Comments on the Irish Information Society Initiative
by
Dr. Liam Bannon
University of Limerick
6/6/96
What follows are a few brief notes on this initiative, together with a couple of appended papers that may be of some interest. Apologies that these notes were rather hastily written due to the deadline, but they hopefully raise some important questions about the whole thrust of this initiative, and what its focus could / should be.
Sincerely,
Liam Bannon
=================
1. Author Details :
Contact Address
Dr. Liam J. Bannon Phone: +353-61-202632
Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems Fax: +353-61-202572
University of Limerick
Limerick, Ireland. Email: liam.bannon@ul.ie
Director, CSCW Research Centre & Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems
Research Interests
Human Computer Interaction, Groupware, CSCW, Hypermedia, Participatory Design Practices, Social Dimensions of IT design & use, Evaluation of systems
I am involved in a wide variety of issues to do with the design, development, implementation and use of new information technologies, especially those that might enhance collaborative work practices since the mid - seventies. I have an interdisciplinary background - cognitive psychology, computer science, cognitive science, human factors, information systems and organizational behavior which I believe are important in understanding this area. My recent collaborations in CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) also have strong influences from work sociology and anthropology. The need to go beyond traditional discipline boundaries and involve users directly in the design process is important when attempting to design computer systems that impact workplace practices and the social relations that exist in an organization. I am also very interested in the evolution of information technology, especially the social shaping of technology within different cultural, economic and historical settings.
My specific interest in the Information Society initiative stems from my role as a consultant with the NBST back in the early 80’s on the EU FAST “Information Society” Programme ( cf. Bannon, Barry & Holst, 1982). As a psychologist and computer scientist I have consistently striven to both develop the usability and utility of new technologies as well as to empower people in relation to technology.
I append a brief CV, and a note on the CSCW Centre.
2. Envisioning the Information Society:
o What are the Key Issues & Opportunities: please address this point in the context of Economy (e.g.: Current / New business opportunities, impact on Enterprise , Employment ) , Policy ( e.g. Government involvement, Education , Training ) and Society ( e.g. impact on the Individual, Organisation)
I am afraid that I find the framing of this question problematic, given the view I have of what might be meant by a term such as the “information society”. In saying this, I do not imply that I have a very idiosyncratic notion of what is meant by the term, indeed I was heavily involved over 15 years ago in an extensive debate on the issue in the context of the EU FAST Programme, which had a whole programme on this very topic! (Cf. Bannon, Barry & Holst, 1982; Bannon & Barry, 1982 (text appended)). Rather, I reject the view that the notion of an “information society” is particularly new as many earlier societies could be seen a information societies. I also reject the notion that there is a singular concept referred to by the term, as there are many possible information societies, depending on the choices we take, as individuals, as citizens, as business sectors, and as the State. I also reject the idea that we must “adapt to” some technological force that is sweeping all before it. The kind of societies we will create in the future, while certainly mediated by the new technologies, are not determined by them. Thus I reject a position of technological determinism that assumes that people must inevitably adapt to whatever the technology demands. Indeed, this is a rather strange way of thinking about technology, in my view as technology itself is a social relation and not an autonomous force. ( Cf. commentaries in Sections 3,4,5 in Pylyshyn & Bannon, 1989).
Apologies for the negatives in the above paragraph, but I believe that the premises that underline much of this Information Society initiative, as currently promulgated, need to be challenged, if we are to really address some of the issues about the kind of future society we would like to have in Ireland, and how it might be enhanced and affected by the possibilities of the new technologies. My concerns are ones that do not imply any rejection of technology per se, indeed I have worked for 20 years in developing new technologies that people can use, but address the question of what is it that we should be discussing here. So, I am quite prepared to accept that the convergence of telecomms and computers, the merger of media conglomerates, the rapid rise in electronic networking, the phenomenal growth of the Internet and its accessibility via the WWW, all create the potential for massive changes in how we do business and how we live our lives. At the same time, I think that it is very important that we do not hide the fact that the kind of society we will live in, in the future, is still substantially determined by the choices that we as citizens and as a society make now. There is no single line of development that impels us to a particular road to the future. The future is a direction, not a place. While, certainly, more of our work and activities will be mediated by the new technologies, the exact form of the society that will evolve is something that will be determined by many factors, personal, social, economic, technical, political. It is for this reason that talk of “the information society” as some coherent, mutually agreed upon, new concept that has an autonomous force of its own to which we must “adapt” or “prepare for” is to my mind problematic. Changes in demographics, cultural values, conceptions of work, and non-work, political shifts, all have significant effect on the kind of future(s) that we are evolving.
o How do you view Ireland's level of preparedness?
