Europe Experiments with Multimedia: An Overview ...

Europe Experiments with Multimedia: An Overview of Social Experiments and Trials To Appear in The Information Society 1999

© 1998 Birgit Jaeger**, Roger S. Slack*, Robin Williams*

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Research Centre for Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK

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Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, Denmark.

Acknowledgement We are grateful to the following members of the Social Learning in Multimedia research network for allowing us to draw on the empirical studies on which this paper is based : Béatrice van Bastelaer, Claire Lobet-Maris (University of Namur), Jo Pierson, Jean-Claude Burgelman, Yves Punie and Frank Neuckens (SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel); Birgit Jæger (Roskilde University, Denmark), Finn J. S. Hansen (Danish Technical University, Denmark); Herbert Kubicek, Ulrich Schmid and Bernd Beckert (University of Bremen); Aphra Kerr, Paschal Preston, Stephanie McBride (Dublin City University); Harro van Lente (KPMG Inspire Foundation), Marc van Lieshout (Universiteit Maastricht); Jarle Brosveet, Knut H. Sørensen (Norwegian Technical University); Pierre Rossell (EPFL, Lausanne); Roger S. Slack, James Stewart and Robin Williams (University of Edinburgh, UK). The authors would like to thank the following for their comments on the paper: Béatrice van Bastelær, Aphra Kerr, Marc van Lieshout, Knut H. Sørensen and James K. Stewart. The Social Learning in Multimedia research programme was supported under the European Commission DG XII Targetted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) programme: Project 4141 PL 9510003.

Introduction This paper presents some findings from a review of 'social experiments' and multimedia trials in the adoption of multimedia-based technologies in Europe. After briefly examining what is meant by the term social experiment and multimedia trials, the paper first explores the origins and motives of such experiments. It adopts a broad definition of multimedia experiments including commercial pilots and technical trials to highlight both the diverse objectives that may underpin such experiments, as well as some largely overlapping concerns with the need to match technological opportunity with the emerging needs of potential users of new technology products and services. It then discusses some dilemmas that arise in the very endeavour of conducting experiments and trials. The main part of the paper then summarises a set of reviews of social experiments in multimedia and related technologies undertaken in a range of European countries: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, and the UK. The paper emphasises the diversity in multimedia experiments and trials. It examines their national and sectoral distribution and considers some possible approaches towards a taxonomy of experiments along a number of dimensions, and in particular in terms of their orientation towards addressing 'technical' matters or understanding the 'social' purposes and contexts of future users. Finally the paper makes some observations about the emerging patterns of multimedia experiments conducted in Europe, and discusses their implications. The starting point for this paper is the proliferation of multimedia pilots and experiments in most European countries and elsewhere (notably the other G7 countries, but also including many newly industrialising countries)1. These seem to have in common a concern to explore and demonstrate the utility and viability of multimedia based products and services. They take many forms, ranging from technical feasibility studies, to commercial trials and explicit ‘social experiments’ geared to involving final users in the design or application of systems. Our special interest is in the role that experiments may have as sites for ‘social learning’. By thus we mean, following Rip et al (1995), the processes whereby diverse societal actors learn to fit new technological potential to existing and emerging social needs. In particular, can these initiatives provide an effective arena for interaction between developers, users and other relevant players ; do they provide a space in which supplier offerings and their embedded presumptions about their utility and the user can be tested and refined? The social learning concept is not restricted to the pedagogic notion of a group of persons learning from others, but is conceived more broadly to include processes of negotiation and alignment of views within and between groups. All sorts of multimedia pilot and experiment offer some opportunities for social learning - whether they are technical experiments, commercial trials or social experiments. We are especially concerned with the latter, insofar as they are informed by particular sets of societal or policy concerns and/or seek to bring in potential users as actors in the design and configuration of products and services. However, all experiments, even the most technically oriented, are to some degree, ‘social’. No technology, however trialled, exists in isolation from the contexts of its use, even though conceptions of the user and uses may remain implicit.

Thus, by December 1997, The European Survey of the Information Society inventory of projects based on Information Society technologies in Europe had over 1,100 entries. (Source Information Society Projects Office http://www.ispo.cec.be/esis/ ) 1

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What do we mean by Social Experiments and Multimedia Experiments Ideas about social experiments can be traced back to initiatives in the 1980s, notably in Denmark, to develop community-oriented information technology applications. They were influenced by models of ‘Human Centred Technologies’ (Ehn 1988) that sought to improve the representation of workforce skills and working life aspirations in systems design, often through the direct involvement of workers and their representatives in the design process. Another influence, also notable in Denmark and other Northern European social democracies, is the emphasis given to democratic objectives. A key feature of these social experiments is that they were explicitly organised around particular societal objectives.2 They often sought to compensate for the predominance of technical specialists and a managerial/policy elite in decision making by involving a wider range of actors including ‘final’ users who were often not technical specialists. They were thus often concerned to involve actors in the earlier stages of systems design and development, and may be directed to finding new ways of engaging these users as actors in technology development. However, as this review demonstrates, social experiments of this sort were not taken up on a large scale and remain relatively rare. On the other hand they have striking parallels with other kinds of experimental initiative with multimedia - notably technical feasibility studies and pilots and commercial trials - which have today become extremely prevalent. Even narrowly ‘technical’ trials provide some space for broader social learning. For a start, initial technology development inevitably involves some representation of future users. And by the time a technology gets to the pilot stage it, of necessity, has to start involving users (though some trials can be criticised for example for using somewhat untypical groups, such as engineers as proxies for more representative users).3 Moreover, contemporary multimedia pilots and trials, like social experiments, are seeking to establish some aspects of the user and uses of a system.4 For example, commercial trials often seek to determine the extent of ‘user demand’ for particular products and services. In conducting such trials, developers may learn unplanned lessons - e.g. about the attractiveness of different aspects of their offerings to potential customers. There are, at the same time, important differences between these various kinds of initiative, particularly in relation to their explicit goals and manner of organisation. Social experiments represent conscious attempts to reassess and adapt models of the use of technology; they involve planned feedback from the user. We can also point to a profound difference between the attitude of the technical experimenter and the social experimenter. Learning in the technical experiment is by and large something done by the engineers and managers - those ‘users’ involved in the experiment are, in effect, resources for that learning. In contrast, in a social experiment, users are explicitly and deliberately brought into the development process; they are directly involved as actors in development. To understand the differences between these different kinds of initiative it is instructive to examine their diverse objectives, particularly in relation to the actors involved and the manner of their involvement. These in turn can be related to the broader context within which the experiment is 2Indeed

the term social experiments was first used to describe Danish initiatives in social welfare - and was extended to some experiments in community use of telematics. 3Engineers have often presumed, incorrectly, that they had an adequate understanding of users, and have tended to model the user in terms of their own local culture and characteristics, often with disastrous effect. One, very obvious example is the baroque design of technologies like the Video Cassette Recorder which today has a large range of functions which, however remain unintelligible and unused by majority of users. 4 These diverse kind of initiative, in more or less diverse ways, seek to embody 'better' and more robust models of the user and uses into the design of products and services. However, while all experiments in some ways objectify users into data, the way in which that data is used differ between the technical and the social experiment as well as their intended consequences.

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taking place. Within a spectrum of experiences we can contrast two approaches. On the one hand the classic Danish social experiments were underpinned by a view that, given its societal importance, technology should be subject to public assessment and control, coupled with concern that market provision on its own might fail to match potential human needs in particular respects. Under this concept, as we will see later, the involvement of ‘the user’ in system development is seen as a good thing per se. Such a model is far removed from the pragmatism exhibited, for example, in multimedia pilots in the UK in which user involvement is validated primarily in terms of the benefits it offers for systems developers (e.g. as a more effective way of capturing user requirements). These two contrasting approaches, which correspond to the dichotomy drawn by Cressey and Williams (1990 in relation to workplace involvement) between involvement as a democratic force and as a productive force: as a prerequisite for the successful commercial development of computer-based products and services. These differences partially reflect the different recent traditions in Denmark and the UK in terms of the emphasis on democracy and public intervention on the one hand and on laissez-faire approaches on the other. We will use the term multimedia experiment to refer broadly to all these initiatives, which includes social experiments but is not limited to them. A multimedia experiment might be a commercial trial (e.g. the pilot launch of an interactive TV service) or a technical experiment undertaken to assess the utility of the equipment for various purposes (for example, contemporary trials in Universities with ATM high-speed broadband networks). Some kind of social learning will potentially take place as a part of all of these kinds multimedia pilots. Learning is a consequence of the implementation of any technology, however banal or mundane. What is at issue is what kinds of learning opportunities may be offered by these different types of initiative. Underpinning this question is a broader concern of this study to find out what approaches are likely to be most successful in organising and supporting societal learning and innovation around new technologies and in this way contribute to realising the benefits they are potentially able to offer for different groups.

Origins and motives of the idea of social experiments It might be useful at this point to explore further what we mean by the term social experiment, and to discuss its historical roots and the ways in which the term has been used in a variety of national contexts. Social experiments are not all of a piece - the range of actors involved, and the manner and extent of their involvement will vary between (and sometimes within) social experiments. In Denmark, and other Scandinavian countries in particular, there has been considerable emphasis on the notion of citizen involvement. Discussing Danish social experiments with technology, Andersen and Jaeger note that: ‘Involving citizens in technology assessment is very important. Technology has a certain ability to become the force that sets the agenda. Suddenly the public realizes that some sort of technology is about to develop in a direction that they do not want at all. At that point, changing the technology is often very difficult, because it has already stabilized. If the public is to have a fair chance to influence the development,citizens must be involved at a much earlier stage. They must be involved at a stage where it is difficult to recognize that it is in fact a discussion about technology at all - at the time for formulating the goals for our common society, the ethics for our interaction with one another and the technology, and the democratic rules by which we want to govern our society’ (Andersen & Jaeger, 1997, p. 169) Here, then, we can see the notion of citizen involvement as something which is not simply a useful thing to have, but as an essential element of the societal appropriation of technology. We can see, 3

underpinning the Danish experiments, something of the emphasis given in that country to democracy and public participation per se. These initiatives also stemmed from the way that public policy debates had been influenced by critical discourses around technology. Thus in the UK, government policy since the late 1970s was almost exclusively focused on the commercial dimension, and in particular competitiveness. Within this framework, the economic and social effects of technologies were seen as being overwhelmingly positive. Such views were of course also prevalent within Denmark, but here they sat alongside more critical views which emphasised the possible negative effects of technologies. Society needed to make choices about how these technologies were to be used, to ensure a favourable balance of the costs and benefits of technology and their equitable distribution within society. These ideas became encapsulated in Danish approaches to Technology Assessment.

