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<h3>North and South Divide in Multimedia</h3>
 
North and South Divide in Multimedia 
 
Abstract 
 
 
 The aim of this paper is to show that there is a multimedia divide in the North and South of England and that this divide is rooted in economical history. This article will focus on the Internet development in relation to the British economy. The discussion begins with a definition of Multimedia and an overview of the British economy during the 1980s. The result is that the development of multimedia is closely linked to the economical development and to bridge the gap between North and South of England, the government needs to spend more money in the northern cities. 
 
Introduction 
 
 
 Multimedia is a very broad term and before starting this discussion, one needs to define it clearly and specify what aspects of it the following paragraphs will focus on. 
According to the dictionary multimedia is ‘the presentation of a computer application, usually, interactive, that incorporates media elements such as text graphics, video animation and sound on a computer. Its history, in relation to computers dates back to 1972, when the first video game was launched. Consequently, one can equate multimedia with all interactive aspects of computers, such as internet, games or work packages to name but a few. This discussion will focus primarily on the Internet and its development in relation to the British economy. It will examine both its private use and its use in education and business, thus placing in a larger economical context. 
Statistics, which will be analysed in more detail later, have shown that there exists an important rift in the development of multimedia between the North and the South of Britain. In the southern regions and London, private Internet access is much more common in the South than in the North of Britain. There are a number of reasons for this divide and in order to investigate further, it is essential to explain the geographical and economical divide of Britain over the past 25 to 30 years. A period of time that fuelled the divide was the 1980s, when the collapse of the mining and other industries caused a national state of recession. The recovery from this economical low-point was much faster in the South than in the North, due to Margaret Thatcher’s centralised government and the fact that London and the South of England had easier connections with the rest of Europe and thus experienced facilitated trade and transport possibilities. To this day, the British government has not managed to bridge this economical gap and living standards in the north remain statistically lower than in the South. 
These historical facts imply that the economical development of Britain is closely related to the development of multimedia. In other words, one can ask whether the trailing northern economy is one of the reasons for the lower use of multimedia in these regions? In reverse, does the economical well being of a region depend on the development of its multimedia industry? 
 
Nowadays, large companies’ administrations are highly computerised, which suggests that its employees have to be more and more fluent in the use of Internet and work related computer programs. This explains how the large-scale economy is dependent on the multimedia education of each private individual in order to function adequately. The following discussion will aim at elaborating the reasons for the North and South divide and its development over the past 25 years. It will also examine some of the efforts made to eliminate this divide and try propose further possible solutions. 
 
Literature Review 
 
 
In the early 1980s, economic misery was spread widely. It was more prevalent and more deeply felt in the North, but it was certainly present in the South as well, and it was difficult to argue strongly for a policy which would simply have distributed high unemployment, for example, more evenly across the country. The economic recovery after the recession was one in which the South was the main beneficiary making it inevitable that sooner or later it would run up against constrains on growth, at a time when the North was still starved of economic activity. 
 
With the change of government in May 1979 came a major shift in policy. 
The Conservative government’s dominant aims were to master inflation through control of money supply and to pull back the frontiers of the State with an increasing emphasis on privatisation. These were pursued with great pertinacity, but often with more rhetoric than success, in circumstances that include a second oil shock in 1979, an international slowdown and recession, war in the Falklands, a prolonged miners’ strike and international economic recovery from 1984 onwards. The Thatcher government took office in May 1979 until the end of 1990 with the resignation of Mrs Thatcher. 
 
The government which took office in May 1979 was dominated by ministers with a very different economic philosophy from that of earlier governments. In some respect they shared the views of the Heath administration in its early days. They were strongly against State intervention in industry and wanted to abolish controls, subsidies and other attempts to prevail over market forces. They intended to cut public expenditure and reduce taxation. They hoped to return an unspecified amount of publicity owned industry to private enterprise. Producers and consumers were to be left as free as possible to conduct their own affairs. 
 
