alternatively improve decision making through easy access to information about appropriate treatments. However, Sullivan and Mitchell’s (1995) review suggests that there is little positive evidence for this type of effect, at least for stand-alone systems. The number of good studies is small and more might usefully be undertaken, not least because there is little useful evidence about costs. But in relation to the first question listed above, about one-to-one consultations, the answer seems to be that costs outweigh benefits for stand-alone systems in GP surgeries. A more complex model The picture changes if one moves on to consider a GP providing care to a population of patients, and providing that care in conjunction with other professionals. This more complex picture moves us away from a
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simple bilateral (GP-patient) view of the problem to a more complex model involving different types of relationship. (Propper (1995) has discussed ‘overlapping principal-agent relationships’ in healthcare. Economists continue to debate the appropriate ways of modelling these relationships; see for example Pitelis 1993.) Some of these multiple relationships are obvious, such as those between GPs, patients and hospital doctors. Others are less obvious, but equally important. Matthews (1991), discussing professional ethics, points out that the obligations of professionals to their clients (or patients) have in practice to be balanced against their obligations to society as a whole: The professional ethic is thus not just a matter of the professional being trustworthy in the service of his client. The client engages the professional in the understanding that society has placed the professional in a quasi-judicial capacity, by virtue of supposed skill and probity, and that this may sometimes be in conflict with service to the interest of the client. (Matthews 1991:741) GPs can, then, usefully be conceived as being at the centre of a complex web of relationships, sometimes acting as agents, sometimes as principals. Thus differing relationships, embodying a variety of incentives, will be manifest when dealing with patients, other providers, district purchasers, colleagues, professional bodies and society in general. These relationships have been changing over time—they are dynamic as well as complex. For example, groups of patients with particular problems have become more informed consumers over time, and so to some extent have reduced the information asymmetries with GPs and with other healthcare professionals. The internal market and other policy changes in the last few years can be interpreted as deliberate attempts to influence agency costs and/or information asymmetries. Broadly speaking, new policies have tended to increase agency costs, and sought inter alia to reduce information asymmetries. ICTs will therefore be just one of many factors that have the potential to affect key relationships in the management and delivery of healthcare. The possible costs and benefits of ICTs in this complex environment are perhaps best understood by imagining a local network, of the kind envisaged by current policies—that is, the network links all GP practices in a locality to the District purchaser and to selected services in local hospitals, including pathology, radiology and outpatients. Some
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Table 13.1 Main costs and benefits of ICTs for selected actors in joining a local network
of the costs and benefits are listed in Table 13.1. The network has the potential to change relationships in time and space, for example by speeding up the reporting of the results of pathology tests or X-rays to GPs (note that this will only be useful if the tests are worth doing in the first place—otherwise ICTs will only speed up unnecessary services). If the network was extended to include links to local pharmacies for the exchange of prescription information, and to community-based services so that GPs might more easily send messages to nurses and other professionals, then they might be handling most of the inter-site information that GPs are interested in. So in terms of the second question posed at the end of the previous section, might GPs only really need local networks? The question cannot be answered easily, since the overlapping relationships mean that costs and benefits will be distributed between different actors across the network. Moreover, the agency framework suggests that as the number of users increases, their interests will increasingly diverge, and so the costs of aligning interests will increase. So there may come a point where the network fails to accommodate the various interests, and users may leave the network and/or particular groups promote their own ends at the expense of other users. In order to explore the question further, a different line of argument is required, which identifies the economic effects of ICT networks.
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THE ECONOMICS OF INFORMATION NETWORKS This section changes perspective, from the GP’s decision to the properties of networks that they may wish to join. It starts with economic arguments which broadly point to positive reasons for adopting ICTs, and then goes on to considers reasons why adoption might be problematic. There are substantial literatures on the economics of information and on network organisation, which offer a means of analysing the potential for different forms of organisation of healthcare.2 Antonelli (1992) presents an excellent overview of the application of economic thinking to communications networks. In overview, networks are introduced to improve information flows; that is, to promote efficiency at various levels. However, potential users and system providers (as individuals and groups) hold a complex array of values and face different incentives; comprehending their preferences is essential for implementing change. In general, organisation structures and information flows (as well as ICTs themselves) can usefully be conceived as networks, and the networks may exhibit one or more of the following characteristics: • Externalities, both positive and negative; • Economies of scale, in both building and running a network; • Economies of scope, given that networks can generally carry different types of data. Externalities Externalities can be thought of as ‘spillover’ effects. In the previous section it was suggested that the introduction of a local network might bring benefits to GPs, who would be paying to join the network. But the benefits may also spill over to patients, who have not paid for the network, and who do not use it themselves. A number of network externalities can be described.3 For example, a new participant benefits all existing participants by providing additional resources and a greater audience but imposes the cost of increasing network activity and (marginally) slowing interaction. In addition, networks with diverse functions impose costs if participants cannot follow their own interests while filtering out others’. In general practice, we would expect marginal social benefit to exceed private benefit because of both improved decision making from
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timely information and greater efficiency in providing data to patients and purchasers. The externality issue is central to the discussion of ICTs and networks, the functioning of markets in information and the nature of regulation required. Not only will markets perform poorly in the presence of significant externalities: the co-ordination of decision-making of economic agents requires augmented signalling devices such as information exchange based on ex ante co-operation among firms which complement the price system. (Antonelli 1992) The same author goes on to note that the significant role played by ‘cooperative competition’ is one of the most striking organisational features of telecommunications networks. Clear analogies can be drawn with ICTs in healthcare, in which a balance has to be struck between competitive pressures (intended to enhance aspects of dynamic efficiency such as the rate of innovation) and cooperative behaviour (to ensure compatibility and coordination). Networks will tend by their nature to generate externalities in any circumstance where information can be shared. There are two distinct effects, due to information and to the network itself, both of which will be positive up to some limit, defined by capacity and other factors (see Ferguson and Keen 1996). The result is that there are significant potential social benefits of networks where information produced by one party can be used by several others. However, it should also be noted that ICT networks will tend to ‘internalise’ externalities, and may restrict them to network users. This will be efficient if all potential beneficiaries have access, and may be inefficient if they do not. Externalities will affect the distribution of costs and benefits across a network. Thus a network link between a GP and a local hospital outpatient department may enable the GP to make appointments, and the hospital to manage its outpatient booking system, more easily; but benefits also flow to patients, if they are seen more quickly than would otherwise be the case. It is possible that groups of GPs could insist that hospitals supply relevant contractual information on a network, directly reducing their search costs and at the same time conferring a further consumption externality on Health Authority purchasers. Of course, whether or not these benefits actually accrue is an empirical question. It should not be assumed that they are inevitable.