Danish Experience of Social Experiments The first wave of experiments with information technology were a by-product of political controversy about a hybrid network which was under discussion in the early 1980s. This hybrid network would combine a publicly owned, nation-wide broadband network and traditional local systems in housing estates and neighbourhoods. The hybrid network as planned would only cover communities with more than 250 households. This implied that 1.4 million people would be out of reach of its potential positive impacts. The proposed exclusion of a substantial section of the population led to a questioning of the service. This dispute about the potential polarisation of the country was overcome by a political compromise. While it was agreed in 1985 that the hybrid network should be built as planned, a programme of social experiments was also set up to allow people from smaller communities and rural areas to participate in the technology. The aim of the experimental programme was to clarify the broad social, cultural, industrial, and geographic aspects of the new information technologies; not to develop technology as such, but to place it in a societal and organisational context. Communities were invited to submit proposals for funding totalling 30 million DKr. 16 experiments were selected, and ran from 1986 to 1989. The experiments were geared towards a very broad target population - the whole population in the communities involved. The goals were also ambitious: to give inhabitants in remote areas access to technology, to test and develop new possibilities of information technology and to enhance services available in the area in order to promote a decentralised development in poorly developed regions, stop emmigration from rural areas to the cities and decrease the rate of rural unemployment. The experiments involved the establishment of Telecottages or Community Teleservice Centres (defined as a centre where IT equipment was placed at the disposal of the citizens of a specific local community [Jæger & Qvortrup, 1991]). These experiments were carefully evaluated, singly and together. Though none had fulfilled the broad goals, the evaluation concluded that the experiments had led to significant lessons. Some successful innovations indicated future possibilities. However many of the key lessons emerged from projects that were seen as failures or lacking innovative potential. They showed that realisation of a working technology requires a learning process for technicians - to learn about the needs of potential users, and to learn to communicate with them. The experiments have contributed to a new form of product development whereby simulation of use precedes design of prototypes and close contact with users enables the systems to be adapted early in the development process. The experiments also provide insights into the characteristics of communities with high potential for entrepreneurship, and innovation reminding us of the 'cultural competences necessary for the integration of new technology in local life' (Cronberg, 1991, p.21). The 'same' social experiment, with the same technology and the same activities, might well yield different results in different local communities, given cultural differences between different regions.

We find substantial differences between European nations in the extent to which ideas of technology assessment were taken up (Cronberg and Sørensen 1995), as well as in conceptions of how technology was to be assessed, particularly in the emphasis given to the involvement of non4

specialist publics as well as a technical and policy elite. These traditions have influenced the propensity to undertake social experiments in different countries as well as the way in which such experiments have been conceived. The other factors underpinning the resort to social experiments concerns attitudes to commercial provision, and its ability to meet social requirements. The market might fail in two, related, ways: * On the one hand there were fears that commercially focused developments might emphasise the potential use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in meeting certain kinds of social need (e.g. entertainment) preferentially over others (e.g. supporting sociability within communities) - perhaps being distorted on the basis of commercial priorities and the culture and priorities of a (foreign) technocratic elite. To counter this it was suggested that there was a democratic imperative to involve users directly in developing new kinds of application. * On the other hand was a fear that some groups might be excluded from the information society by a number of factors (e.g. the cost of the technology, educational and cultural barriers; geographical constraints). This consideration warned of the potential failure of the market to cater for the needs of socially and economically marginal groups. Compensatory public actions might be needed to encourage the development of technological models appropriate for such marginal groups (variously conceived to include, for example, women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, the aged, members of remote rural communities and socially excluded inner-cities), as well as initiatives to make the infrastructure available. With hindsight, many of the earlier social experiments, like the workforce initiatives that they were closely related to, can be seen to have reflected prevalent views of ‘the politics of technology’. These were based upon linear and reductionist models of how social values surrounding the development context might become embedded in technological artefacts and how these values might in turn be reproduced when the technology was subsequently implemented and used. Linked to this was an ‘essentialist’ notion that social experiments might give rise to a distinct class of artefacts. Such a view was inherent, for example in a range of initiatives that sought to redress the imputed rationalisation and control effects of conventional technological design through developing, variously described, ‘human-centred’, ‘anthropocentric’. or ‘worker centred’ technologies (Ehn 1988). The proponents of such social experiments regarded artefacts as having the values of their development built-in as more or less determinate features - hard-wired into artefacts. Their presumption of the subsequent ‘downward conversion’ of these embedded values, paradoxically, underplayed the importance of the social context in which artefacts are implemented and used in shaping and reshaping the significance of artefacts. In short this focus privileged technology design without seeing how the outcome of technological changes were rooted not only in artefacts but also the ways these were inserted within broader sets of social relationships in which technology was used.5 We will return to this point in the conclusions of the paper. The push for social experiments resided ultimately in concerns that technological change might lead to negative consequences, and the belief that these outcomes were not inevitable and inherent in the technology per se, but resulted from the ways in which technology had been designed and 5Paradoxically

, where these initiatives did give rise to technological artefacts, they often did not seem to differ profoundly from models arising from 'good design' undertaken within a conventional commercial setting (For example the worker-centred graphic system created by the Nordic Utopia project has many features in common with desk-top-publishing systems that were developed for the Apple Macintosh). A number of reasons can be advanced for this (for example, the fact that the alternative design projects were minuscule in relation to the mainstream development effort; the fact that both these design settings were influenced by emergent ideas about usability and use of computers that can be traced back to the earlier Xerox Parc developments). However it does force reconsideration of simple conceptions of the relationship between social values and the content of artefacts.

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implemented. This critical view of the character of technology and its potentially-negative social implications has gradually waned. Instead, multimedia technologies have become less controversial as they are taken up on a wider basis. Public debate about their social implications has greatly diminished - and discussions are increasingly likely see them not as a threat but as a source of excitement. At the same time, as information and communication technologies have come to be seen as critical to economic performance there has been increasing concern about how to ensure successful innovation.

Origins and motives of the idea of multimedia pilots The proliferation of multimedia pilots and experiments today reflects a growing recognition that the process of technological innovation is often problematic and uncertain. This represents a challenge to traditional presumptions that technological change would be a smooth and essentially linear process of ‘technological progress’. The latter views often embodied a ‘technology-push’ approach to innovation - that new technological offerings would emerge from technology supply that could simply be disseminated through the market to fulfill the needs of the market of users (Williams and Edge 1996). Discussion of multimedia pilots has coincided with a growing realisation that new technologies often fail; even successful technological developments involve many reversals and may lead in different directions to those anticipated. The availability of powerful technologies is not sufficient to ensure successful innovation. The user and use turn out to be critical. The resort to multimedia pilots and experiments in particular seeks to grapple with the difficulties in capturing either or both the uses and the user of technology. This is particularly problematic where radical innovations are involved in (either or both) the core technologies and the kinds of social applications. Here it may not be possible to apply knowledge based on existing uses; users may not yet exist in relation to wholly radical innovations but may need to be enlisted. In this context, technology developers may need to ‘prefigure the user’, extrapolating from their own representations of future users or from selected participants in trials. One might profitably ask the question ‘was it not ever thus?’ Perhaps so. The many innovations that failed to stimulate or tap (existing or emerging) user demand are today lost in the history of innovation. Indeed this history tends to be selectively re-written, with the benefit of hindsight, to seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy of the self-evident trajectory of development. The many local trials and demonstration projects and the technological dead ends become forgotten.6 Moreover, today there is a concern to do better, by learning from the past. Technology is developing very rapidly, at a global level, and the costs of developing new systems can be enormous. In this context there is a concern to organise social learning processes more effectively. Furthermore, such experiments have gained increasing salience with the emergence of new technical capabilities in Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) - in particular a range of multimedia-based products and services are expected to arise with the development of ‘information superhighways’ and with improvements in the performance and ease of use of computing. This consensus about continued improvements in the technical potential of ICTs, (and about their potentially enormous economic importance) is confronted by the acknowledgment that there is little evidence of consumer demand. Since technology in itself does not create demand for services, increasing attention must be placed on user requirements, and, above all, a market for that technology in use needs to be established. This points to an important difference from classic social Indeed, it has been the rule, rather than the exception, that in the early days of new information and communications technologies those involved have failed to appreciate their potential and eventual significance - IBM initially judged that there would only be a handful of computers in any country; Edison saw the phonograph as a device for recording dictated messages, not music! 6

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experiments. Perhaps the most immediate problem these encountered was their failure to thrive after public sector support was withdrawn. With hindsight it seems that many social experiments had given undue emphasis to technology design, failing to see that this would not in itself ensure the success of the project, and gave too little emphasis to creating the conditions for their continuation and wider uptake - for example, to market related factors. In contrast, multimedia pilots, and commercial trials in particular, often have broader goals as well as simply addressing user requirements. In particular the key tacit goal of a multimedia pilot may be to mobilise the human and technical resources required and develop a method of working of this complex 'socio-technical constituency'. The development of multimedia applications calls for new types and combinations of expertise, who may often come from different organisations and industry sectors with their own diverse technical capabilities, knowledges of markets and cultures (for example including knowledge of ICTs and of cultural products) (Nichols 1998, in this volume). By the same token, even where commercial trials have sought to project the strength of the market and the attractiveness of their offerings, they may have other goals than commercial roll-out, - for example to align the expectations of consumers and producers of complementary products, and to establish their organisation as a key player in the market (see for example, Curry, 1998, in this volume). Experiments have to be understood in their particular context and history. The growing resort to multimedia experiments and trials has also to be seen in the context of a broader socio-political agenda promoting their uptake across the developed world. Public policy makers in the USA, Europe, Japan, the rest of the G7 nations and the Pacific Rim have increasingly been drawn to link their vision of economic futures to ICT and to concepts of the Information Society. Competitive mimicry and desire for joint action have tended to reinforce and align their diagnoses and prescriptions - not least in relation to the importance of multimedia pilots.7 The first, and most influential example was the National Information Infrastructure (NII) Agenda for Action, developed in the USA by the Clinton and Gore administration. This broad exemplar has been taken up (with some differences of emphasis) across the European Union. Both emphasise the potentially complementary roles of private provision and public intervention - with the latter needed to compensate for anticipated areas of market failure (for example to ensure universal access or in relation to non-profit applications or risky investments) (D’Udekem and Lobet-Maris 1996). 8

Trials have become a key element in public policies in the USA, the G7 nations and in the European Union. For the latter substantial component is the the European Commission's Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) programme, which supports 'practical experimentation and trials' on the grounds that they not only help demonstrate technical capabilities, and evaluate their potential advantages, but also allow groups to understand better the requirements of potential users. To this end, ACTS distinguishes three main types of trial: * Technology trials, in which prototype components and systems are developed and tested in an operational environment * Service trials, in which advanced communication services are demonstrated and tested by network operators and service providers, both to validate protocols and to stimulate demand and new applications * Usage trials, in which end-users of advanced services experiment with and demonstrate innovative uses for their own business, public service or personal interests Source http://www.infowin.org/ACTS/RUS/TRIALS/ 19.12.97 8 Somewhat paradoxically, comparing the approaches to policy between the EU and the USA, we find that the pronouncements of the traditionally laissez-faire US government look to the provision of a public infrastructure as a supplement to the market provision already in existence, for example in telecommunications. In contrast, the European Union, despite its tradition of public intervention, is strongly committed to a liberalised telecommunications policy and emphasises the role of the market in the provision of infrastructure. In the latter laissez faire context, the scope for government intervention is largely seen as limited to the financing of discrete projects embedded within that infrastructure (D'Udekem and Lobet-Maris 1996). 7

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Broadly similar perspectives have been adopted by the various EU members states, though there are important differences between particular countries. For example, in the UK policy has placed considerable emphasis on the role of the market (indeed following the early privatisation of British Telecom, competition became a central plank in industry policy for the sector). In other countries, greater emphasis has remained with public provision and the consequent need for public assessment and intervention. However there has been a shift in most EU members to increasing emphasis on the market. In Norway, for example, traditions of public intervention and debate about the adoption of technology, had been replaced by a more commercially focused approach, following the privatisation of the Norwegian PTT (which previously had been a player in public telematics programmes) (Sørensen 1998, in this volume). The final element underpinning multimedia pilots is the increasing uptake of the idea of the Information Society. These typically utopian visions are built around a consensus that the information infrastructure and the multimedia products that will run upon them is a ‘good thing’, that will bring about radical and beneficial social change. These improvements are of two sorts: * for community: allowing closer relationship between citizens by, for example, overcoming barriers of geography and between ‘public’ and ‘private’ space; and, * for citizens not only in terms of the way that public services are run but also in the relationship between the citizen and the state. Despite these very specific and pervasive visions there have been relatively few practical examples of such systems ‘on the ground’. The mismatch between the strength of these visions and the lack of understanding of how they might be achieved, seems to compel public administrations at local, regional and national level to intervene so that the citizens can benefit from this new publicity of information.

