Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  The positive noises from Islington would not have impressed two academics at Stanford University, though. In February 2000, Norman Nie and Lutz Erbing published analysis suggesting the more time people spent surfing the web, the more they lost contact with their friends, families and communities. ‘Email is a way to stay in touch,’ Nie agreed, ‘but you can’t share a coffee or a beer with somebody on email. Or give them a hug. The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it.’

  In Britain, where the web was expanding rapidly, it was noted that the dire warnings of social catastrophe were matched by cyber-evangelists proclaiming the reverse. ‘The most transforming technological event since the capture of fire’ was how John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and digital rights activist, described the development of the Internet.

  The writer Howard Rheingold, one of the first to log on to an online community in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, claimed to have been ‘participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture’. In his book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Rheingold wrote of how he had plugged his computer into his telephone and made contact with the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a very early email network. ‘The WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was grounded in my everyday physical world,’ he enthused. ‘I’ve attended real-life WELL marriages, WELL births, and even a WELL funeral. (The phrase “in real life” pops up so often in virtual communities that regulars abbreviate it to IRL.)’ It all sounded very Californian, but Rheingold had identified the central question for British academics and policy wonks trying to work out the social implications of new technology: would virtual contact translate into physical ‘real life’ connections? When I interviewed the celebrated social scientist Robert Putnam for a BBC TV series, he presented the issue this way: ‘The question is whether the Internet turns out to be a nifty telephone or a nifty television?’ In other words, would people cut themselves off from other people by staring at a screen in the same way they watched TV or would it facilitate social communication in the way phones had done?

  Putnam was famous for having documented the decline of ‘social capital’ in the United States, the weakening of the glue that holds neighbourhoods together. His best-selling book Bowling Alone suggested the very fabric of American community had been damaged by, among other things, television and the motorcar. ‘Years ago,’ he wrote, ‘thousands of people belonged to bowling leagues. Today, however, they’re more likely to bowl alone.’ Putnam feared the personal computer might accelerate the process of neighbourhood disintegration still further.

  In Britain, there was much debate as to whether the Bowling Alone analysis applied here. Although the spirit of the Women’s Institute, Cub Scouts and working men’s clubs seemed relatively intact, levels of social trust, a key measure of community health, had fallen dramatically. Research showed the proportion of British people who thought ‘most people can be trusted’, as opposed to ‘you can’t be too careful in dealing with people’, had fallen from 44 per cent to 30 per cent in just five years — a more rapid decline even than in the United States.

  Just as these figures were being digested, a government policy team investigating neighbourhood renewal reported how in some areas trust in neighbours has all but disappeared — ‘residents described one area as a war zone’. Suddenly social capital was the mantra of Whitehall. The Education Secretary David Blunkett beseeched Britain to ‘build up reservoirs’ of the stuff. The Chancellor Gordon Brown thought the answer was an era of civic patriotism. The question of whether the rapidly expanding Internet was good or bad for community cohesion took on a new urgency.

  In spring 2001, Prime Minister Tony Blair invited Putnam to breakfast in Downing Street. Over coffee and croissants, he listened as the Harvard academic explained how declining social capital was linked to rising crime, chronic illness and early death; how important face-to-face human interaction, community involvement and trust were for social well-being; how critical it was to ensure that developments like the Internet did not further weaken the bonds and bridges that are required for a healthy society.

  At the same time, news from Canada was presenting a different picture. Rather than destroying social capital by replacing face-to-face contact, the experience of ‘Netville’ suggested the Internet might actually strengthen community cohesion and increase neighbourliness. Netville was the nickname of a middle-class Toronto suburb that possessed qualities social network analysts can usually only dream of. All the homes in the development had been offered high-speed Internet access: two thirds of the community had opted to receive the service and a third had declined. The scientists could compare the sociability of those with and without the Internet.

  ‘Wired’ residents were soon emailing each other, asking for advice, advertising garage sales and sending invitations to community barbecues. There were echoes of what happened in Islington’s Internet Street, but in Netville it was possible to see whether neighbours who weren’t linked to the web were more or less involved in the life of the community.

  The results were intriguing: on average, wired residents knew the names of twenty-five neighbours, while non-wired residents knew the names of eight; wired residents talked to twice as many local people as non-wired and made 50 per cent more visits to their neighbours’ homes. The research team also noticed an unexpected difference in the behaviour of the largely online community of Netville compared with people on housing developments nearby. ‘Despite the fact that many homes within Netville were built with spacious patios attached at the rear of the home, the majority of residents had moved a park bench, or a set of inexpensive plastic chairs, to the corner of their driveway or front steps. By contrast, residents of similar nearby developments almost universally chose to sit in their backyards.’