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Economies of scope and scale Turning to economies of scope and scale, Besanko and colleagues (1996) provide useful definitions. Economies of scale in production processes occur when, over a range of output, average cost declines as output increases. Economies of scope exist if the firm can expand the variety of goods or services using current production processes at less than the cost of introducing a new plant—or in the case of ICTs if the same network can be used for several different types of message, so avoiding having to introduce new capacity. An ICT is a kind of production process with an inherent capacity (bandwidth) to provide a commodity (information). For ICTs, once the costs of installing a network have been incurred, the marginal costs of adding users to the system should be considerably lower than the average cost (although at some threshold more capacity will be required before the range can be extended), so economies of scale will be achieved. As Lamberton (1992) points out, ‘Because the cost of information is independent of the scale on which it is used, in an information-intensive economy, information creates pervasive economies of scale’. Economies of scope are likely, given that a variety of data can be stored and accessed on the same network. If network capacity is not a problem, then the cost of using a network will reduce as the number of users increases, and benefits will accrue to both the GP joining the network and existing users, as costs for both fall. The literature suggests that the marginal costs of using a network will tend to reduce, perhaps towards zero with increasing network size. It is also possible, though, to imagine a different scenario, not least because scope is correlated with scale, and each new use invariably places much greater demands on network resources. For example, future requirements in healthcare may include transfer of medical imaging data and realtime audio-visual conferencing (in addition to the uses listed earlier). In this case it may be that there is an upper limit to the size of the network and the number of users that promote efficiency. Up to this point, there would appear to be arguments in favour of GPs joining networks. Networks may confer positive externalities on various parties, and they may bring economies of scope and scale to GPs and others. But as we have suggested, there are also reasons to believe that there may be problems. There are a number of parameters which may influence GPs’ judgements on this question, including the regulatory
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environment, compatibility, data ownership, coordination problems and the question of who will pay for the new GP systems and the networks. Regulation Whether a network is used to store and disseminate information about contracts, effectiveness or individual patient care, there will need to be regulation, just as other communications technologies require regulation (put another way, the presence of public good information and externalities is a reason to consider regulation). In practice the regulatory role for ICTs in healthcare is unclear, and can perhaps best be described as ensuring that the right information is made available to and reaches the right people. For example, do GPs receive nationally available cost-effectiveness information? Do patients have access to performance information about GPs? The regime selected will depend on the type of network selected and the information the network carries. An example highlights some of the issues involved here. The regulatory role would necessarily involve ensuring that sufficient checks were in place to minimise abuse of sensitive data. Interestingly, the Department of Health has announced that the NHS will undertake a pilot study to develop a new system for safeguarding the confidentiality of patient information (NHS Executive 1996). The study explores the feasibility of introducing encryption services for sensitive information passed over the NHSnet. Encryption enables information to be hidden from all except those who hold an authorised key to it, usually only the sender and intended recipient. The encryption issue raises several important economic questions. First, there is a prior cost-effectiveness issue as to whether encryption is the least-cost means of achieving the desired outcome (broadly, protecting patient information). Second, if encryption is the best means of doing so, there are interesting cost questions around which types of information are covered; and the extent to which compatibility across different computer systems can be achieved. This is a significant issue given an initial estimate that encryption could cost up to £20 million of taxpayers’ money. Third, there are regulatory questions such as ensuring that encryption is actually carried out effectively where appropriate; and ensuring that the NHS does not get ‘locked in’ to a single supplier of encryption services. Careful piloting is necessary before more widespread implementation of NHS-wide encryption.
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Compatibility and complementary products Compatibility across software packages is central to a discussion of network externalities. More and more users can share files, which leads to users being able to share tips, then to generate more ideas for refining software, and so on. And by creating a critical mass of users of a particular software package, it becomes profitable for incumbent or new producers to offer complementary products for that package. These external benefits may be significant in cases where software can be acquired free, as is the case with several products within the NHS. These arguments may influence the behaviour of GPs if they are provided with free software—or hardware—that guarantees easy access to services they value. Gandal (1994) highlights the importance of compatibility in an investigation of network externalities in the market for computer spreadsheets. Analysis showed that if two spreadsheet packages were broadly comparable in terms of product features, then the package which was compatible with the ‘industry standard’ (Lotus 1–2–3 between 1986–91) would command a significantly higher price. The analysis indeed implied that a Lotus-incompatible spreadsheet priced at $100 would have sold for approximately $300 had it been Lotuscompatible. This, argued Gandal, revealed strong evidence of network externalities in this specific example of computer software. Will similar externalities appear in healthcare through specific ‘add-on’ packages which are compatible with the industry-standard databases on, for example, clinical effectiveness?