Dilemmas of Multimedia Pilots This section of the paper examines a number of dilemmas with which multimedia pilots may have to contend. First we explore some general questions at the heart of the very idea of multimedia pilots, relating to their conception of the technical potential and usage. Then we review some particular issues arising from examination of the reviews of experiments in their different national contexts. ‘TECHNOLOGY PUSH’ OR USER/MARKET PULL? One dilemma at the very heart of the idea of multimedia pilots concerns the relationship between technical potential and user requirements - and related to this, the notion of technology as a driver of multimedia pilots versus the ‘market pull’ of the established and anticipated requirements of current and future users. Multimedia pilots confront fundamental dilemmas about which elements should be taken as fixed and which should be the subject of experimentation and learning. In some cases, the very technical potential is seen as constituting a self-evident basis for a development. The fact that technology is taken as the starting point does not imply that an experiment can be driven by technology alone. Even in ‘technical trials’, there will be some concept of use or of a user constituency, however it is defined - although it is often the case in such experiments that the user remains implicit and rather poorly defined. Failure to take into account the social context of use is likely to prejudice the success of a trial.9 Such narrowly-focused technical trials and demonstrators may place at centre For example, the UK E-Cademy project provided technical facilities for teachers to share worksheets which were not used as it did not create any mechanism or to motivate teachers from different schools to work together in this novel way. 9

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stage getting the technology to function smoothly, and may give little attention to ‘users and uses’. However, in practice, even these are likely also to yield important lessons about the latter - though the need for learning in these areas may have been underemphasised or even completely overlooked in planning the experiment. The experience of getting a project to work - of learning by doing inevitably involves learning about the societal context and opportunities as well as more narrowly ‘technical issues’. On the other hand, this unplanned learning may be ad-hoc. Above all, there may not be adequate mechanisms to capture, disseminate and exploit the lessons that may have been painfully learned. Conversely, it is not necessarily the case that those projects that are explicitly oriented towards addressing the user and use will lead to more ‘social learning’. There are dilemmas about how to conceptualise users (and in particular how far to characterise them in advance). Every experiment will, as a point of departure, conceptualise its users in some way. But the fact that it is an experiment reflects recognition that the user and use remain unproven. The initial conceptualisation of ‘who are the users?’ and ‘what are the uses’ may (and indeed probably will) change over time. A number of further issues about the design and conduct of multimedia pilots follow on from these points. HOW FAR TO PREFIGURE THE USER Where substantial changes are envisaged in the way that existing social activities are undertaken, they are often based by extrapolating from technical potential. Indeed this may be to some extent inevitable where we do not have an established group of users to which we can relate. In such circumstances, the users and their uses do not exist ab origine, but come to be, by definition, as an emergent property of the experiment. There is a process of enrolment between designer and user. Where the developer has a strong concept of future usage, far removed from existing models, one can see the process as one of ‘creating the user’. Following on from this, questions arise, for example, about how far experiments should attempt to build concepts of the user and uses into an application, as opposed to leaving these questions relatively unconstrained. The former may have the advantage of increasing the utility of the application, and making these inscribed utilities and their advantages more apparent to potential. On the other hand it runs a greater risk of incorrectly anticipating the kinds of use that will ultimately prevail, and thus constraining the ability of future users to realise their objectives. SYSTEMS OR TOOLS The above considerations suggest that there is not a simple dichotomy between taking ‘technology’ and ‘use’ as the starting point for multimedia experimentation. Other strategies may be available. For example it may be more effective to base an experiment around generic applications of technology. These may be _ media that are designed to be relatively independent of the content of interaction transacted on the system - e.g. technologies such as videoconferencing, or the world-wide-web; _ tools designed to be easily configured by non-specialist users; rather than being designed as finished systems with already prescribed functionality, and oriented around particular presumptions about the purposes of the users and the context of use. POTENTIALITY AND UTILITY There is a gap between what a technology can do and what it is useful for that technology to do. In a sense, what is done within an experiment using multimedia is not so much an exercise in the art of the possible but the pragmatic. An example is useful here: there is a potential for all users to be 9

connected to a system which enables them to participate fully in democratic decisions made in their region; however, the pragmatics of use mean that this system is far more likely to be used for email than some exercise in tele-democracy. There is, then, a tension between the potentialities of a technology and its utility. COMMERCIAL DEMAND VERSUS SOCIAL NEED At the heart of many experiments is some concept of addressing and meeting demand - although there may be big differences in the way such demands and social needs are conceptualised particularly between social experiments and commercial trials. It is perhaps instructive to compare differences and similarities between these. In commercial trials there is some presumption that the needs of potential customers have in some ways already been captured; the driver is this imputed demand; the objective of the trial is to assess the strength of this market demand for already developed products and services. In a social experiment the driver is the perception of social need in relation to particular groups. However in practice the differences between these two models are not necessarily so sharp as might be implied by this dichotomy between commercially managed and socially oriented experiments. Though one might expect social experiments to start from the particular social groups, they may often arise in a top-down way in the same way as many other initiatives in social policy - it is not always the case that the service has been asked for.10 Such a paternalistic approach is of course compatible with a rather simplistic view that the 'social needs' of groups were determinate and could be readily identified, specified and embodied in artefacts - and that demand for these artefacts could consequently be taken for granted. This latter view, as already noted, underpins the failure of many social experiments to give sufficient weight to market related factors. The reverse failing may perhaps be anticipated in relation to commercial trials. Commercial players orient their offerings to socially constructed expectations of user constituencies (formed by market research and the like). The demand for a product or service is notionally realised by and large before the product is marketed on a large scale.11 The difficulties of applying conventional market research techniques to radical novel products leads firms to resort to other experimental methods. Laboratory trials may not be effective, or reliable, as a method of assessing user responses. This is one of the reasons why firms have embarked upon often quite large scale commercial trials of new services.12 Even where these do not lead to subsequent commercial ‘roll-out’ and ultimate economic success, they can provide an extremely valuable source of information. 13 10Although

it should be noted that some of the most successful exemplars of social experiment have been developed by promoting local initiatives - for example the Danish broadband experiments in the 1980s (Cronberg et al ). There is another important distinction between projects which include the user and those which are run by the user. This is central in that the management of a project is often undertaken by people recruited from outwith the community that the system serves. Such people may have a different set of relevancies to those for whom the system is being built. Those projects which are in and of the community they seek to serve may have these missing relevancies, and perhaps for this reason alone, may succeed where others have failed. 11 Commercial trials in some ways are seeking to build markets, and 'construct' - or at least corral - the user, even though the language of such trials often fosters the image that a service emerges from some natural demand that is 'out there' waiting to be realised. 12We should also pay attention to the development in the computer industry of 'alpha' and 'beta' testing through which suppliers have been able to enrol technically advanced industrial customers in both product assessment/testing and market testing. 13As already noted, the learning in commercial trials may be oriented towards broader goals than simply undertanding user responses - including aligning expectations and developing the supplier's reputation with the general public, as well as pursuing internal goals within the organisations involved (particularly where it involves collaboration between a number of players with different approaches and aears of expertise).

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A Review of Multimedia pilots within the SLIM Framework We now turn to review the arrays of multimedia pilots in the various nations studied: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland

The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland UK

These are based on a series of reviews of the development of multimedia in a number of European countries as part of the EC TSER study of ‘Social Learning in Multimedia’ (SLIM). In reading these it is important to bear in the mind the methodology adopted, and the consequent limitations in how this information can be assessed. The national reviews were undertaken primarily to show the contours of multimedia in each country. As part of these studies, the eight SLIM research centres each undertook a review of the main social experiments in their country - conceived broadly to include multimedia pilots and trials. These surveys were designed merely to provide a sample from which more detailed studies could be undertaken in the next phase of the SLIM research programme. This was a scoping survey, that relied on material in the public domain. The descriptions of the experiments are largely drawn from published material and ‘grey literature’. The reviews are not therefore wholly amenable to rigorous comparative analysis. In addition to all the usual caveats that surround attempts at comparative analysis, we should note that the experiments are not selected as ideal types or as wholly representative - the experiments described are a more or less comprehensive list of those being undertaken in each country. There are large numbers of multimedia pilots - particularly if we also include smaller scale projects at local level. A selective review was therefore necessary, particularly in the larger nations. Apart from a need to include the larger and more significant experiments known to the researchers, the methodology did not allow strict selection criteria to be applied. There may well be uneven representation of the full array of potential candidates for a number of reasons; reviewers are likely to give special attention to those which were larger scale, or of special interest because of their ambitions or the level of publicity they attracted. On top of this particular centres may well have greater access to certain kinds of project on the basis of regional proximity or established interests/contacts in particular kinds of projects (for example the Irish SLIM centre has a particular interest and expertise in cultural products, which figure strongly in its review). As a result, two caveats must be born in mind when interpreting this information: i) there is a limit to the inferences that can be drawn about the precise nature of ‘national differences’ in multimedia pilots and social experiments; ii) our reliance on secondary sources means that we are often dealing with other people’s accounts of projects. This gives us some access to the formal aims and published claims of projects, but less reliable information about the actual conduct and outcomes of the experiments. In relation to the latter, it is important to regard multimedia pilots and social experiments as contexted and emergent. That is, their features are in a number of significant ways, the result of the contexts (national, political, spatial, temporal, etc.) in which the experiments unfold. Though some of these features are evident in the publicly-available information on which this survey draws, other features (for example about the tacit objectives and elements of the pilot, and, more importantly the extent to which various objectives are met in practice) will not be revealed by this survey. We hope to address them though detailed primary research into the actual experience of selected pilots and trials which will be undertaken in the next phase of the SLIM programme. In the next section we review the main findings of the SLIM national surveys of multimedia experiments in turn. For reasons of brevity it has been necessary to edit down the descriptive 11

material and concentrate on a selection of the main experiments. The features of the complete sample of experiments are summarised in Table 1. Not all of these are described here. Readers should refer to the original national reports for fuller details.

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National Summaries14 Belgium The Belgian example follows a middle road between technology driven and user need experiments. However, the context in which experiments are undertaken is largely unique: Belgium has two main linguistic groups with distinct identities, histories and cultural concerns. Information infrastructure policy has not only to meet the social and technical imperatives that we encounter in other cases, it also has a role in the preservation and realisation of regional and national identity. These competing demands on policy show that the implementation of information and communication technologies is a contested terrain in terms of identity and community at a national as well as local level. The Périclès programme was initially developed by the City of Namur, a coalition of local and regional economic development organisations and partners drawn from the publishing and University sectors. The aim of Périclès is to develop the ICT infrastructure within the city and province of Namur. There are a number of components to the project, including: The Syrecos project (undertaken in partnership with Luxembourg and French partners working with the regional employment service) aims to establish a database as the basis for electronic diffusion of information on training provision (to both employers and those seeking employment) together with an analysis of the training needs of SME’s in the province. A citizen-server has been established to enable local government and citizens to communicate via the Internet. The service allows all local government departments to have a web presence including access to local information and specific newsgroups, in the main dedicated to the city and its surrounding province (especially to cultural and economic activities and political life). Outwith Périclès, the MANAP (Metropolitan Area Network AntwerP) wide area network was established by Telepolis Antwerp, a non-profit making company responsible for ICT’s in the city. Several multimedia applications and services are offered to local government and citizens: these include `telematics for better administration’, tele-medicine, services to citizens and visitors, Belgacom information booths (phone booths that will be converted to kinds of multimedia kiosks offering telephone and interactive services e.g. city information and e-mail). While MANAP is a technical advance technology was put in place before applications were realised in full, and there is some concern as to how its capabilities should be used. However, the project is arguably one of the most complete experiments involving users to develop a cooperatively planned digital city. The experiment began with intermediaries drawn from the City administration’s training division who stood proxy for users (Pierson 1997). Perhaps unusually, this group is involved in the development of a training and regulatory framework for MANAP15. Citizens are also involved under the rubric of generating ‘an intelligent city’: citizens are concerned with the promotion of electronic democracy and the integration of new ICT’s into their lives. At the level of the digital city this has impacted on the design of the WWW interface for the city which was redesigned to make ‘the administration more accessible’ (Pierson op cit.). In education, an important regional press group has joined with a number of partners, including a national bank to fund the ‘Cybertec’ project. Cybertec sponsors a bus fitted with internet links that makes regular visits to high schools in the Walloon Region. The bus stays one week at each school, training teachers and students in use of the Internet. The service has been so successful that it is now hoped to hire it to companies at weekends.