Again, I am afraid I am not really sure how to answer this question, as it is premised on a certain view of what the issue is that we need to be “prepared for”. In the context of my remarks to other aspects of these questions, my concerns would be ones that focus on the kinds of problems people have today and the changing market forces that affect likely job opportunities. We have a good telecomms linkage to the outside, thought there are still some gaps internally. We also could do with better linkage to the Internet than currently, and various initiatives to assess the efficacy of uses of the new communications technologies should be supported. The recent Forbairt report on “Ireland, The digital age”, provides a number of rather general suggestions as to what needs to be done, with which I am in general agreement, though I do have reservations about some of the details. (I must however note that I find the prophetic tone of the report when discussing the “digital age” somewhat overblown. The report may be a useful starting point, but it needs to be supplemented with several more detailed sectoral studies and by case studies).
o What are the Implications arising from the Issues / Preparedness points raised above
I believe that one good outcome of this initiative could be getting people in all walks of life to discuss the kind of society they would like to have, and only then discuss the role of technology. There is still far too much hype for the past 25 years at least about the microelectronics revolution, information society, Internet, etc. What is needed are much more detailed sectoral studies that might help to pinpoint potential problems and opportunities for Irish business. Events such as “awareness week” and courses on “computer literacy” are not where we should be expending the effort. If people are shown real uses of the technology, and can see benefits to them, they will have no problem in learning to use the tools. The problem is not in training per se, but in understanding the way in which the technology might change the way we do our work (Cf. Bannon, 1993). There should be much more emphasis on education where studies of business and technology are part and parcel, and not disjoint. Currently our educational system is still mired in disciplinary turf-fights, and needs to have a dose of economic realism. I would invite the Government to begin a serious re-appraisal of the quality of the educational system at 3rd level here, and its relevance to perceived needs in the society. As someone who has worked in several countries, I have serious criticisms of the educational system here, despite the recurring refrain about “our wonderful educational system”. (Cf. Bannon, 1995).
o Identify appropriate tactical & strategic initiatives which might be undertaken :
- More evaluation studies on existing pilot projects in advanced telecoms and IT
- Select a few specific business sectors and support them in organising a group to outline their current problems and needs, and then see how they might be addressed through new technologies
- Find and disseminate interesting and successful case studies of use of IT (business / non-profit)
- Evaluate 3rd level education and training in IT related areas ( with a view to devising a more integrated and coherent curriculum that ties the understanding of the technologies to actual uses)
- Support a few flagship projects with particular relevance to the image of Ireland we wish to portray to the outside world - e-g- Government WWW pages, sophisticated electronic access to the IDA, ....
- Provide support for interdisciplinary endeavours - in the form of once off “happenings” but also more longer term Centres to bring together - artists, animators, musicians, media, computer scientists, engineers, designers, human factors people, psychologists, anthropologists to develop new forms of creative expression and new synergies. Currently educational establishments tend to be too biased in their disciplinary makeup to really support such initiatives, and need some further prodding from the outside. While they may exist in name, the issue is to make sure that one creates a melting pot of different skills and abilities. (NOTE: This is being pursued in other countries where I have worked, and it is something that I personally am very keen to promote. I would be happy to develop a more detailed presentation on what I mean if there is interest.)
3. Flagship Projects :
Identify here projects / activities which you wish to identify to the Committee which could serve to highlight the impact of the emerging Information Society
This question would appear to be the place where one promotes one’s own pet projects!
I will try not to indulge in this, but rather argue that we need to look at a variety of initiatives in a variety of different social and economic sectors, and show innovative uses of new technologies that actually improve the quality of life for people, and / or hopefully business performance. So, within local and central government, we should identify projects, based not simply on large scale use of new technology, but on uses of the new technologies that can be shown to have had significant impact on people’s work and living. These should be determined based on citizen’s approval of the schemes, not on the PR value of them. I would imagine schemes could be found that do this in such areas as : Dept. of social welfare use of smart cards for the unemployed to allow them access to services ( currenlty working I believe?) ; examples of significantly reduced paperwork due to EDI, the way some small Irish companies have managed to exploit niche markets via world-wide marketing on the WWW, genuine, as distinct from PR, innovative uses of new technologies in education, successful (and sustained) examples of teleworking, etc. The focus should be on the perceived benefits of these services to some group or sector, not simply the use of the most advanced technology. Indeed, I would stress that we should also have examples of how certain businesses were radically transformed through the use of quite “simple” technologies as well. For the Government, I would like to see Internal Revenue launch a pilot project in doing online tax returns for example. (In Denmark, this is already the case. I have an academic colleague visiting the Centre currently who did her tax forms from here over the Internet!)
I also believe that some emphasis should be given to projects that relate to important aspects of specifically Irish life and culture - so for example, areas such as tourism, the food sector, the caring professions, possibly enhancing quality of life of the elderly or disabled, cultural aspects such as music, literature etc. But again, my focus would be on how these projects are actually working, not setting up new, mainly PR exercises to promote some notion of the “information society”. In my view, aspects of this society are here now, in a myriad of ways, we do not need to “promote” it, just to find interesting examples of innovative uses of what is available that have an impact on people’s well-being.