Data ownership Managers at different levels are required to collate certain data for central returns, and would like data to support the process of contracting, to compare services and to monitor performance. The costs of providing data in a market environment may greatly outweigh the benefits, so legal minimums often become the implicit standard. The NHS reforms have not addressed the key issue of data ownership: for historical reasons the data belong to the doctor even though they concern the use of resources provided by public funds. This issue can only be addressed by relicensing medicine (Mason 1996). The Framework for Information Systems approach (NHSME/DH 1990) and
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the later Information Management and Technology Strategy (NHSME 1992) have, to date, failed to address ownership issues. The question of data ownership has important wider implications. There are questions about the extent to which information can or should be disseminated. For example, NHS organisations (the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and the Cochrane Collaboration) have been set up mainly to support organisations involved in the purchasing and provision of healthcare, by assembling and disseminating researchbased evidence on effective treatments. Should the same information be available to patients and carers, perhaps in their own homes? It is possible to view these organisations as ‘middlemen’ in the analysis and dissemination of clinical information—who should they be targeting with their wares? Contrary to the predictions of some commentators, the existence of networks seems likely to help middlemen thrive. Instead of competing on the basis of ‘inside information’, those agents will compete by adding value in other ways: for example, by providing packages which combine information in ways which are helpful to users (The Economist, 2 March 1996). Coordination The discussion of externalities and economies of scope and scale pointed to the need for coordination of the different actors involved in implementing ICTs if network-related benefits are to be achieved. However, even for fairly simple local networks there are many different actors whose actions need to be coordinated, including GPs, Health Authorities, staff in different departments in hospitals, and the suppliers of the network and of the different systems in each location. The coordination problem has a number of aspects, including the need to agree data and technical standards, and some means of agreeing who pays for the network. In essence, though, the problem is political: how to obtain agreement and action by so many different actors with different values and objectives? As networking is considered in localities throughout the UK, the success or otherwise of attempts to achieve the necessary coordination will become clear. Who pays? In the last few years the NHS Executive has subsidised the purchase of computers by GPs, an obvious strategy for encouraging uptake, in that it helps to change GPs’ assessment of the balance of costs and benefits
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of systems. If the Executive perceives that there are problems persuading GPs to join local networks or NHSnet, the Executive may provide further subsidies to upgrade systems and link to NHSnet. For certain types of network, the Executive might also consider whether it should subsidise patient or ‘interest-group’ access to information on (for example) cost-effective treatments. Each of these issues will affect the balance of costs and benefits for GPs of joining a network. Now that the issues have been laid out, it is time to consider the decisions that GPs must make. THE GP’S DILEMMA Which network should GPs join? In this section we return to the four questions posed earlier. First, there are arguments in favour of networks. From the vantage point of a GP, networks might plausibly bring benefits if they convey private (one-to-one) information about individual patients, as long as they result in cheaper and/or higherquality services, as a result of substitution of one technology (paper or telephone) by another (ICTs). If networks are used for public information such as local waiting times or cost-effective treatments, or a mix of private and public information, benefits may accrue in two ways: • Positive information and network externalities flowing from joint use of a network by many GPs; • Economies of scope and scale which mean the marginal costs of network use tend to zero. There are, then, good theoretical reasons to believe that some form of network will be worth joining. However, additional arguments were presented that suggested that the costs of networks might be higher than at first appears, so that costs might outweigh benefits and investments are not warranted. Since the costs and benefits for GPs cannot currently be quantified, it is not possible to say with any confidence which, if any, network GPs should join. It is possible, though, to outline qualitative arguments that GPs might consider in arriving at a decision. The question of investment in stand-alone systems is interesting theoretically, but as most practices now have systems it will not be considered further here. There are therefore two key questions: should GPs join a local or a national network? And if a national network, which one?
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Local versus national networks For the purposes of discussion it is assumed that all candidate networks are secure (admittedly a major assumption), so that the key issue is the optimal size of the network. There would appear to be three important lines of argument. First, the discussion of economies of scope and scale suggested that marginal costs may not tend asymptotically to zero, but rise at some point as network capacity is reached. The optimal size would be at the point where the economies are greatest. It also seems likely that positive externalities will accrue to GPs up to some limit, and then flatten off or decline, if only because the capacity of GPs to process information is limited. Second, as the number of different types of network user increases, the greater the number of different interests it will be expected to meet. There will come a point where the interests of users will diverge to a degree where the network cannot meet all of their needs (diseconomies of scope set in), and one or more groups will leave the network. Third, GPs will have to make investments in new systems if they are to join any network, and will moreover have to coordinate their decisions—all GPs in a locality need to agree to join a single network. Most GPs are currently ‘locked in’ to their stand-alone systems, and will need incentives to acquire new ones. There are a number of issues here, which there is not space to consider, but the main point is that local and national networks will involve different investment costs, different requirements for compatibility and different orders of effort in the coordination of decisions. It is not clear whether these three arguments favour a local or a national network. That is, there seems to be no way of deciding whether a network carrying local private information will be more efficient than a larger network carrying both private and public information—or the Internet used for access to public information alone. However, it is a reasonable working hypothesis that local networks will handle the great bulk of administrative and clinical data, and will provide most of what GPs need. Information on cost-effective treatments, and communications from Royal Colleges and others can if necessary be handled by post (as at present), so the local network option does not exclude access to this important information.
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NHSnet versus Internet The three arguments used in the local-national debate also apply to the NHSnet-Internet debate, and with the same result: it is difficult to decide which is the best option. Key issues such as network security and confidentiality remain unresolved for both options. One way in which the differences between the two can be delineated is as a choice between a good that is voluntary (Internet) and one where there is a degree of coercion to join (NHSnet). Briefly, the arguments in favour of the Internet include: • It removes the NHSE as the network regulator, which may be attractive politically to GPs and means that GPs may avoid the costs of regulation; • GPs can create their own space (or commercial providers supply it) and select the services they want access to. But there are arguments against the Internet, perhaps the most important being a consequence of the fact that use would be voluntary. There will be a coordination problem, because a critical mass of GP users will be needed before it is worthwhile for any individual to participate. There are also arguments for and against NHSnet. The arguments in favour include:
• It might be used to solve the coordination problem associated with the Internet, since the NHSE has taken responsibility for providing it; • The NHSE can reward usage, including GP provision of information about their activities, and thereby strengthen accountability to the Department of Health. The arguments against include: • The interests of GPs, NHS managers and NHSE differ substantially, so the costs of designing a system to satisfy all of them may be high; • There are unresolved questions about the role and costs of a network regulator; • Patient data security and confidentiality are not (yet) guaranteed.
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So, in providing a means of solving a coordination problem, NHSnet introduces new problems, some stemming from the more coercive approach adopted by NHSE to date. GPs are certainly independently minded enough to resist the approaches of NHSE if they decide to do so. It is difficult to decide which network represents the best option for GPs. The uncertainty associated with the decision will be an additional source of inertia. But a decision must surely come. Increasingly it appears that there will be competition between NHSnet, the Internet and other networks. The Internet will affect the NHS debate by offering a real alternative. At the very least this will help to limit the charges made to GPs for the use of any network. POLICY IMPLICATIONS The discussion presented in this paper highlights the complexity of this area of policy making. At present it appears that the case for building NHSnet is not watertight—though this is not to say that it will not prove to be cost-effective in practice. If the NHSE makes the right decisions, it can encourage networks that will yield substantial benefits to GPs— and hopefully also to patients and to other parties. Otherwise, the Internet—with suitable solutions to problems of security and confidentiality—may provide a low-cost alternative for some activities. The absence of empirical data about the costs and benefits of ICTs in healthcare will be a real handicap in deciding which network to support. If GPs are to make good decisions about the next generation of ICTs in primary care, they need good information on which to base them. This chapter has hinted at the substantial research agenda for the next few years, ranging from the costs and benefits of systems on GPs’ desks to the economies that actually accrue from adoption of different types of network. Now is the time to address the agenda, to help GPs to resolve their dilemma. NOTES 1 We are grateful to Bronwyn Croxson for her perceptive discussion, and to other participants for their comments on an earlier version of this paper at the Health Economists’ Study Group at Brunel University in July 1996. 2 An excellent bibliography of network economics can be found at: http:// edgar.stern.nyu.edu/networks/biblio.html.
