Time to get in tune with the global brain

Watching television now is to see worlds dissolve. British television in the age of radical uncertainty knows how to make programmes but, wittingly or not, these chart chasms of mystery and dread that the technologies, flows and political trends of the world open up before us.

Wittingly dedicated to this has been The Virtual Revolution (Saturday BBC2), whose last programme, “Homo Interneticus”, was the finest of a packed and well-crafted piece of didacticism. The question posed by presenter Dr Aleks Krotoski was this: is the net reshaping our, or at least our children’s, brains and emotions? Are fundamentals such as friendships and intelligence now undergoing radical plastic surgery? What happens, when you can have 10,000 Facebook friends, to affection? What happens to memory, when the recall of a fact is not the hunt for a slumbering memory cell but a Google or two away?

Some, such as the web pessimists Nick Carr and Andrew Green, think things can only get worse. An experiment with a range of ages mounted by the programme at University College London showed the youngest flitted and skipped across the digital landscape like butterflies, associating this with that in rapid sequence while the elders lingered more, seeking to understand in the old, linear fashion. A comforting conclusion: the children of South Korea, most connected nation, are best in the world at maths and science, and a government adviser, smiling benignly, said that “collective intelligence is now their basic tool, their instinct”. Al Gore rounded the matter off with the observation that “we are seeing the emergence of a global brain”.

We are also seeing the emergence of a global labour market. In Britain, that is best observed in East Anglia, where tens of thousands of (mainly) central and eastern Europeans work in the fields and packing plants of Britain’s food basket. In The Day the Immigrants Left (BBC1 Wednesday), Evan Davis took himself to Wisbech to ask the question: are the immigrants taking the jobs of the English? The programme’s answer was yes, but that’s because the English employers don’t want the English workers.

Davis arranged for immigrant workers in a potato-packing plant, an asparagus farm, a construction site and an Indian restaurant to be replaced, for short periods, by English people on the dole. The results were upsetting. A carpenter, after a shaky start, did well enough for the boss to say he would have hired him long-term had he not had all the immigrant workers he needed. At the packing plant, one of the three who had agreed to come failed to show, muttering that he felt unwell, leaving the other two to work with an immigrant on a three-person job. They had a more than shaky start, with one affecting not to understand instructions from a (perfectly intelligible) foreign foreman. Dressed down by a young female English supervisor, they shaped up, to a point.

The three hired for the asparagus fields – brutal work, bending and cutting all day – did very badly, at best gathering half of the median of the immigrants. One, a 19-year-old brought there by his mother, turned into a sulky whiner, earning himself the contempt of the Lithuanian shift boss. The Indian restaurant, run by a determined and courteous man called Ali, was worst of all: three of the four contracted didn’t show, and the one who did found the work “did my head in” and gave up. Ali concluded, not without some smugness, that he was better off with Indians.

No way of telling if this was fair, either to the individuals or the town’s unemployed. It did seem that for some of those who don’t work, won’t work is a better description. None seemed like fodder for the British National party: “Fair enough, they [immigrants] work hard” was a refrain. But there was a wide grievance that a more comfortable time was going, or had gone; that out there in the flat fields was the world coming in, more limber and determined than we are, with the grit and spirit that we think made Britain great.

On Expenses (BBC4 Tuesday) was a brisk fable of ageing degeneration exposed by youthful iconoclasm. The parliamentary expenses scandal, blown open by the Daily Telegraph’s publication over many weeks of information it had bought, was told through the character of Heather Brooke, a (real) American journalist living in London who had pursued expenses details through the Freedom of Information Act since 2005, only to be scooped by the Telegraph.

Finely acted, it was relentlessly cast as a contemporary morality play. The grubbiness of many MPs, stemming from the opaque and shambolically regulated system of expenses for a second home (widely understood to be a top-up for relatively low pay) has been clear for some time. For most of that time we have needed public broadcasters to help us understand what these men and women – a substantial minority of whom have been shown to have acted badly – should now do, and how their successors can be better. What’s more, we need to make it a central object of inquiry as to how far MPs’ representative function remains central to our political lives. For it seemed at least possible that a new society, people with new minds, will emerge from homo interneticus and really render them as obsolete as this fiction made them seem.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd