Britain Etc.

Britain eventually adopted the five-a-day message, suggesting people eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every twenty-four hours. Teams of officials were hired to count how much veg the nation was consuming and regularly report progress to ministers. Supermarkets and chefs were recruited to encourage greater consumption and books appeared on ‘the art of hiding vegetables’ and ‘sneaky ways’ to get your children eating them.

Nutritionists and marketing teams were invited into primary schools to try and make veg cool. Instead of Carroty George, twenty-first-century pupils in England and Wales were introduced to the Food Dudes — cartoon kids who supposedly acted as influential role models. After watching an ‘exciting adventure’ about healthy eating, children were then given a portion of fruit and a portion of vegetable. Those who succeeded in swallowing both won a prize. Experts hoped such programmes might completely transform the way Britons eat in the future, a prospect that did not enjoy universal support. Some libertarians argued that ‘public health toffs’ were waging war on working-class culture and sought to defend the working man’s fondness for a Big Mac. At one political meeting held in Westminster in 2010 it was suggested that ‘health paternalism is committed to using the mechanisms of social engineering to ease the pleasures of working-class life gradually out of existence.’ Shortly afterwards the new Conservative Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, suggested the Jamie Oliver approach was counter-productive and government should refrain from ‘constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do’.

Nevertheless, government-funded campaigning to encourage Britain to the greengrocer’s barrow continues. In 2011, ministers instructed the Fruit and Vegetable Taskforce to increase average portions of veg eaten by low- income families and vulnerable older people, with specific targets to increase ‘positive potato messages’ and ‘gardens growing their own’. But the legacy of pottage, soup kitchens and inedible school cabbage means that vegetables remain at the centre of a class battle which slices through British society like Jamie Oliver’s cleaver through a turnip.

W is for www

One day in 1997, just round the corner from where I lived in north London, the occupants of twenty-six houses on one leafy residential road each took delivery of an identical item: a large cardboard box bearing the black and white markings of a Holstein cow. Inside was a personal computer, the bovine branding a pointer to the parcels’ provenance — US technology firm Gateway 2000 (which liked to emphasise its rural Iowa roots). But the cow theme might also have been a clue to the motivation of the sender: the PCs were a gift from Microsoft, which wanted to test whether connecting neighbours to the World Wide Web would see people herd together or drift apart.

The experiment, conducted on what was dubbed ‘Internet Street’ in Islington, was an early attempt to answer a fundamental question of our age: will computer technology prove to be a force for good in strengthening our communities or will it undermine social ties? It is an issue that still preoccupies British policy advisors.

Back in the late 1990s, the jury was deeply divided on the issue. One research paper on the subject, entitled ‘Internet paradox: a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?’, cannot have made happy reading for the people who funded it, many of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley rivals and neighbours. The analysis concluded:

Greater use of the Internet was associated with small, but statistically significant declines in social involvement as measured by communication within the family and the size of people’s local social networks, and with increases in loneliness, a psychological state associated with social involvement. Greater use of the Internet was also associated with increases in depression.

Imagine the executives at Apple, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Bell and others reacting to the news that their own research suggested their products were likely to turn people into sad, stressed loners. The only saving grace was the question mark the researchers had placed at the end of the paper’s title. Small wonder that the psychologists were asked to go back and do some follow-ups which, more helpfully, showed that within three years of using the web the negative effects had been replaced by positive results on social relationships and psychological well- being — especially for the highly extroverted. Phew!

The experiment in the Islington district of Barnsbury was part of the same enterprise: the search for scientific evidence that the Internet is good for us. In selecting a side street full of affluent media types and lawyers, Microsoft must have been hoping that north London would come up with the right answer.

After just a fortnight, one national newspaper article suggested that the resident’s free access to ‘the global Internet, with its 15,000 “newsgroups” and millions of pages of data on the World Wide Web, where they can make airline and hotel reservations and order goods’ was already making a difference.

‘Maya, a 35-year-old advertising executive who lives at number thirty-six, said: “Now, the first thing I do when I get home is turn on the computer to see if I have been sent any e-mail. I’m almost despondent if there isn’t anything there.”’ (It is a remark from another age: twenty-first-century despondency is not discovering too few emails but far too many.)

A full year after the cow boxes had been unpacked, the BBC popped around to see how the neighbourhood was faring. ‘Microsoft’s grand experiment at creating a “cyber-street” in north London could, it appears, pull the plug on claims that the Internet makes people antisocial,’ it concluded. ‘Neighbours have used e-mail and a local electronic bulletin board to co-ordinate opposition to a parking scheme, to try to stop burglars, and just arranging to meet each other at the local pub. Pearson Phillips, a semi-retired journalist and resident of the street, has even started the Barnsbury Bugle, a monthly e-mailed newsletter.’ Bill Gates must have smiled at Mr Phillips’ encouraging testimony. ‘The day I saw somebody put a notice up saying, “We’ll be in the pub at eight o’clock — if anyone would like a drink, please come along,” I realised that this was going to work.’

The positive noises from Islington would not have impressed two academics at Stanford University, though. In February 2000, Norman Nie and Lutz Erbing published analysis suggesting the more time people spent surfing the web, the more they lost contact with their friends, families and communities. ‘Email is a way to stay in touch,’ Nie agreed, ‘but you can’t share a coffee or a beer with somebody on email. Or give them a hug. The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it.’

In Britain, where the web was expanding rapidly, it was noted that the dire warnings of social catastrophe were matched by cyber-evangelists proclaiming the reverse. ‘The most transforming technological event since the capture of fire’ was how John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and digital rights activist, described the development of the Internet.

The writer Howard Rheingold, one of the first to log on to an online community in San Francisco in the mid- 1980s, claimed to have been ‘participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture’. In his book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Rheingold wrote of how he had plugged his computer into his telephone and made contact with the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a very early email network. ‘The WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was grounded in my everyday physical world,’ he enthused. ‘I’ve attended real-life WELL marriages, WELL births, and even a WELL funeral. (The phrase “in real life” pops up so often in virtual communities that regulars abbreviate it to IRL.)’ It all sounded very Californian, but Rheingold had identified the central question for British academics and policy wonks trying to work out the social implications of new technology: would virtual contact translate into physical ‘real life’ connections? When I interviewed the celebrated social scientist Robert Putnam for a BBC TV series, he presented the issue this way: ‘The question is whether the Internet turns out to be a nifty telephone or a nifty television?’ In other words, would people cut themselves off from other people by staring at a screen in the same way they watched TV or would it facilitate social communication in the way phones had done?

Putnam was famous for having documented the decline of ‘social capital’ in the United States, the weakening of the glue that holds neighbourhoods together. His best-selling book Bowling Alone suggested the very fabric of American community had been damaged by, among other things, television and the motorcar. ‘Years ago,’ he wrote, ‘thousands of people belonged to bowling leagues. Today, however, they’re more likely to bowl alone.’ Putnam feared the personal computer might accelerate the process of neighbourhood disintegration still further.

In Britain, there was much debate as to whether the Bowling Alone analysis