Chaos theory
The papers are full of doom-laden predictions about the switchover to digital TV, just as they once were over decimalisation, and chip and pin technology. But will it really be a disaster? If the history of big British changes teaches us anything, says Oliver Burkeman it's that we're remarkably adaptable when push comes to shove
The world's first seven-sided coins started appearing in Britain's purses and cash registers on October 14 1969 - strange, alien lumps of cupro-nickel alloy that were greeted with instant suspicion. Bus conductors and Tory MPs fretted that the new 50 pence piece would be mistaken for the old half-crown, causing chaos. Secret documents released years later showed that the Decimal Currency Board - the body charged with decimalising the country by February 1971 - was terrified that the Queen might die before the changeover was complete, forcing it to introduce a whole new set of coins. And according to the BBC, a retired army colonel named Essex Moorcroft founded an organisation called the Anti-Heptagonists, dedicated to eradicating the new 50p on the grounds that it was "ugly" and "an insult to our sovereign, whose image it bears."
One half-suspects Colonel Moorcroft of being the figment of some rogue BBC reporter's imagination, but only because he fits the story so perfectly. There are always Colonel Moorcrofts, just as there are always fretting MPs and newspapers predicting chaos. But of course the introduction of the 50p went fine, and when full decimalisation arrived a year and a half later, that went fine, too. The Decimal Currency Board had planned for an 18-month transition period, full of confusion and rancour. Instead, most British people adapted within weeks. A few months after "D-day", the board announced that it was winding itself up.
It all feels like distant history now. But if you're one of the people whose job involves trying to persuade the entire population of the United Kingdom to make a major change in their daily habits, decimalisation still has a kind of mythic status. The culture secretary, James Purnell, invoked it last week to describe the switchover to digital television, and like clockwork, the doom-laden predictions arrived this week.
According to market research, 48% of televisions sold between April and June this year were analogue, and will be useless without a set-top box once the government switches off the analogue signal, starting in the Cumbrian town of Whitehaven in October and culminating in London in 2012. (For smaller TVs, excluding widescreen and plasma models, four-fifths of those sold were analogue, reportedly because supermarkets are offering heavy discounts.) So far, only 33m of the nation's 64m TVs are digital or have a set-top box: we are, it seems, radically underprepared. "It's like doing decimalisation and the North Sea gas transformation at the same time," Purnell said, sounding a little awed by the scale of the challenge. "This is a massive technological and social transformation."
History, however, provides support for the following prediction: things will go fine. Sometimes, in Britain, it can seem as if we derive a large part of our national identity from the fact that large-scale projects seem destined to go wrong: major public buildings are never finished on schedule; the Millennium Experience was an embarrassment; we can't run a railway any more, and the 2012 Olympics seem doomed to come in catastrophically over-budget. Our ambitions overshoot our abilities. But with changes in our national habits - decimalisation, seatbelts in cars, unleaded petrol, chip and pin, and, based on early indications, the smoking ban - the opposite is true. We predict chaos, and it almost never arrives.
"I think, to be honest, we were all a bit surprised at how easy it was for people," says Sandra Quinn of Apacs, the UK payments association, which oversaw the transition to chip and pin on February 15 last year. "We just didn't have people phoning us up and moaning. We got lots of calls, but they were mostly from journalists, and we'd have these conversations - 'No, we can't find anything to report about, either.'" The February 15 date - the same as for decimalisation - had been chosen because it is traditionally the quietest time of year on the high street, but predictions of disaster abounded. In the event, many major retailers allowed customers a honeymoon period. Some news organisations reported that "tens of thousands of shoppers" were turned away from the tills on the 15th because they couldn't remember their pin numbers. But that seems to have been the only lesson they needed in order to change their ways. Chaos failed to ensue.
This doesn't necessarily mean that those who predict disaster in advance of a change are necessarily scaremongering: it may be that anticipatory worry is an important tool in readying people for disruption. "Any big change can lead to mayhem," says Claire Whyley, deputy director of the National Consumer Council, which called the launch of chip and pin "appalling" at the time. "It may take organisations like ours to direct some of the consumer-awareness operations." The NCC insists that its campaigning was crucial for the minority of people unable to use pin keypads, due to disability. Even Sandra Quinn accepts that all the tabloid hyperventilating probably helped in the end.
