The Wiki Man | 16 January 2010

You know how it is. You’re driving down some remote B road in rural Britain and your petrol tank is running low. At last you stumble on some tiny petrol station selling some fabulously obscure brand of petrol such as Anglo or Burmah. When you pull in, the weirdest thing happens — a live human being walks over to your car and offers to fill your tank.

Theoretically, we should be delighted by this. But most of us under 60 probably find it faintly disquieting. Filling a petrol tank is now something we prefer to do for ourselves.

Of course there may be a Freudian explanation for the male urge to fill up. Yet our preference for self-service seems to apply to a lot of other activities not involving nozzles or pumps — such as booking flights, buying books, withdrawing cash or supermarket shopping. Most airlines were convinced until 20 years ago that the travel agent was irreplaceable: now many of us prefer to do the agent’s work ourselves. And most of us would find 1950s grocery shopping ‘and a packet of cornflakes, please, Mr Johnson’ intolerable now we’re used to wandering the aisles ourselves.

In short, technology has led us to expect a certain degree of choice in our everyday lives so that we feel uneasy ceding control to someone else. It’s a trend that has done little to boost our affection for public services since, even when the quality of public service is high, the experience tends to leave you feeling impotent: you can get a pizza to come to your home when you are well, but not a doctor when you are ill.

Understanding this shift in public expectation is vitally important for any Cameron government if they hope to realise their vision for the ‘Post-Bureaucratic Age’.