Freedom of Information

Published in The Message, 1:10
(The Message has since ceased publication and I don't, alas, remember the date; the date on this post is a guess)

Everything in the garden is rosy. I should know; I sit here in the middle of the garden, tapping away at the keyboard (sun on my face and a castle behind me), downloading information from half a world when needed, uploading work to my home many kilometres away as it's completed.

Rosy for whom, for how long, how reliably? What, exactly, does "freedom" mean to you?

The medium is the message; and this magazine, The Message, is the medium which pipes at the gates of a third wave information age dawn ... but history warns that new dawns are fragile plants, subject to blight unless carefully tended and pruned. We are in the first swell ahead of that third wave; the wave itself is our future ... ride it, or go under; that is the question.

I am writing this paragraph whilst taking a break from something else. A moment ago, I was writing an outline for a staff development session; a few minutes hence I shall put in time on a short story, before returning refreshed to the training outline. All this, of course, is the commonplace magic of the computer; in pen and paper days, it would have been far less easy to jump about in this way - the information age has freed my mind to work in a more natural, more restful, more productive way. McLuhan's touchstone, "the medium is the message", has a new and liberating expression. Thanks to computer and telephone, the message is infinite freedom.

And yet ... true though it is, does that tell the whole truth? No; it could, but of course it doesn't.

If you are reading this, you are obviously a disciple of the new world which the information revolution promises to deliver into our hands. You probably buy what I'm saying, so far; but you probably see it in terms of the valuable and necessary work done by organisations such as CommUnity or EFF, or of the arguments put by Mark Brennan two issues ago. For the moment, though, I'm not talking about threats to your freedom of the netways; I'm warning of the dangers inherently posed by the very instruments of freedom themselves. Perhaps that will sound less palatable to you; as a true disciple, you may see this suggestion as heresy. Perhaps it sounds melodramatic. Perhaps I will lose you at this point; I hope not – I hope that you will read on, and suspend either agreement or dissent until I've finished.

Remember your history.

The first wave, the agrarian revolution, boosted humankind to freedom from winter starvation. It also starved half of that humankind to death outside the enclosures in the process.

The second wave, the industrial revolution, democratised social surplus, free time and material wealth. It also starved another swathe of the population, and broke more on the wheel of factory exploitation. More familiar to you and me, today, it also gave us the mind numbing production line from which the sirens of the third wave information revolution promise deliverance.

Ride the wave, or go under? If you doubt the second possibility, you are a prime candidate for washout. Recognise it, and you can start planning to ride the crest. Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

What, exactly, does freedom mean to you?

Unless you can answer that question, you can't tell whether it is being given to you, taken from you, or counterfeited because the information age, a revolution like any other, brings a new face to everything. Liberation and oppression are always and everywhere the twin edges on the blade of change, the inseparable faces of a single coin. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and each one of us bears a responsibility for its defence and, more immediately in the face of change, an equal responsibility for its creation from that change.

This revolution, hinging around the computer and telecommunications, already has a number of visible results accruing directly from the informational principle. One of these, teleworking, is well known and widely discussed; but only from a fragmentary heterogeneity of perspective. What, exactly, does teleworking mean to you?

Teleworking is most often used to describe independent, entrepreneurial individuals who shift their work, and with it their control of their own working patterns, from seat of employment to another location: either to their home or a "telecottage" facility. The more obvious potential benefits and drawbacks of this are common currency: they boil down to a trade-off between flexibility and self direction (pro) against social dislocation and erosion of private space (con).
This is not, though, the only application of the word. I work partly by teleworking myself, and I am happy (on balance) with the results. In one of the institutions to which I am linked, however, I meet Carol. Carol is a teleworker, too, though nobody describes her as such.

Carol is a secretary. She has always been recognised by her employers as an unusually (perhaps supernaturally) efficient and valuable secretary. She has always enjoyed her job in particular, she has enjoyed doing it well, making a unique contribution to the work of the institution. She wasn't only valuable to her own department; during lulls in her work, she would automatically look to where she could be useful; she would help other departments, she would call in to help a new secretary settle in; she would improve or refine operational systems; she would "network".

