NETFUTURE

                   Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #42      Copyright 1997 O'Reilly & Associates          March 6, 1997
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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:
*** Quotes and Provocations
      You Can Fire the Teachers, But You Still Need the Technicians
      The New Money: Anonymous But Countable
      What Lies Beyond Multiculturalism?
*** Seeking Balance (Stephen L. Talbott)
The hope of computerized dissonance
*** About this newsletter

You Can Fire the Teachers, But You Still Need the Technicians

We're at least a step closer to that happening with the announcement of what looks to be a dramatic conference at Penn State University in September. It's called "Education and Technology: Asking the Right Questions," and will include such featured speakers as Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, and Langdon Winner. Not your usual, sheep-minded, "isn't technology cool" education crowd. For more information, call 814-863-5110 or write to ConferenceInfo@cde.psu.edu.

Meanwhile, the few educators in the trenches with their eyes open find themselves appalled by the scale of the folly, if only in economic terms, quite apart from the educational issues. Lowell Monke, who teaches computer technology in the Des Moines public schools, and who also participates in the district's technology planning efforts, writes:

I just talked to the head of the technicians in the district and his take is even more bleak than mine. We currently have about 2000 computers in the district and 5 technicians. He claims that businesses generally maintain a ratio of computers to techs well under 100 to 1. That means we are at least 15 short right now. The number of computers will double in the district in the next 5 years according to current plans. That means we should go from 5 to 40 tech positions to adequately support our computer operations. We also now only have 3, not 4, tech staff development people. That number is woefully inadequate now so one would suspect that within 5 years we will need at least a total of 10 staff development people working just on tech stuff.

Keep in mind that none of these include the 10 people being proposed [for] curriculum tech support. It also doesn't include any personnel needed in the high or middle schools -- that part is scheduled for action next year. So add another 5 support people there, minimum. That's 65-70 tech staff needed within the next 5 years to adequately support the computers we are installing in the district at a time when there is no money available to add classroom personnel. And of course with that many new hires in one department we can expect an additional 2 administrators minimum to supervise them.

I'm a high school student in a public school in suburban Maryland, and I truly agree with your views that the school systems aren't attacking the issue of computers in schools the correct way. Immediately when you started talking about the unexpected support costs involved, I began thinking about my computer & information processing class. I would estimate that there are at least ten printers in the room, and it's a miracle if more than one of them is functioning on any given day. One printer wasn't even designed to work with these computers (why the school purchased it is beyond me), and the rest have all been overworked or mistreated to the point of inoperability. And the teacher's response to questions about the situation is always "I'm waiting for the repairman." For a while, the repairman was a regular fixture in my classroom, but now, either the money's run out, or they've given up, because nothing gets fixed.

And next door, there's a brand new computer lab of Pentiums with laser printers, but it isn't being used until next semester because it would be "too hard to teach the new software"....

The New Money: Anonymous But Countable

Not that it will linger there. According to the article,

it takes an average of ten seconds, half of what it did a few years ago, for an A.T.M. transaction to complete the circle of seven electronic steps from request to sign-off: from the A.T.M. to the bank that owns the A.T.M., to NYCE [New York Clearinghouse Association], to the bank where the customer has the account, back to NYCE, back to the bank that owns the A.T.M....and then to the A.T.M. itself.

If the Secaucus Corridor is not widely known, it's partly because of the low profile it tries to keep. "Where there is no customer contact except through the digital Web, anonymity becomes its own security-conscious value." Citibank asked the Times not to print its address, and an NYCE official said, "We don't want anybody to find us." The reporter, Kirk Johnson, commented,

A cultural shift is evident in that kind of talk. If this is indeed an emerging center of postmodern money, it will have its own style. Old money capitals graced themselves with symbols of power, stability and might. But where cash is merely a few flashing lines on a computer screen, edifice is irrelevant.

Dependability is measured by the quality of encryption codes and backup generators and the infrequency of bugs and crashes. The hallmark of success is invisibility.

That, in fact, is what the money-changers in the temple forgot. And it is what the A.T.M. software never knew. The question is how, given the numerical abstraction money is becoming, we can preserve a sense for the meaning and value of money. What has true value cannot be sent off in whatever direction an equation or bit of silicon logic might dictate; it requires a fit, an appropriate context of meaning. It requires, in particular, an act of giving met by an act of receiving.

The quality of these acts, more than anything else, determines the enduring consequences of the transaction.

What Lies Beyond Multiculturalism?

In his Epilogue, Edwards briefly inquires into the post-Cold War shape of the closed world. He describes how the single frame within which the two superpowers struggled for supremacy has given way to multiplying nationalistic and ethnic flashpoints. "Despite their often global scale, 1990s politics as World Wide Web remain fragmented, beyond the reach of the Cold War obsession with centralized control."

At the same time, the Cold War's end "marked the ultimate achievement of world closure: the realization of a global market economy." It also brought the Gulf War, where much of the power of the Cold War arsenal was demonstrated for the first time. Referring to the endless television replay of laser-guided bombs destroying targets in Baghdad, he writes:

In those moments a worldwide television audience experienced the joining of cyborg subjectivity with closed-world politics. As we rode the eye of the laser-guided bomb to the white flash of impact in the eerie virtual reality of the TV image, we experienced at once the elation of technological power, the impotence and voyeurism of a passive audience, and the blurring of boundaries between "intelligent" weapons and political will.