The studies on which we have drawn can be found on the SLIM WWW server pages: http://www.ed.ac.uk/~rcss/SLIM/public/nationals.html 15 The users were not involved in the development, only taking part once the project had been rolled out.

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There are also a number of other public-private initiatives devoted to fostering multimedia literacy within the regions of Belgium. A consortium involving inter alia the Kinepolis Group, for example, aims to create a `smart region’ in Limburg to enhance the technological culture, by offering multimedia education and training. In addition, a kind of `multimedia valley’ is planned. In conclusion, it is interesting to note the varied types of project currently underway in Belgium, and to point out the mixture of public and private initiatives with their stress on infrastructure and culture. As noted in the introduction, the country is divided along linguistic lines - this can be seen especially in wider initiatives such as that of the employment service which uses a multimedia system to advise potential employees of posts. The service is available in both Flemish and French languages and controlled by the regional governments in each area.

Denmark16 Experiments with information technology in Denmark date back to 1982-84, with trials of videotex services (with some TV terminals located in private homes, schools, libraries, hospitals and workplaces). These were organised by a consortium of the Danish PTT and telephone companies, and had their roots in discussions about how to respond to the launch of videotex in the UK in the mid-1970s, and a fear that if they did not take part in development, it would only be a matter of time before foreign telephone companies would launch the technology in Denmark. Content came from several service providers: travel agencies, newspapers, computer companies, banks, retailers, insurance companies, car dealers, libraries and other suppliers of public information. When the experiment ended, the telephone companies turned it into a permanent, nation-wide system, but it never became a success among private users. The number of subscribers never exceeded 7,000, and the service was closed down in autumn 1993. The Kommunedatas experiments involved the provision of on-line services to citizens in the municipalities of Ballerup and Suså. These services were concerned with the promotion of local democracy through the publicity of information. Through terminals located in public buildings (Ballerup) and in homes (Suså), citizens were able to access information about, for example, population, child-care centres and costs of day-care. Citizens were able to obtain information about taxation and community news as well as corresponding with each other, to seek solutions to problems or participate in discussions on municipal conditions. There were also various interactive services: in Ballerup an interactive service was developed to enable users to obtain on-line information about rental housing in the municipality, and to place themselves on the list for housing. Given its relatively dispersed population and geographical location, the facility for home-shopping was made available in Suså. The use of technology as a medium to promote local democracy was a prime concern of the Kommunedatas projects. It was noted by those involved in the local administration that the system enabled people who would not otherwise have communicated with their representatives to make their voices heard. Politicians involved with the project concluded from this experience that such online communication was an important element in the realization of citizen participation in the governmental process. The project sought to organise information in a participatory manner employing committees to evolve orderings of information. That information is ‘there’ appears not to be enough: data has to be structured with regard to the needs of the users, it has to be organised in some sensible structure so that the citizens can make use of it.

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We refer readers to the section on Danish social experiments, above.

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Another experiment provided local politicians with computers and access to administrative databases. The aim was to allow politicians access to a wide range of information for decision making. This provision significantly changed the power structure of the administration, shifting power from older representatives to younger members. Making information available enabled younger members to adjust for the experiential knowledge that older members held. In 1995 the Danish government selected ten municipalities to act as spearheads in the development of experiments aimed at getting citizens involved in the development of technology as a tool in democratic processes. One of the spearhead municipalities, Næstved, is for instance building a ‘town net’, a local internet where citizens can find information, communicate with each other and with the local authorities, and where local politicians have access to documents and internal discussions. While the system has migrated to the internet, the goals are very similar to those of the first programmes. It is notable that Danish experiments with technology appear iterative in character, each new experiment learning from its predecessors.

Germany The availability of technology such as cable and interactive media services has been the main stimulus for multimedia experiments in the German case. The German orientation to multimedia experiments requires commercially viable ‘representative’ markets for trials, there being a close mapping of the experimental consumers and the intended final market. Since 1993, numerous commercial and public multimedia projects in various areas, such as education, teleworking, environmental protection, city information, and the like have been planned and partly realised. Deutsche Telekom’s (GT) experience with interactive television is a good example of infrastructure led experiments. DT saw that their cable network was underused and initiated experiments with user groups in order to identify more effective usage. Public information and citizen-representative communication constitute the main focus of the government administered projects. Infrastructure is a central component: in education, for example, multimedia equipped schools staffed by ‘technologically literate’ staff are regarded as a sine qua non. ‘Alternative’ network providers such as VEBAKOM (with InfoCity-NRW) and the RWE Telliance (with Multimedia Gelsenkirchen) undertook the first experiments with multimedia. Both companies chose the densely populated area of Nordrhein-Westfalen for what were regarded as high risk projects since they had existing infrastructure in place as well as a large potential user constituency17. National and local government initiatives have largely taken place in co-operation with commercial interests. We will discuss two here: firstly, “Schools to the Net”, a combined initiative of the German Ministry of Research and Education, the states (“Länder”) and the German Telekom; second the ‘Polikom’ program launched in 1994 by the Federal Ministry of Research and Education. The three year ‘Schools to the Net ‘ experiment was begun in December 1995, to “bring teaching and learning at school up to the requirements of the information society using IT in classes and access to telecommunication networks” 18. The aim is to develop a base of multimedia literate educators who are able to further use the developing network for innovation in co-operative teaching and learningby providing computer technological infrastructure for schools and teacher Although both were supported by the Nordrhein-Westfalen regional government as a part of their ‘media NRW’ initiative. This initiative supports the growth and development of multimedia experiments to improve competence (especially within SME’s) and to develop a regulatory framework to control the design of experiments within a deregulated market. 18 During the life of the project 10,000 schools are to be connected to servers containing specially designed educational material and to the internet per se.

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education institutions which do not have net connections at their disposal19 . The programme covers initial projects for schools with limited technological experience; pilot projects - that develop experiments which stand as exemplars; teacher education; and the development of infrastructure (both regional and national. Key factors in acceptance of projects into the programme are their cooperation with commercial interests and their contribution to developing infrastructure. Launched in 1994, the Polikom project is a framework programme of the Ministry of Research and Education that aims to develop and test new technological and organisational infrastructures between large organisations spread over several locations. The Polikom program aims to enable and innovate experiments in multimedia co-operation and to improve co-ordination and efficiency of geographically distributed work. Polikom covers the entire range of activities from research and development of components, through prototype development, to pilot and field tests. Projects start with field tests of already available systems in practice. User requirements are analysed on the basis of hands-on experience in real work situations. Polikom is also intended to support the distributed work environments that will arise as a result of the re-location of the German parliament to Berlin in 1998. It supports tools that help co-ordinate the activities of distributed groups such as cooperative document processing and meeting preparation tools. Alongside this, the project addresses the need to build an overall information infrastructure that includes a multimedia document archive, desktop video and document conferencing facilities and electronic mail. All of the above has to take place within a secure environment and across a variety of platforms.

Ireland Until very recently the majority of multimedia experiments in Ireland have taken place within research networks supported by the European Union. Many of these trials are technically oriented, and are characterised by a lack of explicit provision for interaction with final users. A significant focus of multimedia policy has been the creation of jobs and export products in line with past IT policy. A second , more recent current is a focus on the role of and production of content for multimedia systems in education. With regard to content development the Irish case is interesting in that the presentation of culture and nation (although within the experience of the Irish diaspora the two are intimately linked) have been predominant themes for exploration through the new multimedia systems. To date there has been little long-term planning for implementation of IT in the public sector although the launch of the ‘Information Society Ireland: Strategy for Action’ report in Spring of 1997 marked the launch of government initiatives in this area. This report was followed by the establishment of advisory committees in strategic areas; tourism, government, libraries, commerce, manufacturing etc. The main policy documents and initiatives which have emerged so far are in education (see Schools IT 2,000 project below) while the government has also established a web presence20. A major public sector player in the Irish context is the semi-state telecommunications company Telecom Eireann (TE) which has recently expanded its technical experiments to engage more end users, some on a relatively large scale. TE’s strategy has been to prepare for liberalisation of the telecommunications market through the introduction of new pricing schemes and invest in experiments such as the ‘Information Age Town’ and the government’s Schools IT 2,000 project. However, one unanticipated impact of the experiment has been on the regional variations in the curriculum. The technology has tended to produce a uniform pedagogic style which is at variants with the diversity of the current system. 20 See http://www.irlgov.ie

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The Information Age Town project generated considerable public interest and action when 46 towns bid for £15 million investment in hardware, software and skills to benefit their local community. The winning town, Ennis, was announced in Oct. 1997 and the majority of homes will now be equipped with telephones, voicemail services, and internet services while businesses will receive free ISDN access and subsidised computers. Telecom Eireann will also equip all the other towns who competed with semi-commercial Community Access Centres21. As part of this new strategy Telecom Eireann also announced in November that it was investing £10 million to assist the government’s Schools IT 2,000 project which aims to connect every primary and secondary school to the internet within the next seven months and continue this investment so that in three years there will be at least 60,000 computers in Irish schools. This government programme will also invest in teacher training, the development of pilot case studies in ‘exemplar’ schools and the establishment of a dedicated schools internet called ‘Scoilnet’. This follows upon their experience with the Classroom of the Future project; a small scale technical and content development trial conducted by their research and development arm, Broadcom Eireann. This centre was established by Telecom Eireann, Trinity College and Ericsson in 1987 to develop broadband communications technologies. The Classroom of the Future project was a new departure that tried to explore the future use of information technology by placing the technology in primary schools. The project had initial difficulties in finding primary schools with a local area network. In the end two secondary schools and one primary school in the Dublin area were selected. Teachers who were already involved in teaching IT were chosen to assist in the framing of the project and define objectives. Broadcom Eireann is usually involved only in commercially secret technical trials. This project therefore was unusual in that it generated much public interest in the company and required the researchers to deal with more social issues. The researchers found that while the technical implementation of the project was relatively simple the trial encountered much ‘technological fear’ and a low level of motivation from teachers who lacked IT skills. An exemplar of the importance of culture and nation in multimedia content development can be found in the work of the Nerve Centre, Derry. A community arts project situated in the North of Ireland, the Nerve Centre explores the potential of interactive ICTs as tools for the examination of ancient Irish culture and the empowerment, through jobs and skills of disadvantaged groups. The centre has secured government and European funding for training, education, production and exhibitions22. A further publicly funded initiative of the Nerve Centre is the three year Cultural Heritage and Technology educational programme. The impetus for the project was a commission from BBC Northern Ireland Children’s Education Department to develop six five-minute animated cartoons based on the legends surrounding Cu Chulainn, a mythical Celtic hero. From this a broader educational programme of workshops, courses in multimedia, touring roadshows and CD-ROM production has evolved. The centre has also received funding under the EU Horizon programme for a project called Advance, which explores interactive ICTs for the transfer of training and skills across boundaries in the context of disadvantaged groups, particular the young and the long term unemployed. This project will supplement the Interzone initiative which offers young people an internet drop-in point and enables them to learn about ICT’s within the context of their own communities in order to develop a skills base in the area. 21 22

Connected via an intranet. See http://www.nerve-centre.org.uk

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Many EU funded projects in multimedia focus on developing technologies and applications rather than content. The Audio-Visual Centre in University College Dublin received formal public funding for four educational projects and one library project under the 1996 round of the EU Telematics Programme. These projects propose to develop new educational services and adapt existing course materials for delivery through a variety of technologies and to a variety of end user groups. Similarly the Dublin Institute of Technology is involved in a two year Knowledge Assurance in Multimedia Publishing project, which has evolved from an initiative between five European universities to develop a European MA in Interactive Multimedia. The MA project was responsible for launching the first MA in Multimedia in Ireland and importantly developed course materials which will now be delivered universally using EU funding. Finally, the EduNet experiment has evolved from private interests. Supported by Internet Ireland, a private ISP, the project has encouraged up to 200 schools to develop web sites and use e-mail. The project aims are to encourage greater communication between educational establishments, allow for collaborative project work, and encourage new forms of administration, e.g. electronic notice boards and e-mailing parents. The site collates educational resources of interest to the Irish curriculum and links to establishments abroad. The initiative has now spawned a separate company and will no doubt gain further momentum from recent government initiatives23.