If I might make reference to one project that I find of particular interest, yet which might not be seen initially as having much to do with the Information Society, I would mention Marial Hannon’s STORY project with teachers and schoolchildren, based at Bunratty. An exhibition of this work was recently opened by the President, and the project was also selected by the EU to be presented at the recent summit in South Africa. This is a wonderful project that has many facets to it, without currently involving any specific new technology per se. Yet it is all about issues to do with information, with sharing, with history, with locales, with stories, with drawings, collages, with objects and artefacts, with shared understandings, with different languages and cultures. As it is, it is a wonderful project, and could be used to show that conceptions of the information society do not purely depend on the technologies of their delivery. Indeed, I am currently discussing how we can electronically augment the information spaces that Marial has developed, via both archival presentation of material via CD-ROMs and developing a community network over the Internet so that students and teachers can electronically communicate and work together on these issues.
4. Additional comments :
My comments are made from the perspective of someone who has been working within an information society for the past 20 years, attempting to develop information technologies that are usable and useful in a variety of contexts. The major concern that I have with this whole initiative is the apparent premise that it is based on, namely the notion of the “information society” as a new, modular and reified concept. Within the conceptual framework(s) that I work with, none of these assumptions are justified. There have been many information societies in the history of the world, 5th century Athens, medieval Florence, etc. Exactly how society will both shape and react to the ongoing changes in technology is also an open-ended question. The issue is not simply how Ireland “reacts to” some set of technical and economic forces, but how we as a society, having agreed on some of the central (desired) features of our society, can evolve an agenda that can help shape the future direction of technologies-in-use.
The future is a direction, not a place, as some have argued, and this means that we should not assume a position of technological determinism, where we must simply try to “react to” external forces, but can actively shape them to our needs. By this I am not implying that we in Ireland have the power to directly change large scale economic and technical forces that are currently transforming aspects of Western industrialised society, but we should pay attention to how we accommodate them into our everyday work lives. There is no single model of how this co-adaptation of technology and society can and will take place, but if we start out from an assumption that all we can do is “prepare for” or “react to”, some posited “information society” as if it were some immutable object that is about to be unleashed on our society, then I think we will have missed a myriad of opportunities for adapting aspects of the technologies to our local needs.
Before that process can be begun, we need to encourage people to reflect on, and understand their current social, economic situation, and start to envision ways in which the technology might assist them in their endeavours. If one takes this position, then focus should not be on “computer literacy” courses, whatever that might mean ( I have a strong critique of this concept, if people are interested, which I will not develop here), or on “ technology awareness” courses, which tend to be anodyne and too general, but should focus on helping groups, be they local initiatives or even business sectors, to identify their current problems, understand the business that they are in, and then, from this base, to see how they can adapt the evolving technologies in order to pursue their goals. In my view, we will get nowhere if we think the issues we have to deal with in discussing the “information society” are primarily technological, - rather, they are economic and social.
It is for that reason that, without in any way criticising the individual competencies of the members of the Irish Information Society Initiative Steering Committee, I find the makeup of this committee quite strange. Given that we need to address the kind of society that we wish to live in, albeit taking into account the rapidly changing technical infrastructure that is affecting many aspects of our lives, surely the kind of debate we need to be fostering is one that involves human, social and economic factors, informed by current and foreseen technical developments, and not one that is dictated by technology alone. If we accept this, then the lack of people who cover the human, psychological, social, and economic aspects of our society on this committee seems a quite amazing omission. So I would like to see psychologists, sociologists, economists, geographers, philosophers, cultural studies commentators, theologians, social workers, historians, musicians and especially some representatives from disadvantaged sectors of society (elderly, disabled, ...) on this Committee, not out of any sense of simply trying to be populist, but out of a genuine feeling that it is exactly people with these kinds of backgrounds that can help provide visions of possible futures for our society, and how the new technologies might affect - and indeed, effect - these visions. In my opinion, much of the debate about the “information society”, whether it occurred 15 years ago (e.g. the EU FAST Programme initiative on the Information Society), or currently, is premised on a very narrow view of how innovation and societal transformation actually occurs, with a fixation on the technology itself, and not on the other forces that shape that technology in use.
Thank you for the opportunity to raise these points, and apologies for the rhetoric, but I believe passionately in the need to redress the imbalance between user needs and technical capabilities that currently exists in much of the discussion about the Information Society.
Appendices
1. Brief CV of Liam Bannon.
2. Note on UL CSCW Research Centre.
3. Bannon, L. and Barry, U. (1982). Reflections on the Social Implications of the New Information Technologies. In Bannon, L., Barry, U., and Holst, O. (1982) (Eds.), Information technology: Impact on the way of life. Dublin: Tycooly International Publishing.
4. Bannon, L. (1993) Getting the Priorities Right. ComputerScope (supplement on Training), Sept. 1993.
5. Bannon, L. (1995) Perspectives on Learning in a changing educational environment: Some challenging issues. UL Internal Memo, Oct. 1995.
References
Bannon, L. (1993) Getting the Priorities Right. ComputerScope (supplement on Training), Sept. 1993.