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3 Antonelli lists four types of externality: technical, pecuniary, adoption and consumption.
234
Glossary
ATM avatar
bandwidth baud
bit BITNET browser
byte
Asynchronous Transfer Mode: a probable successor to TCP/IP. One’s representation in a virtual reality. If one is Krishna, one’s avatar is likely to be blue and beautiful—but one may have many avatars for different purposes. The amount of data which can be delivered through a given channel. Measured in bits per second. Common but erroneous synonym for ‘bits per second’. Actually means ‘marks per second’: for example pressing a telephone keypad produces one ‘mark’, but this can have any of sixteen values (each of which is a two-tone chord), and so represents four bits. So in this case, one button per second=one baud=four bits per second. Not a lot of people know that. Binary digiT: the smallest unit of information, representing a yes/no or one/zero value. See byte. The Because It’s Time NETwork; a proprietary network protocol for connecting IBM mainframe computers. A programme which allows you interactively to explore a web of interconnected documents; relates as a client to the Web’s server computers. Eight bits: the standard ‘chunk’ of digital information. That full stop is represented in most computers by the eight-bit byte 00101110. In other contexts this byte might represent the decimal number forty-six, or a sort of limegreen colour in a low-resolution graphic.
236 GLOSSARY
client co-ax
DNS
document domain name
.uk .org .poptel WWW DVD
e-mail fibre
FIDO
In this context, a computer programme which asks a server for…stuff. Co-axial cable has one conductor (metal wire) forming a cylinder surrounding the other. This allows it to carry much higher-frequency signals than a ‘twisted-pair’ cable—and hence more data. The Domain Name System: the process by which the names of computers are translated into the IP numbers actually used to route packets of data. Each ISP maintains a table translating common domain names; if it doesn’t know, it knows a computer which knows a computer which does know. Used on the Web to mean any data which make sense to a suitable human: not just text, but sounds and movies. The nearly-humanly-readable ‘address’ of a computer on the internet. This paper exists on the computer whose domain name is www.poptel.org.uk; reading from the righthand end, this is: in the ‘uk’ (United Kingdom) top-level domain; in the ‘org’ (non-profit) sub-domain; in the ‘poptel’ (organisation name) subdomain of that; the local (within poptel) name of the computer (see URL). Digital Video Disk: the same shape and fundamental technology as a CD-ROM, but capable of storing up to two hours of MPEG2 moving pictures. Electronic mail: the exchange of written messages by sending computer documents over telephone lines and other networks. Fibre-optic cables convey data coded in pulses of (laser) light, which are trapped inside a thread of very special glass which is notoriously thinner than a human hair. A ‘store-and-forward’ network based on cheap personal computers. These store messages,
GLOSSARY 237
ftp
gigagopher
Hertz HTML
http
HyperText
IP IP number
usually until night-time, and then dial a neighbouring computer to exchange ‘what’s new’. Selected computers dial ‘hosts’ which have full internet connections to exchange messages with the rest of the net. File Transfer Protocol: a means of allowing one computer connected to the Internet to explore (a selection of) the files of another, to retrieve them and to send files to that remote computer. Prefix meaning ‘thousand million’ (see kilo-). A protocol for building a global catalogue of information held on computers which are connected the Internet. ‘Gopherspace’ is a deeply nested tree of tables of contents for electronic documents. Cycles/events per second. HyperText Mark-up Language: the coding system which defines the appearance and functionality of Web documents, thus:
<STRONG>HTML HyperText. Mark-up Language: the coding system which defines the appearance and functionality of Web Web documents. HyperText Transfer Protocol: the protocol under which your Web browser requests documents from a server. The documents or file contents may be HTML, or something else. ‘http’ is used as a protocol prefix in URLs. Documents with the addition of ‘hot links’— words or pictures which you can click on (or otherwise activate, if you hate mice) to go to another document or to another place in the same document. See TCP/IP. The ‘actual’ address of a computer on the internet. The domain name www.poptel.org.uk is mapped by a magical process to the IP number (at the time of writing) 193.82.214.232.
238 GLOSSARY
ISDN ISP
ITU kilo-
mainframe megaMPEG petapixel protocol
protocol prefix
resolution server TCP/IP
More than one domain name may map to the same IP number. Integrated Services Digital Network: two 64 bit-per-second ‘channels’ over existing twistedpair telephone cables. Internet Service Provider; the owner of a computer which is directly connected to the Internet and to modems which home users can dial into. International Telecommunications Union. Prefix meaning ‘thousand’. One kilogram is 1,000 grams; one megagram is 1,000,000 grams or one metric tonne. However, in digital usage ‘kilo’ usually means 1,024, ‘mega’ 1,024 times 1,024=1,048,576, and so on: for computers, these are ‘round numbers’. Roughly speaking, a large computer designed to support many users simultaneously. Prefix meaning ‘million’ (see kilo-). Named for the Motion Picture Experts Group, this is a series of standards for compressing moving pictures. Prefix meaning ‘thousand million million’ (see kilo-). Picture element: one ‘dot’ on a display screen. Among diplomats, the rules for a conversation: who speaks first, how we decide what language to speak, how we check that the message received is close enough to that sent. In computing, the same. The initial component of a URL, which indicates the protocol under which information is being requested. Common values include ‘http://’, ‘gopher://’, ‘ftp://’, and ‘mailto:’. For visual images, the level of detail present: measured in pixels per unit length. In this context, any system which delivers data in response to requests formatted according to a protocol. Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol; the internet standards or protocols for getting