The aim of financial stability, moreover, was to be achieved by control over the stock of money. It was regarded as the product of monetary policy which was the sole and sufficient instrument for the avoidance of inflation. 
The monetary targets which were to govern policy were first missed, then changed and finally abandoned. The story of economic policy in the 1980s is largely the story of reversion from new concepts of economic management to older concepts initially rejected. 
 
By the end of the decade the management of the economy had swung back a long way towards earlier aims and methods. A higher importance was still attached to overcoming inflation, there was no thought of incomes policy, and there was a more acquiescence in high and rising unemployment. But the problems facing the government were much more akin to those of earlier decades, especially with the reappearance of a large balance of payments deficit. Monetary policy was no longer regarded as an instant cure of inflation. 
Production had ceased to fall at the end of 1980 although this was not what the statistics showed at the time. It would appear that GDP increase between the last quarter of 1980 and the last quarter of 1981 by about 1 ½ per cent and in about the same proportion in 1982- not enough to prevent the continuing rise in unemployment in those years. The increase in GDP in 1983 was much more evident and may have been as large as 4 per cent. In 1984 there was some slowing down as result of the miners’ strike, which is estimated to have knocked 1 ½ per cent off the increase in that year and inflated correspondingly the growth in 1985. Taking 1984 and 1985 together, the estimated rise in GDP averaged a little under 3 per cent per annum. It 1986 it was back up to 4 per cent and maintained a fast pace in 1987-8, averaging about 4 ½ per cent before falling in 1989 to about 1 per cent and beginning to fall in the middle of 1990. 
 
The years after 1983 brought a continuing economic recovery in which employment expanded for seven successive years although unemployment did not turn down until the end of 1986, when it fell rapidly for three years. The prolonged rise in output from the low point in 1981 carried it up by over a third to a peak in 1990. The running was made partly by fixed investment, which reached an earlier peak in consumer 1989, higher by over two-thirds than in 1981, and partly by consumer spending, which outstripped the growth in output and by 1990 was 43 per cent higher than in 1981. 
The expansion in investment was entirely in private sector. 
In the private sector the most conspicuous expansion was in distribution and services where at peak in 1988 fixed investment was nearly three times what it had been in 1981. The increase was, however, quite general and covered housing and manufacturing as well as the various categories of asset to which the totals relate. 
 
The expansion in consumer spending was boosted after the 1983 by a marked fall in personal savings. In contrast to the mid 1970s there had been no fall in consumer spending in the recession of 1980-1: in 1983 there was an increase of no less than 4.2 per cent (well above what the official figures indicate at the time). 
A central part in this fall in the savings ratio was played by the housing boom that reached a peak in 1988 in the South of England and a little later in the North. House prices rose to extraordinary levels in relation to current incomes. The rise in prices and the prospect of its continuance enhanced the attractiveness of house ownership and added to housing demand. 
 
The housing boom was facilitated by easy access to finance. But in the 1988 the process went into reverse. High rates of interest on outstanding mortgages put pressure on consumer incomes while house prices either fell (in the south east particularly) or rose more slowly (in the north). Borrowing fell off and the savings ratio recovered to nearly 11 per cent at the end of 1990. Just as the fall in the savings ratio earlier helped economic recovery so the later increase in the ratio contributed to the downturn after 1988. The enormous increase in consumer debt gave to fluctuations in the short-term rate of interest a power over consumer spending that it had not formerly enjoyed. 
 
for more information about this article please visit http://www.interactivemultimedia.it/ 
Author Info
 
I am Multimedia web/graphic designer based in London, highly skilled in web/graphic designer and SEO. I work to W3C standards; creating cross platform, fully validating CSS sites that look great and are totally accessible. All of my sites are completely hand-coded. 
My clean coding techniques ensure that my site can be tuned to perform well in all the major search engines.

http://www.interactivemultimedia.it/ 
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