Category Archives: Education, Health And Welfare
Can Digital Technology Meet The Challenges Of Social Inclusion?
New technology, particularly email and the worldwide web, has many benefits to offer almost everyone. But it fails to reach many who would find it useful, principally because of its complexities and unfamiliar style. Perhaps we need to think about a ‘Library of the Web’ as a way of offering a level of guarantee of acceptability in terms of content, and to adopt a Plain English Campaign-style approach to e-tech presentation.
There is plenty of evidence that the worldwide web has helped people to make contact across huge divides; but the debate continues (see Guardian letters today) about whether on overall balance it contributes, or does not contribute, to social inclusion.
Essentially, the most serious techno-divide seems not to be between people of different ages or of, e.g., different genders, but between those who are willing and able to get to grips with new technology and those who are not.
Email can be a great boon for people who are housebound, as well as home-workers and of course those in employment. Websites can provide the most amazing information. In every case however there has to be a facility in both the physical and the attitudinal senses.
We can make simple e-tech equipment for young children; why not also for people (some of them older, some with physical difficulties, or whatever) who have difficulties or concerns about using it?
We can ensure that what children read is acceptable and generally valid information. Can this not be done on some level, in terms of public information for everyone, about how to check what you are reading has some substance? Libraries on the whole manage to do this for the books they stock. What about a ‘Library on the Web’ of some sort, maybe at varying levels of provision?
Employment opportunities and training are quite rightly becoming much more accessible on line; so should opportunities for people to seek help with their health concerns, citizenship concerns and much else. These things do exist, but by no means as accessibly as many of us would like.
There is a widespread need to engage people who DON’T understand new technology in its production, when this is for general use, and especially when it’s intended as a public service. (We all pay for public service information; and there is anyway an irrefutable case for making sure we can all, or as many as will benefit from it, have genuine access to it.)
Much of e-tech is produced by people who find it difficult to see how perplexed many of the rest of us are by their language and modes of communication. The real challenge which faces them is to use their skills, at least for pubic domain e-content, to achieve the same level of presentational simplicity as that required, say, to operate domestic appliances or read a popular newspaper.
Social inclusion and entitlement continue to be pressing issues as the internet grows apace. Where is the equivalent of the Plain English Campaign, when it comes to the new technology?
What Priority For Liverpool Hospitals As Part Of The Northern Big Science Community?
Liverpool’s leading university hospitals are at risk of physical dispersal at exactly the same time that eight top universities across the North of England are trying to find ways to build their scientific synergies. The implications for Liverpool of the threat of dispersal seem so far not to be appreciated.
The news today is patchy. On one hand, we learn that the Northern Way has appointed an eminent cancer specialist to lead the N8 consortium, a scientific collaboration led by the University of Liverpool between eight universities from the North of England.
Called the Northern Research Partnership, the N8 consortium is a collaboration between Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York, which between them generate more than £620m per annum in research grants. N8 is concrete evidence that the three regional development agencies in the North of England are now actively getting their scientific act together.
Yet also today we read in the local paper that plans to expand the Royal Liverpool University Hospital on its present site – a project which has secured £500m of funding – may not be going ahead because the will is may not be there to find another way to take forward the local council’s £12m Hall Lane bypass scheme, which is part of the intended improvements to the City-M62 link route.
Add to this the apparent reluctance to secure huge improvements on their current site to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, and you do begin to wonder if the city understands that these hospitals are places of learning at the cutting edge of international research, as well of course as places where people can receive first class medical care.
It’s far less important for the future to allocate responsibility for who said what about these proposals, and when, than it is to find a way forward.
These hospitals need to be linked closely with the university and the Medical School; they need to nurture their community of practitioners; the ‘common room / photocopier’ effect is crucial here. If people at the cutting edge are dispersed, there is a danger that their impact will be likewise weakened; and there are also enormous implications here for investment and big business in Liverpool.
If eight universities across the whole of the North of England can recognise the benefits of getting together, surely there is a way, before it’s too late, that two hugely important Liverpool hospitals and a Medical School can be enabled in a much more intimate physical setting to do the same?
High Culture, Regeneration And The Legitimation Of Excellence
In some circles it is a given that High Culture is ‘inappropriate’ for ‘local people’. This is patronising. It dismisses the enjoyment the arts can bring to everyone, and ignores opportunities which the arts – as particularly visible public activities – can give for people to develop skills and even careers. Legitimation of ambition, in the arts or any other challenging positive activity, is important, regardless of where you live.
In a city such as Liverpool, there is for some a major issue about entitlement and appropriateness in respect of culture. It has on occasion been suggested that ‘high culture’ is not what should be on offer to local people, because they don’t / wouldn’t enjoy it.
This approach surely misses the point. Art must always be inclusive, but like many other activities, getting well acquainted requires patience and perseverance. All cities, and many smaller localities, need to offer every level and type of culture – and here is a challenge for developers as much as for community leaders and politicians – if they are to be true cultural centres, convincing and alive.
The case for a broad sweep in cultural provision is convincing. The argument that ‘high’ art is unnecessary because ‘people don’t want it’ is at best patronising, and at worst insulting, both to providers of that art and to its potential recipients. There must be opportunities for artists to offer their skills at the highest levels of achievement, alongside programmes which afford people engagement in the arts at lesser formal levels of skill (whether this be performing themselves, or listening / watching / looking at the work of others).
One of the challenges in this for regeneration is to find out how to knit together these opportunities, sometimes using the same human and cultural resources, and sometimes different ones, in a way which moves forward for all concerned. When this happens there will be more positive ‘artistic’ and professional role models for others in a given community to follow, which would help to ensure that local aspirations are high and that people from less-advantaged communities are not just left expecting the low-paid jobs.
Put another way, community perception of the art of the possible – expectations for the future – must include legitimation of the ambitious.
In the light of these considerations, perhaps there should be a re-emphasis within the questions above, at least to include these questions:
* How can decision-makers and leaders nurture formal arts and culture in places with limited understanding or appreciation of these?
* How would this impact in terms of enhancing engagement and opportunities for both arts practitioners and their ‘audiences’ / local people?
* What would be the cultural, social and economic synergies which follow from such enhancement and engagement?
Such questions in no way imply that everyone has to appreciate ‘high art’. What they might do is bring us to a greater consideration of the value of art and artists ‘for themselves’ as well as for what they can deliver in the normal sense of regeneration.
Regeneration plans must include artists directly, alongside all other partners. In including them directly we might even discover a new narrative to describe the meanings of ‘high art’, and what can come from it…
Dreaming Realist 