About two years ago, the email system was extended from academic and managerial staff to admistrative support staff. Carol was online. People who used to welcome her visits now found it easy to send email pleas for help; and she, enthusiastically embracing the new tool at her disposal, found it most efficient to respond in the same way, rather than trekking up to their office in another building.

Spending cuts arrived. Harassed managers, on the run from their accounting spreadsheets, noticed that Carol was making a huge, but invisible, contribution way beyond her job description or salary level. A secretary in another department left; Carol was offered a promotion to "secretarial coördinator". Even after accompanying pay rise, the institution saved a fair chunk of the departed secretary's salary. Carol was given her own office, a nerve centre of the email system from which she could telework to all parts of the institution. Other secretaries left; such was Carol's efficiency, in organising people and systems, that there was no need to replace them; her salary rose, and so did institutional savings.

A success story; costs saved, no redundancies, the worth of an individual recognised, and all through the power of teleworking.

But Carol never has lulls in her work, now; her own efficiency has ironed them out. She never leaves her office, because it would mean leaving the tools of her function. Despite greater institutional efficiency, "networking" has declined in the face of the network and the quality of work in the departments has declined with no Carol to breeze through. Carol gets no pleasure from her work, now, and has been suffering increasingly severe migraines.

Am I playing Cassandra, predicting doom? No, I'm not. Still less am I suggesting that we should resist the tide and go back to old ways. What I'm saying is that it is up to each one of us to think carefully about what we want from the new world and then to try for it.

History is independent of individuals in its broad sweep; but individual life within history is the sum product of individual actions in response to it. Sugar coated now, and full of wonder, what message does the medium bear for the future?

Freedom or servitude? It's in your hands.

The information age, in itself, is a fait accompli which no individual, state or corporation can shape or deflect; but it is still malleable, still disorganised, its final form still potential. If you simply allow yourself to be swept along by the tide, your final destination is a random lottery maybe good, maybe bad, maybe indifferent. If you choose your moment, though, you can seize one current and fractionally resist another; like a free fall parachutist, compelled to fall downward but riding tiny variations to a choice of the available landing points.

What, exactly, does freedom mean to you? Where do you want to fall to? What are you doing about it?

Concentrate on a single factor (even such a major factor as the InterNet), ignoring the revolution as a whole, and you fall prey to parochialism and lose your control of you destiny. Even the InterNet is a temporary manifestation of the larger wave; only you will endure, as the system mutates about you. What form do you wish that endurance to take? Make the decision, or have it made for you; freedom is a muscle, it atrophies unless it is used. Like a sub-post-office, you must use it or lose it.

What, exactly, does freedom mean to you? To Carol, it is the freedom to pause and think, to touch other human beings. To me, it is the freedom to decide. Nothing is absolute, of course, but the relativities are ours to ride or succumb to: which do we choose? I must obey the dictates of lecture timetables and meetings, but that is freedom if I will it to be (how else would I know Carol's story?) and for the rest I am liberated by the technology to choose; that choice, and only that, is the liberation. The portable telephone, the notebook computer, Gesellschaft and the InterNet, are merely means to an end. If they become the end itself, I am lost in thrall to them, their servant not their master.

I am writing, now, in a park; the leaves around me full of children. Other parts have been written over my Sunday breakfast in bed, or in an art gallery, or over coffee in a small market café, or on a cliff top above surf ... but that is only freedom as long as I can turn the whole paraphanalia off when I choose – as long as I don't have to work when I am in those places.

The greatest improvement in the telephone system, over the last twenty years, is not digital technology but the little switch that lets me turn it off, shutting out the world and work at will. The same component is the most important part of computer, Walkman, radio - all of them freedom machines on my cliff top as long as I control them. The technology and its off-switch are equal partners in my freedom. Because without the off-switch, there's the tendency to do just that one, extra job before bed. From there, it's a slippery slope to three o'clock in the morning, with your off-switch in someone else's hand, at the other end of a telephone line.

Carol has handed in her notice; she will move to the post of secretary in a small, struggling charity organisation where she will find only half the salary and no modem but will see all her co-workers. We each have at least an idea where our different freedoms lie; we have each found our different off-switch.

What, exactly, does freedom mean to you? Do you have your finger on your own selected off-switch? Do you know where, and what, your off-switch is?

Have you planned how to ensure that it is never, ever, taken from within your reach?

Do it now.