The Netherlands There are two strands brought out within the rubric of the Dutch approach to multimedia experiments: The first being competition - information technology is seen as a central component in the maintenance of a competitive economy. The second strand concerns the pressure within the national debate for connection and the effects that this will have on the idea of nation and locality. Most experiments and demonstrations in the field of interactive electronic services are of a hybrid public/private character. The experiments and demonstrations feed public discussion about the need and desirability of these new developments24. Controversies and discussions about new technical possibilities and related social developments are an explicit goal of experiments. Both public and private actors regard public and political debates as necessary ingredients of any successful experiment. Although these discussions are a necessary component of any learning, there are doubts as to how much learning per se occurs. The tone and outcome of these discussions appears repetitive: one recurring issue is the need to have a competitive economy. As in most western countries, the main translation of national interest is the economic position, and the best way to serve it is through innovation and adoption of new technology. The situation is viewed in opportunities and threats of competitive force and is cast in economic vocabulary. Dominant arguments is that ‘we are we in a world-wide race’, that ‘we have to face the American threat’ or even that ‘we have to fight and beat the Japanese’. In this perspective, reservations about new technological developments in general, and to multimedia experiments in particular, are easily labelled as ‘technophobia’. The Home Affairs State Secretary and the Minister of Economic Affairs began a joint project to develop a `government counter 2000’ in 1995. The government will be able to conduct most of its information exchanges with industry and the public through counters connected to the network. See http://www.edunet.ie The Dutch government’s National Action Plan (NAP) states that: ‘'The government therefore hopes for continuation and broadening of the productive public debate inspired in the Netherlands in recent months by the international metaphor of the information superhighway, including among members of completely new organisations ' (NAP 1995: 5).

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This includes an array of regulatory and statutory information together with other administrative content such as grant information, planning applications and the like. Started in 1994 the Amsterdam Digital City is perhaps one of the more innovative projects - notable for being a citizen-managed innovation. City council elections were just coming up, and the new electronic medium appeared able to bridge the gap between citizens and the authorities. The Amsterdam Municipality decided to subsidise the experiment, together with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Interior Affairs. The ‘Digital City’ enabled the Amsterdam citizen (and others) to look into the council’s records on-line, to consult official policy papers and to request information from the digital town hall. After one year, the daily number of users was around 4000; at the end of 1996 there were about 60,000 ‘inhabitants’. Young males constitute the majority of the population, though it is gradually becoming more representative of the public at large. The inhabitants have free use of e-mail and home pages and can apply for a house in a digital square. Users may enter pubs, chat with each other, organise themselves and events, and participate in events organised by employees of the digital city. The Digital City functions as a public space25 to discuss local political issues, like ‘car-free Amsterdam’ the growth plans of Schiphol Airport and law and order issues. It is perhaps paradoxical that there are no local authorities, elections, city council or other types of democratic organisations within the digital city. This absence is notable in an experiment that is meant to increase democratic participation. To date the ‘running’ of the city has proceeded with little trouble: for example, there was little opposition to the announcement that the experiment would be re-organised as a foundation. In Dutch museums, computers are used above all to record images of objects digitally, making exchanges easier. Many museums want to use the new media for presentation, not only for visitors but also in people’s homes, through the Internet or CD-ROM. The minister of Education, Culture and Science asked the Nederlandse Museum Vereniging (Netherlands Museum Association) to carry out a trial with a joint museum presentation on the Internet aimed at a broad audience. While there is some eagerness on the part of museums to seek out a new audience through new media, there are also some reservations because of the risk of the rights to museum collections being exploited by third parties. (Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Report on Culture 1997-1998, The Hague).

Norway The main focus of multimedia pilots within Norway appears turn on the importance of multimedia in information infrastructure. There is a perception of the multimedia market as somewhat immature, and a feeling that some applications are rather gratuitous in scope, employing multimedia without a full appreciation of its capabilities. Brosveet and Sørensen (1998, this volume) have characterised this as ‘fishing’: while the potential of multimedia has been realised, widespread implementation is sporadic and unsystematic. Multimedia is regarded as an efficient mode of presentation of information and promotion of citizenship goals; this runs alongside a perception, often promulgated by suppliers of technology, that the presence of the technology is reason enough to embark on multimedia experiments. As most experiments seem to take place on the web, a market that is developing fast, it appears that experiments and trials per se are often regarded as irrelevant when it comes to testing the technical, economic and social feasibility of new multimedia applications. This attitude is evident especially Taking the metaphor of the city and its squares as an organising feature. For example, there is a ‘Gay square’, a ‘Green square’ and the like: these can be established by groups and formalised through regular use. Users ‘inhabit’ a place on the squares where they can receive email and the like (underused locations can be ‘squatted’). 25

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among retailers, many of whom have been eager to display their merchandise on the net without waiting for recommendations based on trials. Amongst these hastily set up electronic malls a number seem to be significant: A small number of firms have started experimenting with on-line ordering systems combined with express delivery by the Post Office. One of Norway’s biggest grocery chains, Rema 1000, has undertaken an experiment to investigate the potential of the web in changing customer behaviour. Home shopping on the web combined with fast delivery by the postal service is believed to be a way of further reducing the network of retail grocery stores and increasing profits. The ELCOM research programme taking place in the Norwegian Computing Centre is concentrated on the study of open networks as the marketplace of the future. The main goals are building pilot applications and accumulating new, strategic knowledge on technology issues such as standardisation and electronic payment, policy and legal issues, business concepts, business processes and market mechanisms, as well as human resources involved. As far as information providers are concerned, multimedia applications seem to develop in a rather haphazard manner without regard to changes in style and structure required by multimedia presentations. Many information providers seem to be content simply transferring documents from paper to electronic media. Translation adds nothing in terms of the document qua multimedia product The Norwegian governments’ ODIN project, for example, aims to develop documents tailored for electronic use. The Norwegian example allows examination of the political discourses surrounding adoption of multimedia. Far from being a neutral enterprise, experiments with and adoption of multimedia seems to entail substantial political risk. From a political point of view, education and re-education are considered to be important factors in the society of the future. Concepts such as “the global classroom” and “the electronic school path” have emerged, mostly as concepts without much substance. After some problematic telecommunication programmes in the first part of the 1990s, information technology planning in the educational sector has been conservative. As one of the few concrete measures taken, the government established The National Centre for Educational Resources in 1992 (NLS) for the initiation of development and diffusion of new educational techniques. One of the first initiatives was the adaptation of educational software as part of the EPES project (European Pool for Educational Software), but today much of the activity is being concentrated on the potential of multimedia applications on the Internet, as well as acquiring more of a research profile. In 1996 NLS launched the School Network aimed at pupils and teachers: when fully developed this will offer various kinds of educational material and guidelines relevant to learning in primary schools as well as IRC. The aim is to make the classroom a more interesting place for students and teachers by introducing a strong “virtual” or multimedia component. The NLS also participates in various multimedia projects e.g. the web database on the life and work of writer Knut Hamsun, developed in cooperation with the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK), and the Viking Network Web. The activities of NLS will expand as tele-teaching becomes established. In the next three years be the government are to fund a programme for the development of research on the pedagogical use of information technology. The Norwegian PTT, Telenor leads the field in the establishment of research projects in multimedia and related fields constitutes a useful catalogue of experiments. Between them, Telenor and the Norwegian Computing Centre undertake some of the most interesting multimedia experiments. Telenor R&D, with 700 employees located at eight sites around the country, has the resources to carry out extensive field trials and engage in a wide range of research topics: undertaking projects in distance education and teleworking, notably an electronic classroom, conferencing services and theoretical studies of teleworking. There have also been experiments in citizen communication with elected representatives and the design of new buildings (such as Oslo’s new international airport). Telenor R&D has developed a futuristic virtual conference system. Users can connect to a host 20

machine and enter a virtual world shared with other users. Users have synthetic representations through which they can carry out tasks. The system, if developed beyond the prototype stage, can be used on various types of networks (ISDN, ATM) and used for purposes such as entertainment, distance education, teleconferencing or the remote control of various kinds of equipment. While it would appear from the above that experiments with multimedia are part of the strategies of private and public actors, it is still difficult to discern a distinctive pattern. Most experiments are performed on the basis of a firm but vague belief that multimedia technology will be of major importance in the future26. Consequently, actors continue to explore the possibilities of developing novel products based on multimedia technology and exploit the potential for enhancing services by means of multimedia applications.

Switzerland There are no broad-scale multimedia experiments and initiatives in Switzerland. Most experiments are local and take place in diverse sectors (Internet to the home, interactive television, tele-banking, etc.). Still others are as isolated private or regional initiatives (e.g. Berger virtual museum). Both big and small cable operators and content providers are trying to position themselves on the coming liberalised market, full of promising commercial success resulting in an enormous amount of smallscale commercial trials (banks, museums, tourism, regions). It is notable that the experiments are fragmented and that there is little or no co-ordination of experiments. Creative examples take place at small regional scale (cantons, parts of cantons or cities, even small towns). Some of these developments are related to the `metropolisation' of Switzerland in a few key urban areas (Geneva-Lausanne, Basel, Zurich, Ticino as part of the Italian Como-Varese area), others are more peripheral and emerge from isolated actions, or sometimes from more co-ordinated actions (e.g. within the regrouping of 5 cantons in the north-central part of Switzerland called Mitteland). Probably due to this lack of central policy, regional implementations appear to be the most coherent MM experiments. Swiss Telecom has supported trials and the ATM-based tele-teaching development Telepoly of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne, as well as some innovations by major banks, are somehow exceptions to that regional trend (even though the two latter ones have, to some extent, strong regional implications).

The most interesting area, from a public viewpoint at least, seems to be education. However, due to uncertain and fast evolution of Internet and Telecom tools, it is difficult to assess these experiments individually and draw conclusions since many become `obsolete' rapidly. One early Swiss multimedia experiment was Videotex. In the 1980s the Videotex system, derived from German technology, was preferred to the French Minitel system. This ‘monopolistic’ strategy brought about substantial software development (e.g. in the banking sector and tourism industry) but the system remained confined to a limited number of users, despite initial optimistic predictions. Contrary to the successful French use of the Minitel, Videotex has remained a tool for professionals, and has not led to any kind of popular technical culture. Due, inter alia, to the lack of user-

Readers are invited to compare this with similar ‘feelings’ in other countries, especially the Netherlands. It is also interesting to think through how this unclear formulation impacts on the development of a coherent policy in the area.