  Why had Netvillers acted in this way? When the researchers asked people they explained that by positioning themselves on the front step, they were able to exchange quick greetings with neighbours passing on the street. They could see what was happening in the community, and they were able to keep a watchful eye on their children’s activities.

  The authors of the Netville study, Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton, dismissed the doom-mongers who feared the web would crush social spirit: ‘Warnings of the Internet’s impending destruction of community have rarely been encumbered by evidence,’ they noted drily. But their report also warned against exaggerating the social implications of computer technology, reminding readers that people interact through atoms and molecules as well as through bits and bytes. Netville was a harbinger of ‘glocalization’, they said, ‘simultaneously globally connected and locally involved.’

  Wellman and Hampton concluded that the Internet wouldn’t destroy or transform community, but by offering an additional form of communication, it did have the capability to enrich and empower wired neighbourhoods. Their concern was for people who didn’t have access, those people on the wrong side of the digital divide. ‘What will the Internet do for community then?’ they asked.

  The British government was already growing anxious about the significant minority of citizens who were not on the web — less because of concerns over neighbourliness than the risk of missing out on the economic advantages promised by e-government: citizens accessing state services, paying taxes, shopping, banking, finding jobs or training online. For Tony Blair, what he called ‘electronic service delivery’ was a key plank of his public service reforms. ‘I am determined that we should capitalise on these opportunities and that by 2005 at the latest, all government services will be online. Equally important is that by the same time, everyone should have access to the Internet, so that the whole of society can benefit,’ he wrote.

  Blair had set the clock ticking: within five years, everyone should have access to the wonders of cyberspace, the man had said. But how were they going to do that, especially in
places already suffering the consequences of social exclusion? Ten million pounds was assigned for the Wired Up Communities Programme (WuC), in which residents in some of Britain’s most run-down and poor neighbourhoods, places with negligible Internet access, would be given free computers and invited to cross the electronic frontier.

  Ministers had, perhaps, read about Islington’s Internet Street and hoped they could have the same results in an old mining village in South Yorkshire, a Suffolk market town, one of Liverpool’s most deprived districts, a sheep-farming community in Cumbria and on tough estates in east London and Greater Manchester. When the results were sent to Whitehall, the evaluation made unhappy reading. The authors reported major implementation slippage and uncertainty in relation to the aims of the programme, as ministers fussed and argued over what the pilot projects were trying to do. The scheme was described as experimental — basically, it seems, people were making it up as they went along. A couple of the deprived neighbourhoods didn’t get shiny new computers but were given recycled PCs, second-hand machines that were so unreliable they eventually had to be junked.

  Plans for local community websites to improve social cohesion proved problematic, with three neighbourhoods becoming ‘disenchanted with the experience’. When the evaluation team asked locals whether the exercise had improved neighbourliness, their report admitted it was ‘difficult to get a sense of connectedness’ in the area.

  Most troubling of all, though, was the finding that, despite being given free home computers, the local projects were unable to convince a significant minority of residents of the value of using the Internet. More than a quarter of people given the technology never used it to access the web, with many of those simply saying they weren’t interested or had better things to do with their time. Even when residents were given personal training, indifference remained at roughly the same level.

  This lack of interest was not what ministers had expected. As the evaluation put it: ‘Much of the literature assumes that once people have access to, and have used the technologies, they will embrace them wholeheartedly.’ Tony Blair’s ambition to get everyone surfing away within five years was based on a belief that the meteoric growth of the Internet would continue, and the job of government was simply to help people aboard. The evidence, however, pointed to a problem: with quite a lot of British citizens apparently happy to be on the wrong side of the digital divide, new technology might serve to increase inequality and social isolation.

  Another study into Internet access in London reported the same difficulty: ‘A lack of interest amongst those not connected is probably the most significant problem facing policymakers.’ The capital’s politicians were warned that the number of non-users with ‘no interest’ remained stubbornly high and, with a slightly desperate tone, the report added, ‘Non-users must be convinced.’

  The relationship between new technologies and established communities has often proved unpredictable. The telephone was developed as a business tool but transformed social relations. Radio was designed for the military but inspired a youth revolution. For half a century, mass-produced cars were the playthings of the wealthy, widening the social advantage of the rich over the poor. But with ownership suddenly spreading across the social strata in the 1960s, its impact eroded traditional community life. When televisions were first plugged into people’s homes, the expectation was that they might bind nations together through shared events like the Coronation. Later, the TV would be blamed for seeing us staring at Friends and Neighbours rather than talking to real friends and neighbours.

  Perhaps the development of the railway network in the mid-nineteenth century offers the closest analogy to the growth of the Internet. As trains began steaming into public view, there was considerable opposition to using them — particularly from the ‘common people’. In 1837, for example, the architect and journalist George Godwin published a pamphlet entitled ‘An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of Railways’, in which he quoted one common person, a parish clerk who had just seen a locomotive for the first time: ‘That was a sight to have seen; but one I never care to see again! How much longer shall knowledge be allowed to go on increasing?’