"I think we were on the front page of the Daily Mail four days running, or something, but I have to say I didn't mind, really," she says. Last year, Digital UK, the organisation handling the TV switchover, came to pick brains at Apacs. "We told them we were surprised at how much it caught the public imagination," Quinn says. "And it has. I was at my parents' golden wedding anniversary the other day, and it's all anyone in my family ever talks to me about these days."
The anticlimactic feeling of having planned for more problems than actually arose - felt by staff at Apacs and the Decimal Currency Board alike - was shared by Bob Smalley, who was the chief traffic policeman in the West Midlands in 1983, when seatbelts become compulsory in the front seats of cars. "The police decided to adopt a period of stopping people and advising them, cautioning them," says Smalley, now chief driving instructor at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. "And the Jimmy Savile 'clunk-click' campaign was so good that an awful lot of people were convinced. So by the time we got to the enforcement stage, it was all a bit of a damp squib. The majority of people had been persuaded."
Opponents of large-scale changes usually object to them on libertarian grounds: the "nanny state" must be prevented from trampling on our freedoms. (The civil liberties argument over seatbelts, now vanished from debate in Britain, is still current in the US; the state of New Hampshire has no compulsory seatbelt law at all.) A crucial component of this argument is that changes imposed from above are morally corrupting: when we rely on outside forces to alter behaviour, this theory goes, our own capacity for self-control is somehow diminished. In fact, something more complex seems to be going on. Once a change in our environment forces a change in our behaviour, we manage to convince ourselves, internally, that the change is morally right.
Smoking bans are the classic example. "The psychological change occurs after the behavioural change: if we're not smoking, or we're huddled outside in the rain smoking, then we rationalise it - we decide that smoking must be this bad thing, because I'm not doing it," says Dr Alastair Ross, principal psychologist at Human Factors Analysis in Glasgow, who has studied the (non-chaos-inducing) Scottish smoking ban. The implication is that similar measures taken to combat obesity - such as American bans on restaurants serving food containing trans fats - might actually enhance our ability to care for our own health, rather than eroding it.
In any case, the "nanny state" perception can actually speed the adoption of a new form of behaviour. "In Scotland, [the smoking ban] has gone through very smoothly, actually because it has been imposed by 'them'," says Ross. "So the landlord can say to the customers, 'Sorry, guys, it's not me,' and the customers can say, 'Aah, it's OK, it's not your fault, mate.'"
cont. in next post...
The papers are full of doom-laden predictions about the switchover to digital TV, just as they once were over decimalisation, and chip and pin technology. But will it really be a disaster? If the history of big British changes teaches us anything, says Oliver Burkeman it's that we're remarkably adaptable when push comes to shove
The world's first seven-sided coins started appearing in Britain's purses and cash registers on October 14 1969 - strange, alien lumps of cupro-nickel alloy that were greeted with instant suspicion. Bus conductors and Tory MPs fretted that the new 50 pence piece would be mistaken for the old half-crown, causing chaos. Secret documents released years later showed that the Decimal Currency Board - the body charged with decimalising the country by February 1971 - was terrified that the Queen might die before the changeover was complete, forcing it to introduce a whole new set of coins. And according to the BBC, a retired army colonel named Essex Moorcroft founded an organisation called the Anti-Heptagonists, dedicated to eradicating the new 50p on the grounds that it was "ugly" and "an insult to our sovereign, whose image it bears."
One half-suspects Colonel Moorcroft of being the figment of some rogue BBC reporter's imagination, but only because he fits the story so perfectly. There are always Colonel Moorcrofts, just as there are always fretting MPs and newspapers predicting chaos. But of course the introduction of the 50p went fine, and when full decimalisation arrived a year and a half later, that went fine, too. The Decimal Currency Board had planned for an 18-month transition period, full of confusion and rancour. Instead, most British people adapted within weeks. A few months after "D-day", the board announced that it was winding itself up.
It all feels like distant history now. But if you're one of the people whose job involves trying to persuade the entire population of the United Kingdom to make a major change in their daily habits, decimalisation still has a kind of mythic status. The culture secretary, James Purnell, invoked it last week to describe the switchover to digital television, and like clockwork, the doom-laden predictions arrived this week.
According to market research, 48% of televisions sold between April and June this year were analogue, and will be useless without a set-top box once the government switches off the analogue signal, starting in the Cumbrian town of Whitehaven in October and culminating in London in 2012. (For smaller TVs, excluding widescreen and plasma models, four-fifths of those sold were analogue, reportedly because supermarkets are offering heavy discounts.) So far, only 33m of the nation's 64m TVs are digital or have a set-top box: we are, it seems, radically underprepared. "It's like doing decimalisation and the North Sea gas transformation at the same time," Purnell said, sounding a little awed by the scale of the challenge. "This is a massive technological and social transformation."
