NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility for the Future
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Issue #2 Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates December 21, 1995
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Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)
On the Web: http://netfuture.org
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
CONTENTS:
*** Moderator's Note
What have we wrought?
*** The Great Crusade Against Censorship (Stephen L. Talbott)
Really, folks, get serious
*** High School Students and Technology Assessment (Lowell Monke)
Is efficiency at war with value?
*** Automatic Phone Answering Can Improve Customer Service (Ray Brownrigg)
It's all in how the automatic answering systems are used
*** Monthly posting of netfuture guidelines
*** About this list
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*** Moderator's Note (27 lines)
Having hoped for maybe 100 subscribers to begin with, we found ourselves
flooded with over 1000 subscribers before the first issue was posted.
Things have only gotten "worse" from there: this second issue is being
mailed to more than 2000 subscribers. Apparently the list's topic,
"Technology and Human Responsibility for the Future," touches an
increasingly exposed nerve within the Net community.
This convinces us more than ever not to follow the usual discussion group
model. It's not reasonable to expect 2000 subscribers to engage in truly
productive chit-chat. We will therefore move more toward the newsletter
end of the spectrum -- but with members of the list encouraged to provide
content. Extended conversations will be great to see, but they will have
to be pursued at an unusually disciplined level.
I will play a vigorous role in selecting and soliciting materials
consistent with our announced themes, and in getting authors to "clean
up" their presentation before posting. This will not be a "let's get to
know each other list," but rather a place where you will reliably
encounter interesting material not adequately discussed elsewhere. For
more details, see the netfuture guidelines later in this issue.
The large readership, however, hasn't translated yet into submissions of
fresh material. If you've got something important to say that fits the
list's purposes, please consider passing it along to us. Meanwhile, I'll
not be shy about stoking the fire -- as this issue shows! [SLT]
Next posting will be in early January.
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*** The Great Crusade Against Censorship (159 lines)
From Stephen L. Talbott
Someone deliver us from the Internet censorship wars. For the record:
yes, I'm against silly attempts at censorship. But this supremely easy
pose of conscience doesn't solve much of anything.
"To censor or not to censor" leaves the discussion at a level where we
lose either way. A serious effort at political imposition of censorship
would reduce our society to chaos; on the other hand, if, in the name of
opposing censorship, we simply let networking technologies run along in a
self-driven manner, unaffected by our acceptance of responsibility for
their development and use -- if we do not sweat drops of blood trying to
understand where and how this responsibility can be exercised -- we
guarantee the continued corrosion of everything that can be called
culture.
Telling parents that they should be responsible for their children's Net
exposure says nothing at all about the urgent issues. After all, Parents
should also be responsible for their children's exposure to mortar shells
in a war zone; but most of us would take that to mean: get the children
out of this zone if at all possible, and if not, at least do what you can
to work toward an end of the war. What, then, does taking responsibility
for the Net mean? Not many are offering answers.
Resistance to censorship is healthy if it leads us to grant the right of
existence to all sorts of value-centered communities and cultural groups,
allowing each to develop and express its own character. But if such a
free and diverse society is threatened by censorship, it is even more
radically threatened by the wholesale transfer of social functions to the
Net's culture-dissolving cauldron.
This thought, in any case, is what lies behind the following open letter,
which was sent to some of the principals in the censorship debate. The
letter is an admittedly incendiary attempt to rile people up and get them
to thinking on a different level. If the riling is not to your taste (as
I'd like to think it usually is not to mine!), I hope you will forgive me.
THE GREAT CRUSADE AGAINST CENSORSHIP
Really, folks, get serious
Stephen L. Talbott
As Congress emits its final harrumphs about indecency on the Internet,
the whining of our faithful cyberspace anti-cops is reaching its
predictable, shrill crescendo.
The sound of ripping paper is "what the United States Congress has been
doing to the Constitution in the last few months, all in the name of
protecting our children," pouts Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.
"The religious right is only weeks away from final victory in its battle
to shut American citizens out of the Internet as a medium for uncensored
communication," worries Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual
Community.
"Congress' absurd actions last week made me finally take a look at sex on
the Internet - just to prove that our legislators are fools as well as
money-wasters," fumes David Hipschman in his "Cyberland" column.
The object of this aroused indignation is a Congress now flirting with
adoption of an "indecency standard" for the Internet as part of a
telecommunication bill slated for final passage soon.
