I came across an article by Jon Cruddas about immigration on his home page and thought these paragraphs taken from it show another viewpoint on the 'Knowledge Economy'.
'Globalisation and the information and communication technologies have been widely cited as the key contemporary levers of change that are reshaping the labour markets of the future. Yet, the fundamental problem with this conception of the 'new knowledge economy' is one of evidence. On the basis of both the empirical changes over the last ten years and the best projections for the future, it is clear that we are witnessing an ever more pronounced polarisation within the labour market – and wider society – often described as the 'hour glass' economy.
On the one hand, there exists a primary labour market – the knowledge economy. On the other, there is an expanding secondary labour market where the largest growth is occurring – in service-related elementary occupations, administrative and clerical occupations, sales occupations, caring, personal service jobs and the like. In terms of absolute employment growth since the early 1990s, the fastest growing occupations have been in four long-established services (sales assistants, data input clerks, storekeepers and receptionists); in state dominated education and health services; and the caring occupations (care assistants, welfare and community workers, and nursery nurses).
In short, employment growth has been concentrated in occupations that could scarcely be judged new, still less the fulcrum of a 'new economy'.'
JS
Friday 29 June 2007
Sunday 24 June 2007
Puttnam speaks out on digitally divided schools
Last week, Lord Puttman voiced his concerns regarding the ‘digital divide’ at an event hosted by the Bristol-based Futurelab research organisation, with a particular focus on access within education. It is easy for those of us familiar with the Internet and ICT-based learning to forget that many in the UK are lacking both the access to these technologies, and the skills necessary to use them, in addition to making the assumption that as software advances, such inequalities will be eroded. Puttman actually suggests that those who already use technology will continue to benefit from new developments, while those left behind will remain at the starting point.
Puttman is keen to point out the skills which schoolchildren can develop through the use of ICT technology, however there is an additional aspect which was mentioned neither in his speech, nor extensively in Futurelab’s accompanying report ‘Beyond the Digital Divide’. This is of the social impact of some students having access to technology, and others being left behind.
Sean Coughlan, an education reporter for the BBC explains that students who use the internet, 3G phones and online social networks are likely to interact with those who use the same platforms, and this take place in an increasingly insular fashion. If the desperation of undergraduates when they find themselves without the internet or sufficient phone battery, as well as the digitalisation of many educational resources, is anything to go by, the UK already has one section of the population for whom such advanced technologies are a learning necessity. As (some) schoolchildren are exposed to technology at an increasingly early age, this will have a social impact, creating a divide between those in the playground who have seen the latest YouTube video or participated in last night's MSN conversation, and those who have not. The Futurelab report states that
‘Whilst ICT use is certainly not a pre-requisite to surviving in 21st society, therefore, it is almost certainly an integral element of thriving in 21st century society’.
What should be remembered is that thriving on a social basis is as much a reason to challenge the digital divide as academic discrepancies which can arise.
The Futurelab report itself contains some surprising statistics for a self-proclaimed techno-dependent individual such as myself. Although the UK’s uptake of broadband as been increasing since its introduction, over half of all households in Scotland and Northern Ireland have no internet access at all. However, this can be connected to overall wealth and quality of life, and indeed the richest areas of the UK (the Southwest and London) unsurprisingly have the highest uptake.
As a student who has been lucky enough to have had access to the Internet at home from an early age, I can state that the benefits on an educational (and, not forgetting, on a social level) are immeasurable. Therefore, if the government is serious about its educational targets (such as more students from poorer backgrounds going to University), then it needs to make sure that access to ICT platforms is not a dividing line. Investment into technology at schools is not enough- access at home, and the development of life-long skills, also needs attention. Lord Puttman’s comments on the subject are a welcome sign that this issue is being taken seriously by the political elite- after all, if they are going to be able to use Blackberries in Parliament, shouldn’t the future generation get in on the action as well?
KC
Puttman is keen to point out the skills which schoolchildren can develop through the use of ICT technology, however there is an additional aspect which was mentioned neither in his speech, nor extensively in Futurelab’s accompanying report ‘Beyond the Digital Divide’. This is of the social impact of some students having access to technology, and others being left behind.
