COVER -> DAY ONE
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There is over-capacity in the European automobile market; prices are falling and the mean time between faults is increasing. There are some who will always want a new car every year but others are finding that they can hang on for another 10,000 miles without crippling repair bills. For various reasons which bore me rigid, simply because they have been rehearsed throughout my adult life without any sign of their being addressed, the British are now facing the possibility of losing a substantial chunk of the mass manufacturing market.
Until recently I would have faced the prospect of highly concentrated mass unemployment with short term concern and compassion but with medium term complacency. Why should an advanced country like Britain bother to make things when they can be made cheaper elsewhere? Why should we be so sentimental about the degrading task of burrowing a mile into the earth to bring out coal? For a while these tasks will be performed by less developed economies, allowing them in two decades to reach the stage we are at now. After that there will be robots. As for work, we will all be knowledge workers, thinking, creating, designing, transmitting, receiving, processing, replying, consuming.
Well, so I thought until I began to add up the numbers of those who cannot currently take full advantage of cyberspace as it is currently manifest in sloppy design and bewildering navigation.
The normal process for looking at accessibility figures is to add up all those people who are classified as "disabled" either because they fit some medical or some benefits system criteria. So, it is avowed,
- blind people cannot access a graphics page,
- deaf people cannot access an audio file,
- a person without limbs can only work at a pace which is so cruelly slow that it constitutes an insurmountable disincentive.
Add all these together and you have a number from which you subtract those who can be helped by special devices - subtitling of audio, text description of pictures - and then you have your inaccessibility number.
It might suit fund raisers from non-profits to depict this excluded group as the core of the problem and, indeed, people who are severely, chronically disabled need very special help in many cases. That having been said, for every quadriplegic there are hundreds of people who have mild arthritis which excludes the effective use of a mouse and even more who are just clumsy, with hands like a kilo of Frankfurters.
There are many people who are confused by too much imagery or too much sound.
There are people without the basic cultural conventions which allow us to distinguish a bald from an ironic statement.
For every person with a severe learning difficulty there are scores who suffer from mild dyslexia, cannot tell their left from their right, quite important in navigation.
There are Nobel prizewinners who cannot walk South using a North-oriented street map.
Millions of people conceal varying degrees of illiteracy and over-estimate the size of their working vocabulary.
On the other side, public documents for legislators and Government officials are in no way modified for those who are expected to exercise democratic control. The sentence complexity and richness of vocabulary issues are to some extent dealt with by intermediaries such as the mass media but the best interpreter is the author, not a messenger with an axe to grind.
Without plunging into an extensive exercise in quantitative analysis to aggregate those with such functional limitations that they cannot effectively access cyberspace in any meaningful way, I cannot now imagine that the number is lower than 25% and my experience tells me it is nearer 50%.
On that basis I cannot be so sanguine about the benefits to be reaped from the information age. If the projections are right that manufacture will shrink in the richest countries and where it remains the labour required will be negligible, if margins on retail fall and those involved in it decline, then we will be left with our major economic sector being inaccessible to somewhere between a quarter and a half of the working population.
Add to that the demographic trend towards longevity and you are suddenly faced with an ever smaller working population having to support an ever larger number of unemployed and retired people. That rather knocks the gloss off, even for the gifted and the clever who will have most to gain and least to lose from the transformation but, after all, it is always the poor that suffer from upheaval and the rich that benefit.
Last year when I was in San Francisco trying to generate some interest in the problems of the information society and social exclusion I was made painfully aware that for the United States at least this was not the issue.
The wise and the weird, the do-gooder and the guru, the well-read and the radical all convinced me that there were two key issues presented by cyberspace which were the preservation of the right to self expression no matter how coarse and the protection of privacy, no matter how trivial.
On the first point, there are perfectly feasible, simple systems for allowing unlimited expression and impregnable protection for children. It would be helpful, would it not, for the anti-porn brigade to make common cause with the preservers of privacy; they could do encryption together.
I think the real problem is that the protesters always want to have a sneak look at what they say they hate; they would prefer to rage against porn than not have it as a public issue.
On the second point, privacy is a relatively modern obsession limited to a very narrow section of the population. Where I grew up in the 1950s in a town of 15,000 people everyone knew how much everybody earned, who slept with and wanted to sleep with whom, what ailments they suffered and what kind of underwear they bought.
I work on the assumption that everything I write on paper or on the Internet is public and I believe that it would be a fine thing if I could load huge amounts of information onto a Web site in exchange for being given a simple number which I could use in form filling.
As a citizen I can see no objection to posting my tax return onto a public site. Letters from mistresses, well, that is quite another consideration but, then, it always has been.
The danger is that if we remain obsessed with these rather self-indulgent issues of absolutely unlimited free speech and privacy we will forget that a system which excludes half of the population is not going to work in developed economies in the 21st Century. Feudalism, slavery, intimidation and degradation might be attractive in some circles but the only comforting conclusion from this analysis is that it won't work.