Of course, it is intolerable to have congressional representatives (of
all people!) setting cultural standards of decency. But please recognize
the companion truth as well: it is intolerable to commit ourselves, our
society, our children to a medium in which it is virtually impossible for
cultural standards -- or anything recognizable as culture itself -- to
arise at all. The Net is, in its fundamental manifestations to date, as
corrosive of culture as anything yet conceived by man.
Between these two truths, we are trapped, with no obvious exit. To rail
against one jaw of the trap while ignoring the other is both unproductive
and symptomatic of the blindness that landed us in this predicament to
begin with. It also reminds one of how hard it would be to do without
that most comforting of enemies -- the censor -- whose dastardly
predilections so easily convince us that we are among the more
broadminded, liberal, and cultured representatives of society.
The fight against censorship is -- or ought to be -- the negative side of
something more positive: a desire to protect freedom of expression. One
critical place where we require such freedom is in the schooling of our
children. Parents should be able to place their children in a school
that reflects their deepest convictions about what is true and good and
beautiful, about the developmental needs of their children, and about the
sort of cultural heritage their children ought to enjoy.
Imagine a school system where every parent supposedly had this right to
choose a school, but where all schools were jammed into one vast, open,
chaotic building, with teachers and students indiscriminately scattered
around. If parents had little choice but to submit their children to
such a system, then, far from being free and uncensored, it would
actually force an ugly and artificial homogenization, removing all the
freedom and diversity that should belong to education.
The fact is that freedoms are meaningless apart from cultural traditions,
reasonably stable institutions, boundaries that allow the flowering of
different value systems, places that overflow with the intensity of
enfleshed human presence -- in general, apart from a real cultural
topography that offers some predictability and constancy, as well as
healthy evolution. But all these requirements are exactly what the Net
tends to destroy.
Yes, political censorship is intolerable. But it is also intolerable
that our children should be immersed ever more thoroughly -- and as a
matter of concerted, society-wide effort -- in sickeningly unchildlike
worlds, cut off from nature, cut off from thick-textured, supportive
ethnic milieus against which the young can shape their own lives, and cut
off from living, accessible role models.
Personally, I consider censorship just about the last issue worth wasting
my time on. There are more than enough other people to fill whatever
breaches may be opened in the first amendment's defenses. Indeed, the
greater danger is that the rush of the masses to fill the breach will
cause the entire edifice being defended to topple.
This nation will not, over any long term, err dramatically on the side of
greater censorship. It remains as true as ever that the easiest way to
create a bestseller is to provoke reactions that look censorious.
Really, folks, get serious. You know as well as I that if an indecency
standard ends up banning the word "breast" from .signature files, the next
day there will be millions of such files with that word repeated as often
as our ever burgeoning disk space permits. The law would become a joke,
and you who have whined the loudest would all become cultural heros. You
really ought to hope the law passes.
If censorship ever takes hold in all seriousness, our society will
dissolve in the ensuing conflict. This points us to the real danger. On
what condition can we imagine censorship taking hold? Only if the
foundations of society and culture become so deeply threatened that
censorship arrives as a desperation measure. But at that point "to
censor or not to censor" will not matter much; either way, society will
be collapsing. Who knows how fast the wholesale networking of society
will bring us to such a pass?
If all the shining knights of cyberspace really want to do something
worthwhile, let them spend a little while contemplating the dead end to
which they have helped bring us by their ceaseless promotion of the Net
purely for the exhilaration and the technology of it. Where were they
when the demand arose to start putting a computer on every child's desk?
Yes, the technology is exciting, after its fashion, but were these
advocates asking any profound questions about the nature of the child and
of education as they panted after the latest technical gadgetry?
What I am looking for is the barest acknowledgment that, well, yes, there
are some larger problems having to do with the Net's corrosive effects
upon society, and, no, we do not get any closer to solving these merely
by voting against censorship at every opportunity. We can only release
the trap by pulling both jaws apart, and that means turning off the rose
tint on our computer screens and reconsidering the most fundamental terms
of our embrace with technology.
(Stephen L. Talbott, an editor at O'Reilly & Associates, is author of "The
Future Does Not Compute -- Transcending the Machines in Our Midst.")