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friendliness and high cost the Videotex experience can (despite technological robustness and reliability) be considered a public failure. As a private service, however, the system is more successful. Despite a gradual shift of services from Videotex to Internet, Videotex technology is still in use: Swiss-Online, the Swiss tele-banking system based on Videotex initiated by the Crédit Suisse, comprising the three major Swiss banks: however, even this is slowly being replaced by its equivalent on Internet. This technological transition and the shift from Videotex to Internet clients has given new actors the opportunity to offer maintenance services to those telematics users that want an Internet connection, using old videotex terminals.

The CMC-experiment `Communes modèles pour la’ illustrates the early role of Swiss Telecom PTT in the multimedia construction in Switzerland. It is probably the only effort at national scale that could resemble a national policy component. The five-year experiment, carried out between 1987 and 1992, was a national priority research programme. Eighteen test-sites were chosen across the whole country, according to criteria such as local motivation, originality of pre-projects and diversity of situations (centre and periphery, linguistic diversity). The objective was to explore needs, opportunities and technical feasibility of telematics applications. Many projects failed, or did not get to their implementation stage. The initiatives may have been too numer ous and diverse to monitor, but it seems that the follow-up phase was not taken care of in the planning. One might speculate as to the effects of the experiments on local realisations and technological culture. Some projects were obviously stimulating and enduring successes, such as the tele-medicine partnership between the University hospital of Basel and the cantonal hospital of Semadan. Small experimenting sites in the fields of tele-teaching, interactive TV and tele-cottages (in the cantons of Valais and Vaud),) may well belong to the same category (a close assessment would tell it). The interesting thing about the CMC-experiment is that it is so far the only one of its kind: a national-scale "push" attempt to stimulate collective learning of ICTs, and should for this reason carefully be analysed "ex post".

Newcomers or updated versions of these large-scale experiments can be identified at local levels in 3 fields mainly: Firstly, interactive television, secondly, tele-teaching (like the `Technopôle Sierre', a service provision in a remote area of Wallis), and thirdly, medical engineering (like the experiments and partnerships between academic institutions and companies in the fertile ‘niche’ around Lake Geneva). Two small-scale ongoing interactive television experiments were launched in '95 and ran until December '97. Located in 4 middle-sized Swiss towns (for cultural and linguistic reasons), both are experimental platforms for on-line services (video-on-demand, children programmes, information, tele-shopping). The first trial is run by middle-sized cable operator Rediffusion SA, in Unterengstringen (this offer is technically limited but will be Internet compatible in Summer '97) and Wettingen (offering Internet over the TV cable). The second trial is Swiss Telecom's experiment. The Swiss Telecom's interactive TV trials `Topvision' are supplied by a wide range of content providers and cable operators (e.g. Siemens, Phillips, Alcatel, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, etc.). Blue-Red-Green Window: interesting experimental windows Blue and Red Window34 22

Launched in September 1996, `Blue Window' is the Swiss Telecom Internet access platform for domestic and business end-users. Beside Swiss Telecom's CMC and Videotex experiments already examined. We consider it is worth mentioning this recent offer as a trial, and also as a will to maintain the importance of the public monopolistic national corporation, still a major player for the moment. In the Swiss context, `Blue Window' is cheap. With 20 hours per month free and same price for local or remote connections to the server, it is clearly a manoeuvre of Swiss Telecom to prepare the 1998 deregulation deadline In opposition to `Blue Window', the Internet service providers have federated under the label of `Red Window'.

Green Window: there appears to be a strong need for an ongoing assessment and some kind of meta-service to the Internet service-users on the daily telecom developments. In the foreground of the big players' strategic moves before the deregulatory era, we observe the emergence of new actors, kind of info-highways consultants or intermediaries filling the gap between the service providers and users, following, processing and informing them on the ongoing on-line developments. `Green window', launched right after `Blue Window' in September 96, may be a manifestation of this phenomenon. Presented as the on-line observatory of the Swiss Internet market, it is a bottom-up initiative based on an open forum communication basis, to inform on and debate daily telecom and Internet news. This forum thus hosts a three-fold debate around Internet and represents, under Blue, Red and Green Window, all the actors and users of the field in one arena. The platform is currently, for instance, very much used to debate the Blue Window vs. the other ISPs' court case. Let us add that next to `Green Window', the big group `Ringier', publisher of the `Hebdo' magazine, also covers the information highways debates under various forms in its online version `Webdo'. Numerous attempts to use multimedia technologies as communication tools are pioneering their domain, standing as strong examples of what could be done. Given the newness and the rhythm of change in these experiments, it is still difficult to acknowledge a social learning process for them, although the hypothesis is high that there will be one, even at multiple actor levels. The main characteristic of this evolution seems to be the explosion of domains with MM applications as well as new approaches to them. In the social work sector, for instance, it is worth mentioning the early experimentation called `Café Saigon'. `Cafe Saigon' is an interactive MM game for youngsters that aims at installing a creative dialogue on drug and alcohol addiction. It was promoted by a private association regrouping more than ten social regional-based institutions (called GREAT), all over the French-speaking part of Switzerland. It mobilised about 25 people during three years and was finally put on the "social" and educational market in 1994. The prototype was the successor of a quasi multimedia game coming from Canada, used by the same association during the 80's. Its success is such that 5 independently run animation equipment and social workers use it full-time in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, that a translation for the German part of the country was immediately made, and that now many countries, especially in Eastern Europe, are eager to have it translated. Meanwhile, the technology, CD-ROM and Macintosh based, has to be enhanced and Internet mail will probably be added as continuing improvement of the concept, which still has two or three years to go.

23

In the museum sector, it is worth underlying the quick changes that took place in that area of activity. In 15 years time, three innovative museums have or are in the process of being opened in the same region (Geneva-Lausanne-Montreux metropolitan area): 1. The Nestlé Food Museum (Alimentarium) opened in 1994 in Vevey. Its elaboration was guided by an intense scientific concept and an important design activity. In two steps, computer aids were added in order to help visitors getting familiar with the matter and finally give them some monitoring tools to follow their own relationship to food habits during the visit itself. MM is barely present, though. 2. The Olympic Museum opened in 1992 in Lausanne, as a `Deluxe' 80 millions francs building with a lot of MM products in it, mostly big screens and interactive devices. The result looks like a fashion-motivated combination between information and object display and MM communication. 3. The Chaplin space, located in Vevey, a project planned to open in 1998-99, is a completely MMbased concept. MM technologies, both in their claim for "virtual realism" and connectivity (other similar MM spaces are planned to open elsewhere in the world). The sequence of these three museums shows a radical evolution in the use of MM technologies and the underlying communication logic of the concept, from bare aids to key-organising principles. On the job information market, there has been an explosion of Internet-based offers in a few months time, no less than ten enterprises competing for market shares in that sector (let us stress that Switzerland has roughly 3.5 millions active persons, and 200'000 unemployed). The main characteristic of this new on-line trend is that the job-market, which was mainly regional and linguistic-bound, tends to become national and multi-lingual, and assume that people are ready to physically move from one region to another within the country.

UK The pluralistic nature of multimedia in the UK is played out in a series of practical trials and other projects. The majority of these trials are either commercial or hybrids of public commercial services. In areas where the public sector is involved, the philosophy of the previous administration required a significant degree of private sector involvement (this does not appear to have changed significantly with the election of a Labour government). On a purely financial level, it is important that commercial organisations are involved since costs to public bodies would be simply too great given the restrictive budgets of central and local government. The ‘IT for All’ initiative, launched December 1996 by the national government has a ‘social’ basis, aimed at the education of the general public. It is a four year initiative to encourage businesses, and voluntary groups and the public to develop awareness of the possibilities of IT. It is a government co-ordinated, rather than funded programme - run in conjunction with local authorities, media and technology firms, high street retailers and banks and some Universities. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) ‘Information Society Initiative’ is a 4 year project with an investment by the UK government of £35 million. It contains programmes that channel government and European funds to industry. The initiative aims to disseminate best practice and inform business of the latest uses of new multimedia and network technology in industry. Specific issues being addressed include: export using the Internet, electronic commerce and EDI, High Performance Interfaces and Protocols, Digital Broadcasting, Intelligent systems and Teleworking. In one initiative particularly relevant to the notion of multimedia experiments and learning the DTI are funding a number of advice and consultancy centres for small business wanting to develop use of the Internet. The ‘Electronic Networking for Small Businesses’ programme established two pilot 24

centres (Manchester and Harlow) in 1996 and published best practice material. These centres are experiments in themselves, intended to develop in response to the needs of local businesses rather than follow a common programme. A linked initiative in Scotland is ‘SPAN - Smart Partnerships Across Networks’, supported by the EC that aims to stimulate the use of ‘information highways’ by proving advice and assistance in obtaining funding for public and private initiatives. Outside commerce, many schools and local education authorities are developing uses of multimedia. One of the highest profile pilot programmes is the department of Education £10 million initiative in 1995 “ Superhighways in Education” which funds pilot products in school education. An example of the initiatives in this area is Argyll on-line which serves the Argyll and Bute areas of the Scottish highlands. This ‘tele-schooling’ project has connected students in five primary schools. PC based video-conferencing enables teachers and students to exchange documents and to work on collaborative projects across a relatively large and sparsely populated area. Private initiatives in education include the ‘E-Cademy’ which serves Edinburgh and West Lothian. Connected by the local cable service provider, five schools have been given access to the internet and to special materials provided by teachers on-line. The service also connects schools to the University of Edinburgh and to the local councils. Each of the participating schools has a local area network with an average of 110 computers connected - these are linked via cable modem to the rest of the network. Content for the E-Cademy is produced by teachers under the auspices of a Scottish Council for Educational Technology initiative ‘Curriculum on-line’. This scheme enables both teachers and parents to provide content for the network, notably electronic course materials generated through HTML. In addition, teachers can set and mark homework on-line while students’ work can be monitored by parents as well as teachers The University sector, largely funded by government, is conducting a number of pilots. However there are few grand projects - most of the funding and work is at a low level. Established in 1989, the Computers in Teaching Initiative funds 24 centres each focusing on an academic discipline, research and promote the use of technology within that field. UK universities have long been users of Internet communication technology with JANET: SuperJANET is an extension that uses and experiments with broadband communications. The Scottish Highlands and Islands University is a project supported by Scottish Universities, local authorities, the ‘Millennium Fund’27 and the EC to deliver University level Education to the remote areas of Scotland, using ISDN and Multimedia. Local government-funded initiatives are almost the only attempts to use multimedia to promote social or community aims. The Craigmillar initiative serves a deprived area of Edinburgh offering links with advisors in the city council, where information on welfare rights and benefits can be obtained. The service also intends to provide the users with some sense of community and local identity through the provision of image files and commentaries. Similar projects are located in other UK metropolitan areas. Two of the most publicised trials in interactive television have been the BT trial in Ipswich and the Cambridge trial, run by Acorn (On-Line Media). These were both technical trials of advanced interactive television, involving many commercial partners developing content for the services, together with some user trials. The BT trial is now complete, and a commercial version of the service will be trialled in Westminster. The trials are lead by commercial motives and include ‘social’ services such as education at the fringes. The main aim of the trials has been to test technology, build alliances, provide a demonstration of the company’s technology and raise the international profile of the firms involved, not to produce a working commercial system.

Financed through the government’s share of profits from the national lottery, this fund aims to create a series of infrastructure projects that mark the year 2000.