GLOSSARY 239
teratwisted-pair Unix
URL
http:// www.poptel.org uk /nuj/mike/ glossary.htm UUCP
World Wide Web
raw information from one digital device to another. Higher-level protocols (that is, those closer to human needs) like http and gopher ‘sit on top of’ TCP/IP in roughly the sense that the grammar of this sentence ‘sits on top of’ the use of the Roman alphabet for raw words. Prefix meaning ‘million million’ (see kilo-). Conventional telephone wiring with two plain wire conductors (cf. co-ax). An operating system for computers, developed at Bell Labs and used by most large university systems. Unix ‘imagines’ the universe as consisting of streams of text which are fed or ‘piped’ through processes; it is well adapted for running many small processes in parallel. Universal Resource Locator: a unique global identifier for a file, which may contain a document or a computer programme or just about anything digital. A URL consists of a protocol prefix; the domain name for the computer on which the file is held; a path through that computer’s directories or ‘folders’ to the file; and the file name. This file exists at the URL http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/ glossary.ht m, which breaks down: protocol prefix domain name path file name. Originally, the Unix-to-Unix Copy Program: a protocol for Unix computers to exchange files over a dial-up telephone line. In more common use to name the ‘faking’ of an Internet connection over an intermittent UUCP link— thus a more advanced ‘store-and-forward’ link than FIDO. The total collection of hypertext documents using HTML formatting. Nothing more than that: the magic (if any) is in the content…
240
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256
Index
academia 36, 55, 126–8, 129–7 access 192–9; city realm 11; inequality 38; Internet 10; providers 13; public access to information 20–6, 183; women’s 92–4 Adam, A. 11, 94 Adams, P. 63, 95 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 38, 128 Africa: community access 55; connectivity 10, 23, 38, 45–50; GDP 23; see also South Africa Africa One 45, 54, 55 agency 83 Aitkenhead, D. 139 Allen, S. 89 American Psychological Association 123 Amin, A. 58 Amsterdam, De Digitale Stad, 69–3 (Figures 4.4, 4.5, 4.6), 75, 117 Anderson, B. 211 Antonelli, C. 222, 223 Apple 154 ARPANET 38, 128
artificial intelligence (AI) 94, 116, 118, 120 Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 45 AT&T 45, 50, 139 Atkinson, K. 212 ATM Forum 44 Audit Commission 216, 217 Aurigi, A. 10, 79, 117 Australia: information policies 12, 151; online information 189; school nets 193 authorship 126–8, 130–2, see also copyright Baker, J. 106–7 Bangemann, M. 4, 150 banks, 28 Banks, K. 45, 49 Baran, N. 64 Baranshamaje, E. 37, 48, 52 Barlow, J.P. 36 Barnatt, C. 181 Baym, N.K. 9 Bazerman, C. 131 BBC Wales 211 Behavior and Brain Sciences 123, 141 Belgium: Gondwana project 48; information policy 147 257
258 INDEX
Bell, D. 3, 86 Bellamy, C. 59 Belt, V. 60 Benedikt, M. 58–59 Beniger, J. 76 Besanko, D. 224 bioengineering 31 Bitnet 38 Blair, T. 5, 149 Bloomfield, B. 119 Bologna, Iperbole 71–5 (Figure 4.7), 75 bomb-making 115–17 books 35, 129–4, see also authorship, publishing Borchert, M. 63–5 Bourdieu, P. 134 Bowen, D. 51 Boyer, C. 57, 57 Bradley, H. 86 Brail, S. 83 Brants, K. 70–3 Braverman, H. 85 Brazil, average income 23 bribery 30–2 Bristol Cyber City 68 Bristol Index 68 Bristol. Net 68 (Figure 4.3) Bristol Online 68 British Library 188 British Medical Association 30, 218 British Sociological Association 123 British Telecom 150–4, 153, 194 Broadcasting Act (1996) 211 Brooks, R.A. 94 Brown, J. 119 Browning, J. 61, 202 BT Syntegra 218 Buenos Aires conference (1994) 49, 55 Builder, C.H. 53 Bulletin on Women and Employment in the EU 86 Burrows, R. 3
Bush, R. 45n, 45 Cable, V. 3 cables, fibre-optic 45, 48 CableTel 211 Calabrese, A. 63–5 Canada: information policy 151; online information 189; school nets 193 Canter & Siegel 106–6 Carnegie-Mellon University 138 Castells, M. 14, 15 n.7, 57, 61, 62, 78 Castineyra, I. 44 CCTA see Computer and Communications cellular phones, fixed-location 44 censorship 100, 103, 107,109 Central Information Technology Unit (CITU) 185, 186 Centre for Information Systems 183 Centre for Reviews and Dissemination 227 Centre for Urban Technology 65 Chartier, R. 129 Chaum, D. 51 childcare 89–1 children, social activities 26 China: cultural concerns 156; dissidents 108; government policy 24, 147, 148, 152; information society 4; rural society 155; structural change 154 Chubin, D. 140 CINECA 71 cities: access to communications technologies 11, 49–50; migration to 49–50; public realm 10–11, 57–8;
INDEX 259
virtual 11, 65–8 (Table 4.1), 74– 79, 117; see also Amsterdam, Bologna citizens advice bureaux 21, 164, 175– 9, 186 Citizens Charter 161, 162–6, 170, 173 citizenship information 159–3; citizens and consumers 162–6, 177; defining 160–4, 177; demand for 163–71, 177; evidence of demand 164; evidence of potential demand 165; factors influencing policy development and content 170–7; government policies 24, 178; government provision 174; loss of authoritative citizenship 27; national policies 169; need and demand 163–7; needs 161–6, 177; policy development 168–7; providing and funding services 174–9; supply and demand 165–9; trends and expectations 166–1 City Island 66 (Figure 4.2) City. Net 65 Citysearch San Francisco 77 class, transnational corporate 62 Cleveland Freenet 59 Clinton, B. 147, 150, 191 clubs 26 Cochrane, P. 151 Cochrane Collaboration 227 Code of Practice on Access to Government Information, UK 190 Cohen, A. 209 Cohen, L. 90 Collaborative Open Group Report 100 college information 188, 189 Collins, J. 58