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*** High school students and technology assessment (103 lines)
Response to "The Fundamental Deceit of Technology" (NF-1)
From Lowell Monke
Steve,
Thanks for starting this discussion group, and starting it with some
concerns that hit home to a lot of us, I'm sure.
Your first offering came at just the right time for me. My computer
technology class is discussing the role of technology in society and just
this week we read excerpts from "Technopoly" in which Postman asserts
that once a technology is introduced it plays out its hand and we are
forced to adapt to it. In the midst of discussing this idea one of my
students made the enthusiasts' claim that you cite - our civilization has
been steadily advancing since we have begun making technological changes
so what is the problem?
I tried to get at this issue by asking the students to consider what has
changed for the better in the last 50 years and what has changed for the
worse (this required a brief course in ancient history). They had no
trouble coming up with things to list on the plus side: Cars
(transportation in general), TV (some debate whether this was a plus or
minus), computers (no debate), information access, medical science, food
production and a few more. Curiously, they had a very difficult time
getting started on the minus side. Finally, I suggested families as an
example and then they began coming up with things: government, schools,
physical fitness, crime, drugs, environment and a few more. It became
clear to most of the students that there appeared to be a pretty neat
categorical split developing - areas that were _perceived_ as progressing
were technological while those things _perceived_ to be declining were
personal, social, educational and natural. (I stress the word "perceived"
because there seem to be some social areas of progress, like human
rights, that cloud the issue) So the next question was, Is there a
connection? And if so, is it a cause and effect one? And if so, are the
advances worth the declines? Unfortunately, just as I asked these
questions the bell rang and, Pavlovian dogs as we have conditioned them
to be, they immediately put their thoughts away and went to the next
class.
But those questions lead me to ask for some clarification in something
you wrote in the essay:
>There is an alternative, however, and it does not require us to
>sacrifice efficiency. Anyone who suggests we give up efficiency for
>the sake of human values has missed the critical issue. Efficiency
>is never at war with value.
I think I have a vague idea of what you are getting at here, but I would
appreciate it if you - or someone else who is tuned into this - could
expand on this or approach it from a different angle - especially the
last sentence. It certainly doesn't fit the admittedly oversimplified
dichotomy my students developed and it isn't the common thinking one gets
from critics of technology (nor, I might add, do I think it is an
argument that would ring true to family farmers in the midwest who are
battling the corporate farms that are driving them out of business
through the "efficiency" of size).
All the best,
Lowell
Lowell Monke
Advanced Computer Technology
Des Moines Independent Schools
Des Moines, Iowa
LM7846s@acad.drake.edu
Lowell --
Nice question.
The large, agribusiness operations are only more efficient at producing
what they produce. If that's what we want, then that's what we should
buy.
But if we want, say, pesticide-free produce grown in healthy soil, then we
will happily pay what it costs today to produce that. The large farms
you speak of simply aren't in that business, so they don't threaten the
small, organic farm. Or, put it this way: if they do seem to threaten
the small farm, it is only because not enough of us are interested in the
particular values the small farm produces. So the small farm loses out,
not to greater efficiency, but to a different set of values.
If a large farm learns to do what the small farm does, but more
efficiently -- then more power to it. Many of us will buy from it.
But this is no conflict between efficiency and value; it's just
efficiency. (Remember, however, that one of the things you and I may
choose to value and pay for is a quality of community -- including the
quality of the community of people producing the food. Nor is this
absurd: we all pay one hell of a lot today for community lost. Just look
at the prison and drug war budgets.)
In general, it is only as we begin to grow alert to questions of value
throughout the economy that we will be able to shape the economy
according to human needs, rather than yield to subhuman, technological
forces running amok. A reasonable awareness of human responsibility has
already grown up in the environmental arena. But the technological
surround, as a context for individual responsibility -- has so far
escaped even the beginnings of such an awareness. We mostly take up an
unconscious relation to the machines we buy, use, program, and make policy
for. [SLT]
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*** Automatic Phone Answering Can Improve Customer Service (58 lines)
Response to "The Fundamental Deceit of Technology" (NF-1)
From Ray Brownrigg
Steve:
I would like to respond to part of your article in the first issue
of netfuture.
> I work for a book publisher, O'Reilly & Associates. It is now
> possible for us to exchange our customer service people for an order-
> taking telephone system. I hope we don't. Much of the company's
> success has arisen from its unusually close contact with its readers.
