Hi John,
I really appreciated this comment. You are very right. So I blogged about it on my own site:
http://blog.vanderbeeken.com/2005/08/john_thackara_c.html
All the best,
Mark

John
I think you're being a little unfair. I chose the word 'modernising' in the title, precisely because it does carry connotations beyond simply speeding everything up. What I was trying to convey to the reader (and remember, the target audience for this sort of thing contains policy-makers, politicians, industry figures - not philosophers) was precisely that it's not enough to get more, faster cables in the ground. Modernity is a multi-faceted project.
However, I did set out in one chapter to look at the technological aspect of modernisation, which I linked directly to economic benefits. It is undeniably the case that the UK economy needs to ensure that its skills base adapts to its technological infrastructure, and the skills of its oversease competitors. This is the language our society and politicians speak. I didn't vote for it.
There are plenty of institutions and individuals better placed to map out richer, more amiguous versions of the future than me and the ippr. If you want your bureaucrats and wonks to start acting like poets, go to California and hang out with some management gurus. But I think most people would rather we stuck to our more dreary function.
Will

Will, You write: "This is the language our society and politicians speak. I didn't vote for it". In what way, then, is the IPPR a 'progressive' think tank? Surely the craven way politicians do what tech companies tell them to do - in the NHS, for example - is something policy advisors should contest, not go along with? If the purpose of the digital manifesto is to enhance national competitveness, then a more radical focus on social and cultural capital - enabled by tech - would be one way to achieve that. By the way, I share your distate for the way California management gurus link science fantasy futures with confident proclamations about the impossibility of government: their fixation on Tech is more dreary than our continued confidence in people.

Coming from Finland and having contributed to the Sixth Framework Program myself, I totally agree with your gripe "a lot about tech and not much about soc." I can see two reasons for it.

First, (risking a blatant generalisation) it seems to me that Europeans often start their problem solving from the wrong end. Too many projects proposed in FP6 are brilliant technical solutions to woefully narrow problems. The solution may be great but if it only helps a handful of people then who cares. Instead, projects should be driven by a social demand. I grudingly admit that the Americans with their market-driven approach are often smarter. They start by analysing a problem, then develop a solution to it. The solution may be a technical one but it doesn't have to be. As long as it makes life easier for enough people it will sell.

Secondly, technology-driven jobs are going to disappear. Daniel Pink made the elementary observation about "Asia, abundance and automation" in his book A Whole New Mind. Any job that can be done for less money somewere else or that can be automated is going to disappear from Europe and USA. What remains are the "right-brained", big picture jobs. We need to learn how to analyze the social context, synthesize abstract requirements, and arrive at a solution. Then specify that solution for somebody else to build.

John, your book seems very interesting.

On the blog discussion I would say: let's ask ourselves the question again: Does technology make us happy?

Not sure Europeans, Americans or Asians have the right or wrong approach to problems; but certainly if we continue developing technology based on "market niches" instead of social needs, technology will not make us happy.

We should probably look at children around the world and ask them if technology makes them happier, or fatter and lazier, or more intelligent.

Hopefully we (designers and tech-developers) focus our efforts on delivering the right cultural message using technology to the extent where it is necessary. I have the feeling that many high-tech products create more problems than solutions, because they're based on market trends not on social needs.

John has a very good point here, and I thank you for sort of reaching outside the choking conspiracy of silence and incompetence that much of ‘organised’ Euro research is about. If this kind of funding were dished out in a country like Cambodia, it would be seen almost as a travesty, but where its Europe, its OK, its still raising our competitiveness vs. Japan and US. Remember the europrocessor and OMI, it had limited success but did adavnce the ARM chip, and made for experiments with embedded systems and other things.

I have worked on several EU 5th and 6th framework projects on the human/social/cultural side since about 1995. Since that time it has been my experience that both in the proposal stage and throughout the development of the projects the human side is paid lip service at best. Used to be evaluators wanted some human factors work in projects, then it was business viability. They seem to have stuck there. The last big project that I worked on did away with even pretending to be interested in the ‘human’ side, I was more or less coerced to work in developing ‘business modelling’ for the MPEG-21 standard. Read for this building some sort of business case for DRM.

You know there were rich veins that were emerging in the 1990s when you chopped the chaff of the bandwagon effects. It takes events like Doors to perpetuate these tangential ideas. I remember one Euro meeting where Nick Negoponte was invited. After the very generous lunch, we had an Italian guy present his ‘human factors’ spiel. It was ‘users this’ and ‘users’ that . . . until . . . Negroponte burped and interjected: . . . ‘SHIT’ . . . "that’s shit" he said. I hadn't heard many gurus swear at that point of life, and not in sleepy after lunch 5th Framework meetings. . .

I was mortified, as I had myself bought into the idea of ‘user’ and seeing it challenged in this way dishevelled. His argument we all know and that was that new technologies are too far beyond the ken of users so their input would only confuse. No data there. This is contentious of course. But maybe this is how it is, enshried in policy, and in projects, and it is now seen this way.