27

25

The Distribution of Multimedia Pilots and Social Experiments Categories

BE

DK

D

IRE

NL

NO

CH

UK

Totals

%

1. Public Admin.28:

6

8

4

0

6

4

2

2

30 32

20

2. Health29

3

0

0

0

2

0

2

0

57

3

3. Culture and Media30

3

3

5

7

2

2

4

2

24 28

16

4. Education31

6

6

6

6

4

6

3

5

35 38

23

5. Economic Development32

3

5

8

2

2

0

4

4

22 26

14

6. Infrastructure33

4

5

7

0

1

3

5

3

23 28

15

7. Commerce34

0

5

4

0

2

2

5

1

14 19

9

Total

25

28

34

14

18

17

25

17

153 178

NB For reasons of brevity, not all the above cases are described in the paper.

Having reviewed some of the specific features of the cases, we will first comment about the distribution of the sample of projects before going on to draw out some overall observations about the character of Multimedia Pilots and Social Experiments as a whole today. We have categorised all the pilots and experiments from each national review in terms of the area and type of activity they involved. 12 of the 125 separate projects covered in the survey were ‘hybrid’ projects, concerned with more than one area of activity. Most of these (8/12) were technology infrastructure projects (typically Metropolitan Area Networks), which also involved trials and initiatives in specific activities such as Public Information, Education and Economic Development. To simplify comparison, these compound hybrid projects have been disaggregated, and each element has been counted separately, bringing the sample size up to 153. The distribution of these multimedia pilots and experiments between different areas of activity is shown in Table 1. This reveals that the vast majority of projects fall within a small number of finite areas. Projects geared towards Education, Public Administration, Culture/Media, Technology Infrastructure provision, local Economic Development and Commerce accounted for 97% of our sample.35

28

Citizen information, administration of government and communication with representatives. Health information and promotion. 30 Includes both cultural heritage and experiments with, for example, interactive television. 31 Electronic classrooms, CD-ROM’s and the like, connections between schools and other education establishments. 32 Includes national, regional, local projects. 33 MAN’s and the like. 34 Teleshopping, tourism and the like. 35This distribution is largely in line with that found by the European Survey of the Information Society projects - though the latter showed a somewhat higher proportion (16% of the total) of health-related projects . (http://www.ispo.cec.be/esis/ December 1997). 29

26

The largest single group, comprising 35 experiments and pilots, and accounting for almost a quarter of the total (23%), were concerned with Education. These included ‘electronic classrooms’, connections between schools and other establishments, and CD-ROMs, and were mainly, but not exclusively, public sector initiatives. These were motivated by a range of goals - a view that education was per se ‘a good thing’, and that technology could improve the quality of education and reduce the costs of its provisions. Further there was a view that these initiatives would promote skill development in general and IT literacy in particular and that these initiatives could contribute to broader policy goals by, for example, helping to combat social exclusion or stimulating local economic development. The next largest group, of 30 projects, accounting for a fifth of the projects surveyed, was Public Administration - comprising mainly public information systems, together with some systems more narrowly targeted on the administration of government (i.e. internal communication within the administration and communication with representatives). The public information systems diverged in their organisation and goals along a spectrum between two poles: at one end were citizen information systems, where new ICT’s were seen as an efficient means of information provision for citizens and which seemed often to have been conceived as simply another means of dissemination in electronic form of versions of paper leaflets and notices currently circulated by the administration. At the other end was the more bottom-up development of electronic communities, in which ICT was seen as providing, through electronic means, close linkages and exchanges of information within a community (particularly in relation to socially fragmented or physically dispersed communities).36 One related area, where one might have expected to find a significant number of projects, is that of Health care. It was somewhat surprising that the survey only yielded information (and often only schematic information) on five health-oriented projects (3% of the total) that were underway in Belgium and the Netherlands. We are aware, from other sources, of a number Health-related multimedia initiatives that have been established in Europe. However these are not necessarily captured within this survey (for example where work is still primarily developmental it may not involve any public trials). The low level of health projects might thus be an artefact of the timing of the survey or an error from small sample sizes. The other significant groups of projects were concerned with: Culture and Media - 24 projects (16% of total) including both ‘cultural heritage’ projects, such as electronic museums (notably in Ireland), and experiments with, for instance, interactive television (notably in Germany and the UK). The former were typically publicly-funded and the latter privately. Economic Development - for example attempts to use multimedia to promote regional economic development (‘smart regions’). There were 22 such projects (14% of the total), spanning local, regional and national levels. Electronic Commerce - a smaller group of 14 projects (9% of the total) were concerned with Teleshopping and electronic marketing of Tourism facilities etc. When comparing the profile of experiments in the various countries surveyed, some areas of broad similarity can be noted - in particular, the across the board attention to Education. The significant number of Education trials in Norway mainly reflected trials in developing network links with schools and the provision of distance education. In this geographically-dispersed country, the 36Public

information systems are evolving and it is not clear whether the distinction between these two types will be maintained. For example, citizen information systems that were established on a top-down basis may subsequently form the nucleus of broader and more pluralistic community information systems, and vice versa.

27

perceived utility of multimedia as a way of overcoming spatial barriers may have special relevance. Infrastructure initiatives Differences can be noted between countries, though the small numbers involved require considerable caution in how to interpret them. For example, as already noted, the significant representation of Ireland amongst the Culture and Media projects (7 out of 24 such projects), which can be linked to the importance of tourism and cultural activities to the Irish economy, may also in part reflect the familiarity of the research team with projects in this area as well as the absolute frequency of such projects and the relative lack of other initiatives in Ireland at the time of the survey.37 There was some evidence, in this survey of projects, of differences between countries in the relative level of attention given to economic goals (local economic development and commerce), which were particularly noticeable in the UK, German and Danish samples, and public goals (public administration and health), in which Belgium, Norway and Denmark all figured most prominently. Taken together this suggests a divergence in the relative emphasis in multimedia projects between public and economic goals. Although most countries were engaged with both sets of goals there was some indication of a trade-off between the two.

Towards a Taxonomy: Some Axes for Examination In this section we explore a series of axes which address the key features of the multimedia experiments described above. The key axis here is the user - technology continuum, which seeks to capture a the range of approaches in terms of the starting point and learning goals of the experiments. We return to this shortly. A number of other dimensions also stand out. Of particular significance is the organisational context of and support for the project. Whether a project is publicly or privately funded has important implications for its character; for how goals are set and pursued. However, when we examine the projects surveyed we find that there is not a simple dichotomy between projects which are somehow either publicly or privately funded and run. Many projects combine elements of both public and private provision. Thus we find that publicsector projects often depend on substantial levels of additional support from the private sector (for example suppliers donating large numbers of computers to schools alongside state funded provision of networking to classrooms). It is also the case that many public and community projects (e.g. Digital Cities and community information systems) arise outside conventional government structures, for example involving the 'voluntary sector', through community and pressure groups which take on many functions that would otherwise fall to the state hierarchies. This model offers advantages in terms of flexibility, low overheads and proximity to the client group. Sometimes provision of public services (for example community information services/digital cities) is devolved to privately constituted organisations (which may be cooperatives or firms), who supply the service on behalf and in the name of a community or public body (as in the case of the Amsterdam Digital City). These factors explain the involvement of private bodies in public initiatives. Conversely we find the state as a major player in decisions around the provision of multimedia-based services, through its regulatory and its role in promoting innovations through provision of information and even financial support. The complexity of these patterns is also underpinned by the fact that many multimedia developments involve collaboration between organisations with different, complementary products and capabilities (eg the various technical elements in the delivery system, content and service providers). This is

Since the survey was undertaken, the Irish PTT has announced a number of relatively large-scale trials with advanced telematic services, including a 'wired city' initiative.

37

28

likely to involve organisations which are private as well as public, accentuating the tendency for experiments and pilots to be hybrid in respect of their funding and ownership. Of course, the roles of public and private sectors depend critically on the patterns of ownership of some of the key sectors: telecommunications, cable television and broadcasting. These vary quite to a quite surprising level between different European countries, with elements that are seen in some countries as inevitably and correctly privately owned, and others resting firmly in the state sector. But overall we typically find a mixed system of public and private provision. The privatisation of telecommunications across Europe is at varying stages, and, as we have seen, has important implications for national multimedia strategies. The contours of public sector provision are changing, alongside changes in the methods of state intervention. We can also distinguish between those projects run at a national, regional and local level. The latter dimension is also bound up with the level or the articulation perhaps, of users and their participation. It might also have an impact on the ways in which the user is characterised. In local experiments, for example, we find that ‘who’ the user is, may be relatively clearly defined - indeed the user may be an integral component in the initiation of the experiment itself. In the experiments more removed from the local, one finds the character of users may be more generically defined. However there is a methodological issue about how to interpret centralised initiatives, since these are often set up to provide resources that will enable local involvement - by users who at the outset are not specified in detail, but who emerge in the course of the experiment. We can also categorise projects, for example in terms of the kind of activities addressed, distinguishing those focusing on work activities from those focusing on ‘everyday life’ and those focused on the home setting or in broader civil society (Collinson et al 1996). It would be possible to plot each multimedia experiment on each of these axes to yield a comparative understanding of the range of projects covered in these surveys. However, in practice the effort involved in such a categorisation exercise might not be warranted given the uncertainties about the representativeness of the national surveys and the difficulties in interpreting experiments on the basis of public announcements. Instead we present these dimensions to help us examine the features of the experiments reviewed. The national reviews provide a first point of access to these issues. Further research in this programme seeks to overcome such limitations by addressing the conduct of such multimedia pilots through a series of detailed case-studies, currently under way.

THE USER - TECHNOLOGY CONTINUUM The main dimension that we now explore addresses our central concern with innovation in relation to technical capacities and in relation to usages, and how this is presented in available descriptions of the experiments. This dimension seeks to capture two closely related aspects of what is taken for granted or seen as at issue in experiments and of the goals of those who put it in place. We consider these together to explore the ambitions of the project for learning in relation to technical development and in relation to use and the user. Some of the kinds of projects that give greater salience to technology development include: i) those concerned to demonstrate technical feasibility in which the expected lessons to be learned were primarily technical, and the ambitions for social learning were correspondingly limited. There were also some demonstrator projects, such as the virtual reality model of Oslo Airport, narrowly geared to advertise technical capacities to wider audiences. ii) there were also a number of projects which took the provision of technical facilities as the starting point for the trial - i.e. where technology was seen as the driver for change or as 29

sufficient in itself, and where use was not necessarily seen as problematic or requiring investigation. iii)similar in some respects, but with very different significance, was a range of projects concerned with the installation of a new technical infrastructure (for example a broadband MAN network). This provided the framework for a series of subsequent experiments around application and use though these were not necessarily specified at the outset. iv) a rather different group of projects involves those that were seeking to engage with technological design (i.e. where the intended outcome of learning was a technical artefact). However these may envisage a greater or lesser level of engagement with users requirements (e.g. perhaps, developing terminals for use by the physically disabled)

In relation to the first two groups, in particular, we must bear in mind the limitations of categorising projects according to the salience attached to ‘technical’ and ‘use’ in publicly-available descriptions. As amply demonstrated by our ongoing case-studies of multimedia pilots, the fact that a project does not at the outset emphasise experimentation with use and user involvement, does not mean that such experimentation does not take place. Indeed learning about users and use must take place, even where not planned and provided for in advance, and even in the most technically focused trials. When we look at projects that give greater salience to the user end, we find a range of projects broadly aimed at ‘social innovation’ (Gershuny 1983). However these varied in the manner and extent of learning envisaged. * For example some merely aimed at providing access to technological services such as the Internet or electronic mail. These perhaps represent the least challenging projects in terms of learning - they are concerned to reduce barriers to entry to technology; to the extent that they address learning this is limited merely to the individual learning needed by the user to operate existing technologies/services; they do not envisage the user becoming an actor in designing and shaping such services. In that sense, though they fall at the user end of the spectrum - but at the lowest level of learning ambitions. * Archetypal social experiments envisaged substantial social learning, as well as some technical learning. It is noticeable that these projects often involved relatively well-established technologies - such as electronic mail - in contrast to the concern with more technically focused initiatives on keeping close to the state of the art - a point we return to below. * commercial trials could involve a range of possibilities - mainly intermediate between these two, insofar as they aim to examine user responses in a context where many technical and user features had largely been already determined. Figure 1 shows how we can differentiate these different kinds of projects in terms of their location on two dimensions - the extent of social learning and the extent of technical learning envisaged.