Sean Coughlan, an education reporter for the BBC explains that students who use the internet, 3G phones and online social networks are likely to interact with those who use the same platforms, and this take place in an increasingly insular fashion. If the desperation of undergraduates when they find themselves without the internet or sufficient phone battery, as well as the digitalisation of many educational resources, is anything to go by, the UK already has one section of the population for whom such advanced technologies are a learning necessity. As (some) schoolchildren are exposed to technology at an increasingly early age, this will have a social impact, creating a divide between those in the playground who have seen the latest YouTube video or participated in last night's MSN conversation, and those who have not. The Futurelab report states that
‘Whilst ICT use is certainly not a pre-requisite to surviving in 21st society, therefore, it is almost certainly an integral element of thriving in 21st century society’.
What should be remembered is that thriving on a social basis is as much a reason to challenge the digital divide as academic discrepancies which can arise.
The Futurelab report itself contains some surprising statistics for a self-proclaimed techno-dependent individual such as myself. Although the UK’s uptake of broadband as been increasing since its introduction, over half of all households in Scotland and Northern Ireland have no internet access at all. However, this can be connected to overall wealth and quality of life, and indeed the richest areas of the UK (the Southwest and London) unsurprisingly have the highest uptake.
As a student who has been lucky enough to have had access to the Internet at home from an early age, I can state that the benefits on an educational (and, not forgetting, on a social level) are immeasurable. Therefore, if the government is serious about its educational targets (such as more students from poorer backgrounds going to University), then it needs to make sure that access to ICT platforms is not a dividing line. Investment into technology at schools is not enough- access at home, and the development of life-long skills, also needs attention. Lord Puttman’s comments on the subject are a welcome sign that this issue is being taken seriously by the political elite- after all, if they are going to be able to use Blackberries in Parliament, shouldn’t the future generation get in on the action as well?
KC
Thursday 21 June 2007
IN G00GLE WE TRUST?
Can you keep a secret? Google can. Or so they say. For some reason, I want to believe them. The EU and the BBC (don’t call it a vendetta) clearly have their doubts. Obviously, I’m not saying I have more faith in Google than I do in the EU and the BBC. But to be honest, I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw them (which isn’t very far, since they are very big, and Knowledge Politics is very small).
The core of the latest Google dispute is precisely this: Google amasses – and has an unsurpassable capacity to amass – a large amount of information about our personal proclivities. There is no solid law stopping them. The EU, the only thing we have that passes for a global regulator, and the BBC, the only thing we have that passes for a reputable global media corporation, are keeping an eye on things. EU ‘pressure’ has – thankfully – led to a magnanimous Google decision to reduce the time they keep certain information from two years to eighteen months.
Eighteen months? That’s still an eternity, in the virtual world. Two years, said the EU, could have been against the law (assuming one can break a law which was made before the crime in question had hardly been imagined). Eighteen months is ok though, is it? Well it would be, under certain circumstances.
But surely those circumstances don’t include a scenario in which Google’s own global privacy counsel admits the firm’s privacy policy is ‘vague’. The vague bits he was referring to refer to Google’s policies on sharing information with third parties. They say “oh, well, er, sometimes we have to help the police with investigations.” Knowledge Politics says “what about the rest?” Are the ad companies benefiting from Google’s vague privacy policy? Google has actually just paid £1.6bn for Doubleclick – the ad firms aren’t even third parties anymore; Google likes to keep its data-sharing in-house.
I like Google. I use it countless times every day (actually, I’m sure somebody is counting!). They provide a brilliant service, they are challenging Microsoft, they provide some assistance to FOSS, and their technological expertise is extremely impressive. But power must be checked, as simple as that. Not by political grandstanding, or by journalists, but by law. As Google gets bigger (it is currently advancing full steam ahead into the higher education ‘sector’), regulations must be in place to mean that information, the most valuable commodity of the information society, is only ever used in accordance with the public interest and individual rights.
Don’t hate Google. Why bother? I don’t want to have to trust them. Let’s just empower public authorities to meaningfully regulate them. Then all we need to do is work on trusting public authorities.
