Primitives for an information economy

Abstract

There are three really fundamental principles of speaking after dinner. The first is to be humorous, the second is to be brief, I am not going to do that, and the third is not to say anything which might offend your audience. So I thought it would be suitable to start off by introducing you to a tabloid journal that you might not all come across, called Capital Gay. Because in the last year, something very interesting has happened on pages 18 and 19. These are adverts for telephone dating services. One of them according to a very small study has generated one and a half million telephone calls since it started. Their capital costs consist of putting the advert in Capital Gay. There is a difference between peak time charges of 38p a minute and off peak charges of 25p a minute. The only difference, I can imagine, is that the 13p in those differences has gone to British Telecom. Those of you who are nasty and competitive will be pleased to know that not a single one of them uses ‘you know who's’ telephone lines. The only other thing they have to do, is employ somebody called Arthur, who doesn't appear to be a computer, but if you use a few words which he can recognise then he beeps in and disconnects you because either ‘Nanny Telecom’ or somebody outside British Telecom in ‘Nanny Government’ decided the last thing that was to happen in Britain, was that people were to use naughty words over the telephones because after all it's illegal to use naughty words through the mail.

Citation

Lindsay, J. (1989), "Primitives for an information economy", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 41 No. 7/8, pp. 251-263. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb051145