History, however, provides support for the following prediction: things will go fine. Sometimes, in Britain, it can seem as if we derive a large part of our national identity from the fact that large-scale projects seem destined to go wrong: major public buildings are never finished on schedule; the Millennium Experience was an embarrassment; we can't run a railway any more, and the 2012 Olympics seem doomed to come in catastrophically over-budget. Our ambitions overshoot our abilities. But with changes in our national habits - decimalisation, seatbelts in cars, unleaded petrol, chip and pin, and, based on early indications, the smoking ban - the opposite is true. We predict chaos, and it almost never arrives.
"I think, to be honest, we were all a bit surprised at how easy it was for people," says Sandra Quinn of Apacs, the UK payments association, which oversaw the transition to chip and pin on February 15 last year. "We just didn't have people phoning us up and moaning. We got lots of calls, but they were mostly from journalists, and we'd have these conversations - 'No, we can't find anything to report about, either.'" The February 15 date - the same as for decimalisation - had been chosen because it is traditionally the quietest time of year on the high street, but predictions of disaster abounded. In the event, many major retailers allowed customers a honeymoon period. Some news organisations reported that "tens of thousands of shoppers" were turned away from the tills on the 15th because they couldn't remember their pin numbers. But that seems to have been the only lesson they needed in order to change their ways. Chaos failed to ensue.
This doesn't necessarily mean that those who predict disaster in advance of a change are necessarily scaremongering: it may be that anticipatory worry is an important tool in readying people for disruption. "Any big change can lead to mayhem," says Claire Whyley, deputy director of the National Consumer Council, which called the launch of chip and pin "appalling" at the time. "It may take organisations like ours to direct some of the consumer-awareness operations." The NCC insists that its campaigning was crucial for the minority of people unable to use pin keypads, due to disability. Even Sandra Quinn accepts that all the tabloid hyperventilating probably helped in the end.
"I think we were on the front page of the Daily Mail four days running, or something, but I have to say I didn't mind, really," she says. Last year, Digital UK, the organisation handling the TV switchover, came to pick brains at Apacs. "We told them we were surprised at how much it caught the public imagination," Quinn says. "And it has. I was at my parents' golden wedding anniversary the other day, and it's all anyone in my family ever talks to me about these days."
The anticlimactic feeling of having planned for more problems than actually arose - felt by staff at Apacs and the Decimal Currency Board alike - was shared by Bob Smalley, who was the chief traffic policeman in the West Midlands in 1983, when seatbelts become compulsory in the front seats of cars. "The police decided to adopt a period of stopping people and advising them, cautioning them," says Smalley, now chief driving instructor at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. "And the Jimmy Savile 'clunk-click' campaign was so good that an awful lot of people were convinced. So by the time we got to the enforcement stage, it was all a bit of a damp squib. The majority of people had been persuaded."
Opponents of large-scale changes usually object to them on libertarian grounds: the "nanny state" must be prevented from trampling on our freedoms. (The civil liberties argument over seatbelts, now vanished from debate in Britain, is still current in the US; the state of New Hampshire has no compulsory seatbelt law at all.) A crucial component of this argument is that changes imposed from above are morally corrupting: when we rely on outside forces to alter behaviour, this theory goes, our own capacity for self-control is somehow diminished. In fact, something more complex seems to be going on. Once a change in our environment forces a change in our behaviour, we manage to convince ourselves, internally, that the change is morally right.
Smoking bans are the classic example. "The psychological change occurs after the behavioural change: if we're not smoking, or we're huddled outside in the rain smoking, then we rationalise it - we decide that smoking must be this bad thing, because I'm not doing it," says Dr Alastair Ross, principal psychologist at Human Factors Analysis in Glasgow, who has studied the (non-chaos-inducing) Scottish smoking ban. The implication is that similar measures taken to combat obesity - such as American bans on restaurants serving food containing trans fats - might actually enhance our ability to care for our own health, rather than eroding it.
In any case, the "nanny state" perception can actually speed the adoption of a new form of behaviour. "In Scotland, [the smoking ban] has gone through very smoothly, actually because it has been imposed by 'them'," says Ross. "So the landlord can say to the customers, 'Sorry, guys, it's not me,' and the customers can say, 'Aah, it's OK, it's not your fault, mate.'"
cont. in next post...