CB
The core of the latest Google dispute is precisely this: Google amasses – and has an unsurpassable capacity to amass – a large amount of information about our personal proclivities. There is no solid law stopping them. The EU, the only thing we have that passes for a global regulator, and the BBC, the only thing we have that passes for a reputable global media corporation, are keeping an eye on things. EU ‘pressure’ has – thankfully – led to a magnanimous Google decision to reduce the time they keep certain information from two years to eighteen months.
Eighteen months? That’s still an eternity, in the virtual world. Two years, said the EU, could have been against the law (assuming one can break a law which was made before the crime in question had hardly been imagined). Eighteen months is ok though, is it? Well it would be, under certain circumstances.
But surely those circumstances don’t include a scenario in which Google’s own global privacy counsel admits the firm’s privacy policy is ‘vague’. The vague bits he was referring to refer to Google’s policies on sharing information with third parties. They say “oh, well, er, sometimes we have to help the police with investigations.” Knowledge Politics says “what about the rest?” Are the ad companies benefiting from Google’s vague privacy policy? Google has actually just paid £1.6bn for Doubleclick – the ad firms aren’t even third parties anymore; Google likes to keep its data-sharing in-house.
I like Google. I use it countless times every day (actually, I’m sure somebody is counting!). They provide a brilliant service, they are challenging Microsoft, they provide some assistance to FOSS, and their technological expertise is extremely impressive. But power must be checked, as simple as that. Not by political grandstanding, or by journalists, but by law. As Google gets bigger (it is currently advancing full steam ahead into the higher education ‘sector’), regulations must be in place to mean that information, the most valuable commodity of the information society, is only ever used in accordance with the public interest and individual rights.
Don’t hate Google. Why bother? I don’t want to have to trust them. Let’s just empower public authorities to meaningfully regulate them. Then all we need to do is work on trusting public authorities.
CB
Tuesday 19 June 2007
The information straightjacket
The information society has no frontier. Not even backstreet Indian takeaways. Wherever you look, you can find ordinary people trying to deal with the benefits and drawbacks of technological development. A couple of days ago, I was waiting impatiently for my order in Jeera's curry house in Sheffield (highly recommended, by the way), when a young, confident and slightly sleazy salesman bounded in, and asked to see the manager.
Cue manager: highly dubious (he conducted the meeting over the counter, which was fortunate for the readers of Knowledge Politics' blog, if irksome to the salesman), but polite nonetheless. The brochure in the briefcase had nothing to do with vacuum cleaners or double glazing windows, but rather a website. The salesman worked for an online firm whose sole product - it appears - is a site that allows restaurants to take orders online. A prospective customer, in the mood for a Balti, wouldn't bother with the Yellow Pages or the stack of junk mail on the floor, they would click straight to said site, search for Indian restaurants in deliverable distance, and have an ordered placed in moments, without the hassle of human interaction.
Fantastic, yes? Jeera's would get a lot more business. Well, here at Knowledge Politics, we have an annoying habit of looking at the bigger picture. Jeera's would have to pay this online firm 9% of every order (for a very simple online function). Not so bad, we may suppose, if Jeera's is doing a lot more business. But it is bad if all of their orders start coming in online (once you hear its possible, why would you ever use the phone to order a curry from them?), and they lose 9% of their revenue (and a much higher proportion of their profit margin) - surely it would take a huge surge in business to cover the loss of such a huge chunk.
So what? Jeera's doesn't have to pay this firm, do they? They could keep faith in the telephone and their passing trade. Their food is excellent, they don't need this new fad. But what if one of their local rivals does decide 9% is a price worth paying? If people prefer online ordering (the evidence is that they do, emphatically), they will choose the rival over Jeera's. Jeera's choice, therefore, is stark: potentially give up 9% of their revenue, or lose custom to the higher-tech rival. Jeera didn't ask for this choice: curry making is a low-tech industry, and rightly so. But capital has been pumped into some new internet device, and its owners are thirsty for returns.
Not all the Indian restaurants can win: we aren't suddenly going to be eating more curry, just because its easier to order it. As we miss out more and more on the exertion involved in picking up the phone, or even walking to collect our food, we'll probably start eating less. The only winner is the firm with the website. They probably have a patent. Even if they don't, they have some basic technical expertise that Jeera's doesn't. Is this all the information society can do for us: providing a service we don't really need, and which minimises human interaction, so that the Indian food industry becomes more profitable for a non-curry making company at the expense of the curry makers?