Collins, R. 136 Committee of Public Accounts 215 Communications Decency Act 116 communications networks 9 community: centres 55; cyber-based 59–1; loss of 25–29; reestablishing 209; virtual 75–7; Welsh society 201–5 commuting 27 Compaq 154 compatibility 226 competition 68–9, 150–4, 153, 157 competitiveness 147 Competitiveness: Forging Ahead (DTI) 183 complaints procedure, electronic 189 CompuServe 116, 194; Wales Forum 202–12 (Figures 12. 1, 12.2, 12.3) Computer and Communications Technology Agency (CCTA) 182, 183, 185, 186 Computer Supported Cooperative Work movement 92 computers: cost of 40, 139; GP practices 217, 228; maintenance 56; UK penetration 194–8 Condorcet, Marquis de 129 Confucius 153 Congress, Library of 191 consumers: citizens and 162–6, 177; rights of 27 control of Internet 99–9, see also censorship, government, policing copyright: Crown 190, 191–5; law 31, 108, 130;
260 INDEX
newsgroup postings 213 n.5; see also authorship, intellectual property Coser, L.A. 134 credit allocation 126–8 Cronin, B. 139 culture 148, 155–9; Welsh 201–15 cyberculture 84, 93–5; feminist responses to 94–7 cyberdivide 13 cyber-eisteddfod 204–9 cyberfeminism 11, 83, 84, 95–7 cybermaterialism 12, 124–30 cybernetics 115 cyberplatonism 124–30, 132, 138, 142–5 cyberpunk 93–5 cyber-rape 83 cybersex 113–14, 117 cyberspace: as new urban public realm 58–60; bridging the divide 182–198; divide 182; groups within 62–6; term, 15 n.1, 93, 115, 181; urban social architecture of 60–3 cyber-visionaries 3, 5, 11 CymruNet 13 Daniel, H.D. 135, 140 Daniel, W.W. 86 data ownership 227 Data Protection Act 30, 189 Data Protection Registrar 189, 218 Davies, J. 211 Davis, M. 3, 57 Dawkins, R. 133 democracy: national policies on information 169–3; tele- 69 Demon 13
Department for Education and Employment 185, 193 Department of Health 185, 217, 225, 231 Department of National Heritage 185 Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) 182–6, 186, 193 Descartes, R. 94, 124 de-skilling 83, 84, 85 Development Board for Rural Wales 210 Dickens, P. 116 Digital Bristol 68 Digital City Foundation, The 71 Direct Access Government 187 dirigiste model 12, 151–6, 155, 156 dissent 24, 27 District Health Authorities (DHAs) 216, 217 Dixon, J. 216 doctors see General Practitioners Dordick, H.S. 62, 63 dormitory neighbourhoods 27 DOS 20 Doyal, L. 33 Drucker, P.F. 182 economics of information networks 222–31; economies of scope and scale 224– 8; externalities 222–7; regulation 225–9 Economist, The 23, 227 EDGAR database 191 electronic mail 38, 40, 116; Africa 45 (Table 3.2); UK government 184, 189; US Congress Members 184 Ellul, J. 119 Elson, D. 87 e-mail see electronic mail employment: gender issues 83–5;
INDEX 261
online information 188 encryption 225–9 Enlightenment 129–1 entertainment: at home 27; multimedia 43–4 Ernet 43 escape 94 Esterhuysen, A. 55 ethics 11, 99–9, 104–12 ethnic cleansers 31 European Commission 13, 156, 169, 171, 174 European Union (EU): citizenship information 159–2, 160, 167; cultural concerns 155–9; debates 53; employment predictions 51; information policies 12–13, 24, 151, 156; Welsh network initiative 210 exclusion: impact of 20–2; social 9–14 fantasy: personae 113; virtual communities 75–7 FBI 106 Federal Depository Library Program 189 Ferguson, B. 14, 223 FIDOnet 38, 45, 49 file transfer protocol (ftp) 104 Finland, information policy 147 flexibility: labour market 5–6, 84, 85; working patterns 91 Forbes Magazine 25 Forrester, J.W. 119 Foucault, M. 9 France, cultural concern 155–9 fraud detection 188, 189
freedom 99–9; of information 190, 191 Freeman, R. 185 free-market perspective 10, 21 Friedland, L. 76–8 Friedmann, J. 63 Frissen, P. 118, 119 Fuchs, I. 138 Fujitsu 154 Fuller, S. 12, 124, 128, 139 G7 nations 12, 147, 150 Gandal, N. 226 Gates, B. 44 Gaubatz, K.T. 196 gender: cyberculture and 83; gendered user 91–4; IT-related employment 83; neutrality 53; of Internet users 61; professional roles 90–2; relations in ICTs 11 General Practitioners (GPs) 215–25; computers 217, 228; ICT costs and benefits 221 (Table 13.1); networks 228–4 Germany: citizenship information 160, 160– 4, 167, 169, 170, 172, 175, 176; neo-Nazi material 116 Ghana, connectivity 47 Gibson, W. 93–5, 181 Glass, R. 113 Gondwana project 48 Gordon, I. 51 Gore, A. 4, 48, 52, 147, 148 Gottdeiner, M. 57 Gough, I. 33 government: information provision 174–9, 191– 5;
262 INDEX
investment in electronic information services 182–5; leadership 196; policies 24, 147–60; publications 188, 189; quality of information 190–4; regulation 128–30, 150–4, see also control, state; UK measures 182–93 ‘Government direct’ 187–3 Graham, S. 10, 58, 61, 64, 65, 79, 117 Green, E. 11, 90, 91, 92 Green Card Lottery spam 106–6 Green Paper 186–91, 195 Greenbaum, J. 87 GreenNet 45, 49, 55 Grossman, L. 79 Guardian 113, 113 hackers 33 Hackett, E. 140 Haddon, L. 89 Hales, M. 92 Hall, K. 95 Hamelink, C. 64 Hammer, M. 5 Hannah, P. 211 harassment 83 Haraway, D. 95 Hardy, H.E. 45 Harnad, S. 123–45 Hawking, S. 133 Haywood, T. 9–10 Healey, P. 74 healthcare: economics of information networks 222–31; ICT applications 14, 215–35; information-flows 216–20; network 197; medical information 30 Heeks, R. 88, 91 Hegener, M. 45, 47–8 Herring, S. 95
Heseltine, M. 185, 193 Hess, D. 136 Hill, M.W. 182 Hirsch, F. 127 HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) 188, 191–5 Hobbes, R. 38 Holderness, M. 10, 23, 36–7, 44, 51 Hollywood 148 homeworking 86, 89 Hong Kong, average income 23 Horowitz, I.L. 132 Hoskin, K. 126 House of Lords 182, 184, 185, 186, 193 HTV214 Huws, U. 4, 6 hypertext 126–8 Hyundai 152 IBM 32, 139, 154 IDC 194 idealisation 68 inappropriate material 106–8 India: average income 23; cultural concerns 156; Ernet 43; women workers 88 Indonesia, cultural concerns 156 inequality: access to communications 38, 60; geographical and economic 10– 11; social 60–2 Information Infrastructure Task Force 181, 184, 191 information networks: economics of 222–31; local versus national 229–3 information policy 147; effects 154–9; goals 147–1; lessons 156–60;
INDEX 263
mechanisms 149–6; motivation 148–2 information society: concept 3–7; goals 147–1 Information Society, The 124 Information Society, The: Agenda for Action in the UK (House of Lords) 184 Information Society Initiative (ISI) 5, 150, 186 Information Society Taskforce 184 Information Superhighways: Opportunities for Public Sector Applications (CCTA) 183 Information ‘Superhighways’: the UK National Information Infrastructure (POST) 184 infotainment 44 Inglehart, R. 198 Intel 154 intellectual property 142–5, see also copyright International Telecommunications Union 49 Internet: access 10, 38; access providers 13; communication medium 35; control issue 99–9; healthcare issues 230–4; international connectivity 40– 42 (Figures 3.1, 3.2); missionary phase 19; origins 38, 99, 128; population 61–3 (Figures 4.1a, 4. 1b); pricing schemes 127; privatisation 138; publication 12; technology 43–4; Welsh newsgroup 202–6, 206, 209; women’s usage 92
Internet Society 38 interventionist policies 12 Iperbole initiative 71–5 (Figure 4.7) Ireland, citizenship information 160, 161, 168, 170, 171, 172, 176 Iridium scheme 44, 54 isolation 27, 155 IT for All 186 Jackson, T. 184 Japan: economic policies 152, 153; information society 4, 152; school nets 193 Jaszi, P. 143 Jensen, M. 49 JiangZemin 147 Johnston, M. 217 Jones, A. 201 Jones, S. 3 journals, academic 131–3, 140–2, 143 Kahin, B. 127 Kedzie, C. 53 Keen, J. 14, 215, 223 Kehoe, C.M. 92 Keynes, J.M. 153 Kling, R. 123, 124 knowledge 119 Korea: economic policies 153; information society 4, 152; structural change 154 Korean Information Society Development Institute 195 labour market: feminised 86–8; flexibility 5–6, 84, 85; gendered divisions of labour 84– 7, 91 Laing, R.D. 114 Lamb, R. 123 Lamberton, D. 224
264 INDEX
Langford, D. 11 languages 36, 53, 212 Landweber, L. 38 Landwehr, L. 37 Large, P. 85 law centre 21 legislation: Broadcasting Act 211; citizenship information 166; Internet 116; see also copyright law Leibniz, G.W. 118 Leinberger, C. 63 Leland initiative 48 LG 152, 154 Li Peng 147, 148 liberty 27, see also freedom libraries 21, 28, 196, 197 library catalogues, digital 189 Library of Congress 191 Lie, M. 89 Loader, B.D. 4, 15 nn.1, 5, 115 Lock, C. 217 Lockheed Corporation 44 Lopatka, S. 113 Los Angeles, 57 Lotus compatibility 226 Louisiana Children’s Network 197 Luddites 5, 7 Lukes, S. 6 Lyon, D. 6, 15 n.3, 201 McAfee 33 McBeath, G. 75 McCaw, C. 44 McElvogue, L. 77 Mackay, H. 13–14, 202, 209, 210 MacKenzie, D. 7, 20 McLuhan, M. 126 Macve, R. 126 Madanipour, A. 58 Malaysia: cultural concerns 156;
information policy 148; rural society 155 Malis, A. 44 market-led solutions 12, 151 Marvin, S. 58, 61, 64, 65 Marx, K. 153 Mason, J. 14, 227 Massachusetts, University of 191 Massey, D. 61, 62, 63 Matthews, R. 220 Mays, N. 216 MCI 153 medical information see healthcare Michigan Public Health Institute 197 Microsoft 19, 44, 154 middlemen 51, 227 Miller, J. 120 Ministry of Defence 192 Mitchell, D. 57, 57 Mitchell, E. 217, 219 Mitsubishi 154 Mitter, S. 87 modem: cost of 23, 40; UK penetration 194–8 Mooney, G. 219 Moore, N. 12, 182 Moravec, H. 94 Morley, D. 211 Motorola 44 Mukla 49 Mulgan, G. 9 Mulligan, M. 47 Murdoch, R. 155, 211 Musisi, C. 49 Myerson, R. 219 Nairn, T. 206 National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux 164 National Audit Office 215, 217 National Health Service (NHS) 215– 21; Executive (1996) 225;
INDEX 265
Information Management and Technology Strategy 217, 227; NHSnet 218, 225, 228, 230–4; reforms 227 National Information Infrastructure (NII) programme 5, 150, 191 National Information Infrastructure Report 15 n. 3 National Performance Review 191 Naylor, K. 86 needs: human 21; information 161–6 Negroponte, N. 50 Nelkin, D. 29 neo-liberal policy 12, 150–4, 155, 156–60 Netscape 19 Netherlands, citizenship information 160, 162, 167–4, 173, 175, 176 Network Computer Systems 47–8 Neuromancer (Gibson) 93–5 New Labour Party 5, 149 New Ways to Work Newsletter 89 New Yorker 35 newsgroups 31, 100, 100–2; Welsh 202–6, 206, 209 NHSnet 218, 225, 228, 230–4 Northwestern University Library 189, 191 Norway: citizenship information 160, 161, 169, 171, 172, 175; first Internet connections 38; StarCom support 49, 54 Odlyzko, A. 138 Odone, C. 60 Office for Telecommunications Regulation (OFTEL) 151 Office of Science and Technology 183, 185 Office of Standards fro Education 192
Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) 196, 215, 217 offshore processing 84 old people, social activities 26 Omega Generation 71 Ong, W. 126 oral tradition 35 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 195 ORSTOM 45 Osmond, J. 201 outreach projects 55 outsourcing 84 paedophile networks 31 Pain, D. 92 Panorama 30 paper 136–8, 188 Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) 184 parliamentary proceedings, availability 188 part-time work 5, 86 PCs: availability 40, 42 (Table 3.1); origins 32 peer review 127, 131, 140–5 Perry, R. 195 Philip, A.B. 203 Phizacklea, A. 87 Pitelis, C. 220 Pitkow, J.E. 92 Plato 143 Platonism 124, 125, 130 Poland, average income 23 Police National Computer 30 policing the Internet 109, see also censorship, control political: extremism 11, 107, 115; goals 148; meetings 26 Pollert, A. 88 Pool, I. de S. 137, 139