> A bond of mutual trust and respect has developed, which influences the
> quality of our books.
I think you CAN have it both ways. That is, you can introduce the
technology, AND maintain the reputation for good customer service. The
key is whether or not the customer "trusts and respects" the technology
(or interface) provided. I have not encountered these voice recognition
systems, but I have experienced the touch-tone activated type in both
telephone answering and electronic banking situations. The overall
problem I see is that there are too few opportunities (sometimes none)
to "break out" of the sequence and speak to a real person (or even just
to start over). I can envisage a book ordering system in which if you
knew exactly what you wanted, and it was available, and all payment
details had been pre-arranged, you the customer would prefer to use
touch-tone or voice recognition to make the transaction, particularly if
it meant that the transaction would be possible outside of 'normal
working hours'. However, what is essential, and usually lacking, is a
continuously operative 'escape to human' key, which would ideally
use your current context to connect you to an appropriate person, and
make available to that person the transaction history of your current
call (so that you wouldn't have to re-state the catalog number if you
were ordering a book, or the extension number of the person you were
trying to call, e.g.).
The requirement is, of course, that some real software needs to be
developed to handle this interface to the customer. I suspect the
requirements of this software are far in advance of what is currently
provided.
>
> If we learn to care about these things, we will happily pay for them
> in every product and service -- not because we have given up
> efficiency, but because we now seek ends that simply cannot be
> mechanically contrived. We will no longer lash out against our
> machines. Nor will we fail to recognize the anti-human consequences
> of a progress conceived in purely technical terms.
I agree. The scenario I paint above may not be much more efficient,
because you still need the staff to be available to handle the "escapes
to human" requests. But I believe it will still maintain, or enhance,
the reputation for good customer service.
Regards
Ray Brownrigg (ray@isor.vuw.ac.nz) http://www.isor.vuw.ac.nz/~ray
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*** Monthly posting of netfuture guidelines (67 lines)
netfuture is a moderated forum -- the moderation is one of our responses
to the problem of information quality on the Net. Initially, the concept
of the list hovers indecisively between that of a moderated discussion
presented in digest form, and that of an informal electronic journal. No
one's worrying; we'll see how things evolve under the pressures of your
participation. After all, what really works in this new medium may not
have been discovered yet, so why not keep an open mind?
All published materials will be reviewed for
* readability (the sloppiness characteristic of so much electronic
communication will be nudged toward a minimum, as a courtesy to readers,
although informality is encouraged)
* substantive, well thought-out content
* relevance to the (not yet fully defined) themes of the list
There is no preordained limit upon the length of contributions, although
for obvious reasons a shorter piece may have better chances than an
excessively long one. But if the long one contains the year's decisive
insight regarding technology and the responsible human being, we'll still
probably use it!
Submissions may be edited for length and presentability, but your
permission will be asked before any such revision is posted.
The overarching theme of the list is "Technology and Human Responsibility
for the Future." What this really means will doubtless become clear only
as readers help to make it clear. But here is a first shot at
exemplifying (and by no means exhausting) relevant topics:
* What, within the human being, drives the success and progress of the
Net?
* How does technology determine us and how do we determine technology?
That is, where are we most free, where are we most unfree, and where is
the greatest promise of extending our freedom? As technology changes
the face of society, are we masters of the change, or are we being
taken for a ride by forces we can no longer control?
* Does it matter how we form all those little habits that shape our
interaction with computers -- from the way we scan the words of another
human being, to the way we hammer out our own words, to the way we bow
with our attention before the unfolding pattern of screen events, to the
way we submit our senses and bodies to be trained by electronic
technology?
* Does it matter when we support, through our purchases and use, new
technological capabilities that exist solely because the massive
machinery of research has made them possible -- that is, when we add
our own share to the impetus of a largely self-driven technological
evolution? What are the human implications of such an evolution?
* How are we being affected by computerized technology in our self-image,
our personal relationships, our attitudes toward community? Is the talk
about the Net as an intimate or democratizing or prejudice-free medium
justified?
* Is the computer affecting education as advertised, or is it redefining
what it means to learn and teach--and in ways we have not yet fully
recognized?
If you are in doubt about a possible contribution, there is no loss of face
in simply testing the waters.
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About this list
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #2 :: December 21, 1995