I think we can expect more. But it'll take a lot more than technology itself to realise the best of the information society. We need to work a lot harder to manage technologies like the internet to make them productive rather than destructive.
Cue manager: highly dubious (he conducted the meeting over the counter, which was fortunate for the readers of Knowledge Politics' blog, if irksome to the salesman), but polite nonetheless. The brochure in the briefcase had nothing to do with vacuum cleaners or double glazing windows, but rather a website. The salesman worked for an online firm whose sole product - it appears - is a site that allows restaurants to take orders online. A prospective customer, in the mood for a Balti, wouldn't bother with the Yellow Pages or the stack of junk mail on the floor, they would click straight to said site, search for Indian restaurants in deliverable distance, and have an ordered placed in moments, without the hassle of human interaction.
Fantastic, yes? Jeera's would get a lot more business. Well, here at Knowledge Politics, we have an annoying habit of looking at the bigger picture. Jeera's would have to pay this online firm 9% of every order (for a very simple online function). Not so bad, we may suppose, if Jeera's is doing a lot more business. But it is bad if all of their orders start coming in online (once you hear its possible, why would you ever use the phone to order a curry from them?), and they lose 9% of their revenue (and a much higher proportion of their profit margin) - surely it would take a huge surge in business to cover the loss of such a huge chunk.
So what? Jeera's doesn't have to pay this firm, do they? They could keep faith in the telephone and their passing trade. Their food is excellent, they don't need this new fad. But what if one of their local rivals does decide 9% is a price worth paying? If people prefer online ordering (the evidence is that they do, emphatically), they will choose the rival over Jeera's. Jeera's choice, therefore, is stark: potentially give up 9% of their revenue, or lose custom to the higher-tech rival. Jeera didn't ask for this choice: curry making is a low-tech industry, and rightly so. But capital has been pumped into some new internet device, and its owners are thirsty for returns.
Not all the Indian restaurants can win: we aren't suddenly going to be eating more curry, just because its easier to order it. As we miss out more and more on the exertion involved in picking up the phone, or even walking to collect our food, we'll probably start eating less. The only winner is the firm with the website. They probably have a patent. Even if they don't, they have some basic technical expertise that Jeera's doesn't. Is this all the information society can do for us: providing a service we don't really need, and which minimises human interaction, so that the Indian food industry becomes more profitable for a non-curry making company at the expense of the curry makers?
I think we can expect more. But it'll take a lot more than technology itself to realise the best of the information society. We need to work a lot harder to manage technologies like the internet to make them productive rather than destructive.
Wednesday 13 June 2007
Reaction to Blair media speech
Tony Blair's attack on the media has been rightly derided. I agree with many of the sentiments, having despaired routinely at the nature of much news coverage, which resembles a competition between banility and sensationalism (Doctor Who Is Not News). But like almost all politicians, Blair cares far, far, far too much about what the media. They assume all of the following:
Interesting. Find out more about the issue by reading our report on the Directive, here.
- everyone reads the papers in as much detail as they do
- news journalists speak for the country
- public pereception of politicians is determined entirely by the media
None of these things are true to anything like the extent Blair et al believe they are. These assumptions have even proved fatal. Dr David Kelly was pursued as the source of a leak because of a slight factual inaccuracy in an early morning radio report from a third division reporter. In the US Lewis Libby has been convicted because (allegedly) Dick Cheney devotes himself to rebutting and ridiculing any journalist speaking about him, regardless of the fact that not a single vote is going to be swayed by the articles they've written.
Anyway. Blair's speech contained a reference to an old friend of ours, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. He basically welcomed the fact that 'television' news streamed over the net would be subject to the same regulation as regular news. Here's an extract:
"OFCOM regulate broadcasting, except for the BBC, which largely has its own system of regulation. But under the new European regulations all television streamed over the internet may be covered by OFCOM. As the technology blurs the distinction between papers and television, it becomes increasingly irrational to have different systems of accountability based on technology that no longer can be differentiated in the old way."Interesting. Find out more about the issue by reading our report on the Directive, here.
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