  Godwin, in a lament echoed by those attempting to encourage acceptance of the Internet today, implored the working classes to be open-minded and positive towards technological changes. ‘We would strongly and sincerely urge every individual of the society to lend his utmost aid in establishing and increasing their effectiveness,’ he wrote, ‘not merely to maintain the prosperity of the country, but greatly to increase it.’

  Tony Blair’s ambition to get everyone on the Internet by 2005 came and went. Five years later there were still 9.2 million adults who had never been online in Britain. More than a quarter of UK households had no access to the web, with 59 per cent of those saying they either didn’t want or didn’t need it.

  The digital divide is partly a generation gap, with older people more reluctant to engage with new technology. But it is also a feature of a profoundly worrying aspect of British society: the sizeable minority of citizens who are increasingly disconnected from the mainstream. While just 3 per cent of graduates have never used the Internet, for those without any formal qualifications the figure rises to 55 per cent. There is a clear link between social exclusion and digital exclusion, and government advisors have warned that people they label as ‘resistors’ risk cutting themselves off still further.

  Reading official documents on the subject, one is struck by the frustration of those charged with getting Britain online: they bemoan the negative knee-jerk reaction of some groups to the potential benefits of technology. ‘These people,’ the government’s key Digital Britain report advised, ‘need to be clearly shown how digital services could benefit them.’ But when resistors were shown a five-minute video designed to do just that, most people still said no — even if offered access for free.

  Ministers were warned that those deeply socially excluded, with no meaningful Internet engagement, accounted for 10 per cent of the population and that Britain was at a tipping point in its relation to the online world. ‘It is moving from conferring advantage on those who are in it to conferring active disadvantage on those who are without.’

  The early dramatic claims for the Internet, that it would either create a virtual utopia or destroy physical community, forgot the importance that people give to real socialising; to sharing a meal or juicy gossip, to handshakes and hugs, to looking people in the eyes and occasionally glimpsing their soul. Emoticons or colon/bracket winks and smiles are no substitute. Facebook, Hotmail and Twitter don’t replace conversation and friendship: they build on what is there — just as the railways, the postal service, the telephone and the motorcar have done.

  The evidence suggests that a large majority of the social interactions that occur online involve people who know each other offline: the Internet therefore magnifies the connectedness of those who are connected and the exclusion of those who are already excluded. The solution is not simply about access to the web, providing high-speed broadband to remote villages or IT suites in old folks’ homes, important though those may be. The challenge is to give the marginalised in Britain — the illiterate, the vulnerable, the desperate — the skills, support and social confidence to cross the electronic frontier.

  X is for XXXX

  Explaining the alphabetical structure of this book, the question I have been asked more than any other is, of course: ‘What are you going to do for X?’ In his famous dictionary, Dr Johnson described ‘X’ as ‘a letter which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language’ and, despite every British child being introduced to the xylophone and the X-ray fish at an astonishingly tender age, it is true that the twenty-fourth letter is regarded as an exceptional, perplexing and exotic character.

  ‘X’ exerts an emotional force greater than the rest of the alphabet put together: it is a simple kiss and an ancient battlefield; the signature of the illiterate and of democracy it
self; it marks the spot of hidden treasure and the source of forbidden pleasure; it symbolises Christ and the unknown. We react to the dramatic crossed strokes of the ‘X’ because they imply something extraordinary, mysterious or dangerous. ‘X’ is camouflage for taboos: the X-rated; the X-certificate; the XXXX!

  It is that last aspect of Britain’s X-factor that I wish to explore: the place of curses, oaths and swear words in British culture; the expletives that tell us far more about our status, our values and our heritage than simply whether we have a foul mouth. How one swears and how often are as indicative of class as top hats and shell suits.

  The middle classes (who swear the least) are sometimes prone to cite pervasive working-class coarseness as evidence that Britain is bound for hell in a handcart. The commentator Theodore Dalrymple, a cheerleader for such views, recoils at the way he sees popular culture increasingly pandering to proletarian crudity. ‘In Britain we have completely lost sight of the proper place of vulgarity in the moral and cultural economy,’ he wrote recently. ‘We have made it king when it should be court jester.’

  Certainly, the media’s access to and search for mass markets has seen the exploitation of the common curse: TV chefs marketed as much on their profanity as their profiterole; the clothing label French Connection selling its wares in Britain cheekily stamped ‘FCUK’; beer marketed to lager louts with the boast that Australians ‘wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else’; music and video releases so riddled with potentially offensive language that the industry has felt obliged to introduce a Parental Advisory Scheme.