266 INDEX
pornography 31, 33, 107, 115, 116 Portugal, citizenship information 160, 160–4, 167, 170–4, 172, 173 post offices, local 28 poverty 37, 50 Powell, T. 13–14, 202, 209, 210, 212 power structures 22 Prest, M. 51 principal-agent theory 219–3 printing press 111, 126 privacy 29–2 Propper, C. 220 Psycoloquy 123 Public Accounts Committee 218 public libraries 21, 28, 196 public space: cyberspace as 58–60; publicness of 57–9; urban 57–8 publishing: electronic 12; esoteric 133–5; historic role 129–3; investment strategies 134; role of server 31 pubs 26 Pye, L. 185 racism 11, 31 radio: history 211; Welsh culture 201, 211 Rand Corporation 53 Ravetz, J. 11, 119, 120 Redner, H. 141 Redwood, J. 210 Rees, T. 86 Reich, R. 22 religious movements 31 remote-learning 55, 188, 189 remoteness 28 Report on the Information Superhighway (CCTA) 183 Reuters 21
Rheingold, H. 15 n.1, 58, 59, 207, 209 Roberts, B. 86–8 Robins, K. 211 robots 94 Rockoff, M. 65 Romanticism 130–2 Rosenau, J. 196 Rural Wales Information Society Initiative 210 Russia, inequality 25 Ryan, M. 219 S4C 211 Samsung 152, 154 SANGOnet 55 Santa Monica Public Electronic Network 59 satellites: Low Earth Orbit 44; VSAT dishes 48 Saxby, S.J. 192 scarcity 127–9, 134 Schiller, H. 64 schools: government policy 196, 197; Internet connection 184, 192–7, 197; online information 188 Schools on Line project 193 Schroeder, R. 93 Schuler, D. 58, 59 science fiction 93–5, 95 Scotland, culture 206 Searle, J.R. 119 Seattle Community Network, 59 Securities Exchange Commission 191 security 44 self, disembodied 114 self-help groups 15 n.8 Sennett, R. 57 sexual material: attitudes to 108; graphic 11
INDEX 267
Sharpe, S. 88 Sharrock, S. 47, 49 Shields, R. 58, 95 shift-work 86 shopping 28 Siltanen, J. 86 Silverstone, R. 89 Simpson, L.C. 119 simulation 68, 117–19, 119–1 Singapore: average income 23; competition 153; cultural concerns 156; government policy 24, 116, 147, 153; structural change 154 skill 83, 147 Sklair, L. 63 Sky 211 Slouka, M. 113, 114 small businesses 22, 194 Soc. Culture. Welsh 202 social divisions 22 Social Epistemology 123 social exclusion and inclusion 9–14 Sociological Research Online 123 software: compatibility 226; industry 88, 91 Sorkin, M. 57 South Africa: community access 55; information policy 147, 149, 151 South Bristol College 194 South Bristol Learning Network 194 spamming 106–6 Sparrow, J. 65 Sprint 49 Squires, J. 83, 95–7 stalkers, electronic 31, 83 StarCom 49, 54 state, role of 12, 150, 151–5, see also government Steele, J. 13, 160, 182
Stikker, M. 69 Stimson, J. 198 Stonier, T. 3 Strange, S. 182 Sullivan, F. 217, 219 Syntech 13 Taiwan, structural change 154 Tambini, D. 74 Tang, P. 13, 195 Tarjanne, P. 36 Taylor, F. 15 n.5 Taylor, P. 33, 183, 195, 199 n.14 technological development, critical perspective of 7–9 technologies, new 19–19 Technology Foresight Programme 183 Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP) 197 tele-democracy 69 Teledesic scheme 44, 54 Telenor 49 telephone: availability 40, 42 (Table 3.1), 47; companies 54; fixed-location cellular 44; sex lines 102 television: availability 42 (Table 3.1) 42 ; cable 48; UK penetration 195; V chip 103; Welsh culture 201, 211 teleworking 4, 6, 62, 83, 84, 86, 88– 90 temporary work 5 terrorists 31 Tevie, W. 48 textile industry 87 Thailand:
268 INDEX
information policy 147, 152, 153; rural society 155 THOMAS Web 191 Thompson, J. 57 Thompson, K. 211 Thrift, N. 64 Times Higher Education Supplement 123 Timmins, N. 199 n.9 Toffler, A. 3 Total New York 77 Touraine, A. 3 trade unions 26, 85 Trading Fund Act 192 typing 36 UK Online Ltd 195 United Artists Communications 194 United Kingdom (UK): citizenship information 160–8, 167–6, 175; Code of Practice on Access to Government Information 190; computer penetration 194–8; culture 156; difference between Internet population and overall population 61 (Figure 4.1a); first Internet connections 38; government 22, 150–4; growth rate 155; healthcare 215–35; inequality 24–6; information strategy 5, 13, 149, 150, 156, 182–93; investment in electronic information services 182–5; laissez-faire policy 24; school nets 193 United Nations Human Development Report 24 United States of America (US): city centres 57; city websites 77;
competition 153; Congress 184; connectivity 23; cultural hegemony 148; free government information 191; government 22, 184; Government Printing Office 189; information policy 147, 148, 197; Internet history 38, 55, 128; legislation 116; online information 189; school nets 193 universities 55, 196, see also academia, colleges University of Wales 210 Usenet 73 USPTO patent database 191 Utopian predictions and beliefs 7, 32, 59, 124 UUCP 38 Varian, H. 127 Vedantham, A. 65 videoconferencing 53, 197 Vietnam: cultural concerns 156; government policy 24, 152; rural society 155 violence, fear of 27 virtual cities 11, 65–8 (Table 4.1), 74– 79, 117 Virtual Futures conferences 93 virtual reality 44, 116–19, 120 viruses 33 voting 52 Wales, national identity 13–14, 201– 15 Webb, S. 75 websites 102–3 (Figure 6.3), 107 Webster, F. 201 Webster, J. 6, 85, 86, 87 Weinberg, S. 133 Welsh Development Agency 210
INDEX 269
Welsh Office 210 Western Mail 211 Westwood, S. 89 White House 22, 191 White Papers 182–6, 185, 187 Wilkinson, C. 51 Williams, R. 201, 209 Windows 20 WITCHES project 91 Wolkowitz, C. 89 Wolpert, L. 133 women: employment 84–7; equality 53; workers 5; see also childcare, gender, teleworking WorkNet 49, 55 World Bank 23, 24, 52 World Wide Web (WWW) 102–3; graphical and multimedia information 100; technology 43 Wriston, W.B. 181 Zinberg, D. 26–8 Zuboff, S. 6