30

Technical Infrastructure Programs

‘Classical’ Social Experiment

Commercial Trial

Feasibility Studies

Access

TECHNICAL LEARNING Figure One

31

SOCIAL LEARNING

Discussion of Survey Findings In practice it may not always be straightforward to allocate particular projects unambiguous to particular categories.38 Comparing the actual character and distribution of findings to the range of possibilities outlined in Figure 1, promotes a number of observations. The first and most immediate fact is that ‘social experiments’, as originally conceived, are not taking place on a significant scale today. By this we refer to experiments based upon the direct involvement of citizens and groups in open ended exploration of how technologies might be designed and developed to fulfill social need driven by a democratic concern to involve ordinary citizens as actors in development, and to meet kinds of need that may otherwise be overlooked by commercial provision. There are important exceptions to this generalisation; most notably the various initiatives to ensure access of marginal groups to the internet (for example public-subsidised cyber-cafes and skill centres in depressed areas of cities or remote rural communities). However, in contrast to ‘classic social experiments’ these are not in general oriented towards system development (qua hardware and software), though some projects oriented towards the physically disabled have developed alternative interface designs for public terminals for disabled users. Instead the main focus is on making largely standard media (email, bulletin boards, the world-wide-web) available to groups. In other words, they address issues of access to the new technologies, rather than their character, though they do, of course, allow users to become engaged in the creation of new ‘content’; a point we will return to later. An important feature of the rationales behind most of these projects appears to be a concern to ‘keep up’ with technology - driven by powerful rhetorics, that are highly prevalent today, that new technology will deliver economically and socially beneficial changes and in particular that technological advance is critical to achieving competitiveness. To the extent that this discussion addresses negative outcomes, these are primarily seen in terms of the risks that particular groups, regions or nations may be ‘left out’ and may fail to gain access to these beneficial technologies - a view which also underpins the aforementioned access initiatives. Earlier critical analysesTofECHNICAL the technology-society LEARNING relationship would see this state of affairs as problematic on the grounds that these initiatives, in their failure to address technology design, will not ensure that all parts of society are able to get their needs reflected in emerging technologies. There however are a number of reasons for questioning such a pessimistic view. The perspectives emerging from the SLIM study suggest that we may need to reconsider the design-centred perspective and the rather linear model underpinning it of the relationship between social values, technology design and the reproduction such values when technologies are used. In contrast, all types of pilot and experiment offer some opportunities for social learning (Sørensen 1996). Even where users are merely ‘consuming’ products developed elsewhere, they are still able to exercise considerable autonomy in the meanings attributed to these technologies and in their manner of use. Furthermore, even trials with a narrow ‘technical’ focus, inevitably allow some opportunities for broader social learning about the user and uses, as at this stage they must begin to involve people in some way as representatives of the user. Equally, even technical feasibility studies involve experimentation with some sample application and thus yield lessons about the uses of technology. The parameters of such learning, and the extent to which the information generated is captured and disseminated, are likely to vary between different kinds of trial. The key question concerns whether, and to what extent, it makes a difference that a pilot involves a conscious attempt to involve users, and how far it seeks to problematise models of use.

38We

have deliberately made the areas shade into one another so as to draw attention to the fact that these are not discrete alternatives- there is a degree of overlap.

32

These are questions which we cannot fully answer from the current survey (though we hope that our current case-study research into multimedia pilots will allow us to examine these issues in more detail). For although our review of social experiments provides an opportunity to examine how far explicit societal objectives are institutionalised in the various pilots etc. currently underway across Europe, it only provides a point of access to these developments. In particular, it offers a relatively superficial view of wide range of pilots - based mainly on public pronouncements. It is not always clear from these whether user representatives were actually involved, and if so, how. For example a project description that fails to mention user involvement could relate to cases in which nonspecialist ‘users’ were not involved, or were simply not specified in the material available to the researchers. This interpretation problem is particularly acute in relation to large-scale and long term projects - for example the development of a technology infrastructure - where the involvement of local user constituencies may not be (fully) specified at the outset, but may emerge in the course of the project.

Innovation in technology and use It was noticeable that those projects most explicitly addressed towards social policy objectives (for example ‘access projects’ and projects geared towards involving user communities) typically involved rather well-established technological models (e.g. email, bulletin boards, the world-wideweb). This distinguished them from the more technically-focused projects, which were more likely to involve technologies at the forefront of current advances. The pattern seemed to confirm the suggestion, from our earlier taxonomy of pilots and experiments, that there was some constraint on the number of ‘degrees of freedom’ that a project could address - resulting in a trade-off between the emphasis on technical innovation [in artifacts] and social innovation [in uses]. The lesson seems to be that projects which seek to innovate on too many fronts may fail, given the increased costs and uncertainties that may thus be incurred. Similarly it can be noted that even in projects geared towards developing new uses, the amount of innovation in the products and services mounted is typically rather modest. Many new offerings simply represent electronic replicas of existing paper-based products or face-to-face interactions. One could present this as a reluctance to utilise the full potential of multimedia. However, the preceding considerations suggest that the apparent conservatism of such experiments may be advantageous in that novelty can itself be a barrier to participation and uptake of technologies. Adapting existing models of use means that their relevance is more immediately apparent to current users. Both supplier and user are able to draw on their current understandings of the product or service. The supplier can thus avoid the costs and risks of elaborating and convincing potential customers about radically new kinds of use, and the user can economise on the need to learn about them. These observations suggest that the process of innovation in multimedia will be a largely incremental one (in both the core technologies and their uses). This is perhaps inevitable and may indeed be beneficial. In particular a sustained incremental innovation process may hold better longterm prospects of success than a smaller number of radical technological changes. The group of projects which diverged from this apparent trade-off were the pilots concerned to create technology infrastructures - typically experimental broadband networks (exemplified by the Metropolitan Area Networks). Many of these were hybrid projects, as noted above, which also involved trials of particular kinds of multimedia pilot. Even where such experimentation was not specified in the prior publicity, it can be largely presumed, insofar as some applications must be run if only to test the infrastructure. We can therefore see the installation of a MAN as indeed providing an infrastructure, that is relatively independent of particular types of application, on which a range of multimedia services can be distributed. In other words, development of the technical facility may

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provide a prelude for further experimentation around use (which may not be specified at the outset). Figure 1 tries to capture this. This points to a broader observation, that the core multimedia technologies are explicitly designed for flexibility in both their application and their use (Williams 1997). As a corollary, they are designed to be independent of particular application contexts. As a result of this, and the increasing resort to interoperability standards, technologies are increasingly amenable to local configuration and reconfiguration. This allows, in particular, delivery systems to the relatively independent of particular kinds of applications (Collinson 1996). As a result there seems less justification for some of the initial concerns that the design and configuration of the technology infrastructure and applications which run upon it would lock in certain kinds of application and use - and present barriers to other kinds of use. Instead, an important dynamic underpinning current technology development seems to involve trying to avoid dedicating offerings to particular users and contexts, but instead designing them to be relatively independent of particular contexts in order to maximise the market for that technology by opening up offerings to the widest markets (Williams 1997). And many multimedia systems take the form of ‘media’ independent of particular kinds of use. Just as importantly, there is considerable autonomy in relation to the content of multimedia; content developed in one context can readily be used in another, and there are increasing opportunities for non-specialist users to be produce to reconfigure content produced elsewhere and to produce their own multimedia content. We see these developments in particular in the current development of the world-wide-web. Relatively open models of multimedia have become widely embraced, and present flexible tools for conviviality. Technology is becoming much cheaper and more widely understood and transparent to the user. In this context, non-specialist users have greater opportunities and more confidence in acquiring multimedia technologies and in appropriating them to their particular uses. And as these technologies being taken up on a wider scale, user expectations begin to exert greater influence through the market. These developments underpin shift in popular views of technology as rather alien and arcane, and therefore potentially requiring public debate and intervention, to something that is commonplace.

The future for social experiments and trials? These observations may undermine the arguments for the need to conduct large scale, formalised social experiments. In particular, such comprehensive approaches may not provide the only vehicle, or even the best vehicle for social learning. In considering this point, it is important to look at social learning as something that takes place across society, rather than being limited to the confines of a finite trial or experiment. Indeed, conventional social experiments often shared certain shortcomings. As already noted, they seem to have encountered recurrent problems in addressing how to ensure commercial viability and to build their future ‘markets’. However these issues are critical if a project is to go from pilot to full-scale societal adoption. The latter is of course an area where commercial trials have established tools and techniques for assessing whether ‘consumers’ can be attracted to use the product or service. On the other hand, it would be misleading to see commercial roll-out as the only indicator of success for a multimedia experiments. We have already drawn attention to the variety of goals that may underpin such experiments. Their main significance may thus be as a resource for subsequent developments through the information they yield or in the wider dissemination and alignment of views about how technologies may usefully be exploited. Market processes have a number of similarities with social experiments. For example, market research into novel products often involves trials with panels of users. In-so-doing they face a dilemma about how adequately this group represents the wider market. This is, of course, a slightly 34

different question from that posed in comparable democratically oriented experiments, in which the critical issue concerns not only the extent to which trial users provide information needed to develop and refine particular design decisions, but also can be seen sufficiently representative to provide a mandate for and legitimate its further roll-out. The continuing importance of these issues is, however, reflected in the large and growing number of trials taking place (of which review has only been able to touch on the ‘tip of the iceberg’ particularly in relation to the proliferation of local trials). This is indicative of experimental nature of multimedia, and the acute need felt by government and industry to explore use of multimedia for public service and to test its commercial viability for commercial services. Our concern is how best to support social learning at the societal level to allow the most effective social appropriation of multimedia technologies. The critical question is not whether to have social experiments or commercial trials (or even to leave the whole process to the market). Instead of pursuing a particular model, these considerations point to the existence of a range of initiatives of various kinds, differing, more or less, in the scope they offer for learning and in how they are organised, and particularly in the ways they approach and involve users. The question becomes one of their relative strengths and of how they might best be fitted together to improve the effectiveness of social learning. Our findings suggest that commercial trials and public pilots may provide effective ways of experimenting with new technologies in a naturalistic setting. However the question is whether the information arising from such trials is collated; whether the lessons are made more widely available, and to whom they are made. As multimedia technologies become more usable, and more widely taken up, we note a shift in the key loci of social learning from developmental contexts of design and latterly of use, to arenas where different constituencies interact around the implementation, use and further evolution of multimedia applications. The key learning processes are broadening out from the design for use and actual use of particular artefacts to also include the interaction between different kinds of player (for example in relation to the links between suppliers of complementary products or the extent of supplier-user linkages) and the broader socio-economic setting (including the policy, legislative and regulatory context). The implication is that public policy to favour social learning should not be restricted to direct intervention in the form of support for running trials, but should also consider ways of ensuring that the growing body of knowledge and experience in the use of technologies is made available to the range of players who may be involved and affected, including developers, promoters, interest groups and consumers.

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