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.