In today’s Guardian, 06/10/2020, in his article Robert Rinder: ‘Law is meaningless unless everybody has access to it’, Patrick Butler writes: ‘His views come tumbling out, from street homelessness (it is hard to think of a more poignant example of [social] failure) to the dire lack of social housing, the short-sighted dismantling of legal aid, and the complexity of the benefit system (one gets the creeping sense that it is made as challenging as possible for those who need it to be as easy as possible).’[1]

Rinder is a barrister and onetime TV judge who switched his life’s work to become a Shelter Ambassador. But Rinder’s complaint brings up a poignant point. The shift that is taking place to bring all the processes of housing, human services, and legal aid onto government online platforms, should, it would be assumed, be able to simplify processes, allowing increased access. But instead these online platforms often have the opposite effect of screening out or removing candidates.

All these services were once brought to you in person, inside an office building, in waiting rooms, places where you could chat with others and exchange information. A drab atmosphere, peeling paint and uncomfortable seating were the standard fare for everyone. Now, however, with everything online, it’s difficult to reproduce these socially mixed environments... with the pandemic, these online functions are being reinforced. The little chat-bot at the bottom of the page is all that is left, I guess.

In their ground-breaking book, ‘The medium is the Message: An inventory of effects,’ published in 1967, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore observed:

Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or counter situations made by artists provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions.