The day the world turned radical

The implications of e-commerce

With internet start-ups appearing like digital mushrooms across the virtual plains, with online-related advertising on television rapidly displacing cars, deodorants and instant coffees in volume and frequency, with increasing numbers of people getting connected each day, e-commerce seems set to revolutionise the business and consumer worlds. But what exact form will this revolution take? And what changes will it bring in its wake? Difficult, if not impossible, questions to answer. Predictions have a tendency to turn out invariably wrong. Nevertheless, the undercurrents pulling society online are definitely strong and far-reaching, with pungent whiffs of radicalism coming from the unlikeliest quarters.

Imagine someone telling you that a majority of businesses and people are locked into old models, old mentalities. That change has become so fast that to sit back and wait and see, once maybe an acceptable business practice, has now become disastrous. That inertia is deeply worrying. That whole sectors of the current economic makeup are in danger of extinction. That national borders are coming down and regulations being blown away. That the info-rich and the info-poor question is now a vital issue. Not long ago, one would have pictured a foot soldier of the Californian ideology or some fringe voice of the net counterculture, and yet they were aired at the London School of Economics by the former head of the e-commerce team of the cabinet, both under the Blair administration and the former Tory government, Jim Norton on Tuesday evening.

Bricks and mortar in e-dealing times

Illustrating the report published in September by the e-commerce team, Norton's statistics and examples very quickly expanded beyond the mere description of the e-commerce trends or internet usage among different countries - with Sweden in first place, ahead of the US - to detail how the rate of change was bringing much wider implications in its wake. Jim Norton warned that certain traditional sectors of economy, such as high-street banking, were under serious threat from the introduction of their internet counterparts. An example: On average a typical US funds transfer conducted over the counter costs the bank USD1.07; the same operation conducted over the net costs ONE CENT.

The implications of such a difference are staggering. In a country like the UK, where holy or national days have long been morphed into what are known as Bank Holidays and your high-street branch forms very much a fixture of local communities, together with the Supermarket and the Post Office, what will happen when (an 'if ' seems more and more unlikely) the banking sector moves out of the physical into a completely digital environment. Forget the miners strike in the UK back in the eighties as a symbol for the shift in paradigm between the industrial and post-industrial age, the first decade of the new millennium could see bank tellers across the nation erecting barricades in front of automatic cash dispensers, fighting for a world that was left behind with the twentieth century. And if banks really do decide to abandon the realm of the real and tangible, the littered high streets, who is to say that others will not follow. Could online shopping actually lead to the demise of our current places of worship, that great American invention known as the Mall, the shopping centre? "Bricks and mortar are in serious disarray", Norton said. "Change is fast", he added.

Computers for the poor

If the coming digital years do empty buildings and streets, where will everyone go? Online, of course. But how? A considerable part of Norton's seminar was, in fact, dedicated to the need for wider access. The government for its part, has recently introduced the idea of a programme for the provision of free or subsidised PCs and cheap access to the Net for the economically disadvantaged. The intentions are admirable, but maybe misplaced. As Jim Norton pointed out, one million people in the UK do not have a bank account and ten percent of the adult population has serious literacy problems. Is a computer the first thing a poor person needs? Wont they just be flogged down the nearest pawnbroker when a bill needs to be paid, or food needs to be bought?

One of the main problems, in fact, is understanding how to make the best use of new technologies. And a very democratic problem it is too, running as it does throughout all sectors of society, affecting the jobseeker, the entrepreneur, the cabinet minister. While promoting an e-future, the government is itself struggling to come to grips and implement new systems. The treasury's software, for example, is incompatible with the rest of government departments; 300 million pounds is being spent on expanding the broadband for the NHS, but not a single penny is being spent on how to make use of this.

All is not slow on the governmental side, however, as the new e-minister Patricia Hewitt may well prove. According to Norton, when she was first appointed he e-mailed her the 150-page report, 48 hours later he received an e-mail back which gave detailed comments for virtually every page of the document. Now, that's radical (for a politician).