This helps lead Edwards toward the provocative conclusion that "intelligent machines are being integrated into contemporary culture under the all-inclusive rubric of multiculturalism." He sees problems in this "co-optation" of cyborg politics:

This simplistic doctrine flattens all cultural difference into two categories. Exotic differences function as the "interesting" resources for a Believe-It-Or-Not pseudo-anthropology. These can be trotted out as the trophies of cultural explorers (as on Star Trek: The Next Generation), as existence proofs for incommensurable understandings of reality, and as arguments for preserving cultural diversity. But in a world brought to us by the Discovery Channel, the exotic has paradoxically become familiar. It is all too easily transformed into the utterly mundane, and anthropology gives way to Disney World. As commonplaces of everyday life, mundane cultural differences form the basis for an easy relativism. This antimorality avoids hard ethical and epistemological questions by rotating all hierarchies -- whether of value, of knowledge, or of power -- sideways by ninety degrees, turning them into spectrums of difference rather than scales of worth. Terminator 2 demonstrates how cyborg politics can be co-opted by this oversimple multiculturalism, where cyborgs represent little more than a set of mundane differences between sentient creatures whose technology matters no more than their biology.

How do we find sources of integrity and authenticity in a world where the enormous pressures of global capitalism inexorably hew all forms of worth to fit the Procrustean bed of money value? How can we preserve cultural diversity at all when technologies of communication (including computer networks) and transportation are eliminating the very basis of cultural difference in embodied situations, locations, and language? How do we locate a basis for politically expensive judgments of value in the face of the political cheapness of moral relativism? How do we face global-scale problems with the only resources we have, namely our increasingly divided, anxious, angry, yet increasingly fragile, inauthentic, and vanishing local cultures? How do we even conceive of a "we" in an America where the master categories of gender, ethnicity, class, and even race have become, for many, little more than mix'n'match cultural fashions? The postmodern embrace of cultural chaos seems no answer, yet the old secular authorities -- science, Western liberalism, Marxism -- have collapsed. In their place, increasingly, reign nationalism, fundamentalist religions, and global trade. The center has not held. Yet the technologies originally built for cold war have bound the globe, perhaps permanently, into one single world.

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If you've been through a four-year, on-campus higher education, you can probably remember how, by their senior year, most students can't wait to get out of the ivory tower and into "the real world." But, at the same time, many in the streetwise world of business and commerce long for the kind of camaraderie, serious inquiry, and devotion to high principle they remember from school.

Similarly, I have had occasion to observe the inhabitants of a small, close-knit community come to feel an unhealthy inbreeding, an isolation from the larger society, a kind of self-centeredness sapping the effectiveness of their life together. Meanwhile, suburban types end up wishing for a place more rooted, where neighbors care about each other and are bound together by common enterprises.

Perhaps these examples suggest only that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. But I think they lead us to a much more profound truth -- one having to do with balance. And this theme of balance, when brought to the computer, enables us to see more clearly the problems and opportunities associated with this machine, while avoiding the tendency to demonize or worship it.

In general, a healthy life thrives upon balance. We breathe in and we breathe out. We fall asleep and then awaken. We need balance between intellectual activity on the one hand, and artistic and practical activities on the other; between cultivating a warm, centered community and braving the broader social currents; between seeking help from others and offering help to those in need; between commitment to friends and openness to strangers; between the risky exposure of a vigorous public life and the protection of a secure private life. I am convinced that any prolonged and extreme one-sidedness in these matters takes a serious toll upon both individual and society.

A living balance is not a matter of precise, mathematical division, but of proportion and rhythm. It is not a matter of stasis, but of artful movement. No two people will exhibit the same complex rhythm, with the same emphatic beats. But in all cases the apparent opposites must come into creative play. The opposites are thus overcome: the strong individual contributes most to the community, and the strong community contributes most to the development of the individual.

It is easy to see that the computer figures in some widespread imbalances in our society. A few that come quickly to mind:

• Most obviously, there is the relatively rigid physical posture of the computer user, producing various maladies. Eyes cease their rhythmical blinking and therefore become susceptible (especially in dry, winter environments) to conjunctivitis. They are further strained by a pattern of use that does not include regular refocusing on objects at different distances. The motion of head and arm becomes tense and spasmodic, lacking the lightness and harmonious rhythm of, say, the pianist. Various repetitive strain injuries result. The disks of lower back and neck are deprived of the alternate stretching and compression, inbreathing and outbreathing, required for their nourishment. Enduring sustained compression, they slowly degenerate.

• This same rigidity, this same spasmodic tightness, can be seen reflected in the inner state of the compulsive programmer or mudder or surfer. The natural breathing of one's life is suspended in favor of a single, prolonged contraction of one's interest and attention, from which all else is excluded.

• A long-time social trend has separated work from the family context, disrupting the balance between familial life and external associations. Telecommuters notwithstanding, the computer in the den or bedroom (as many spouses are discovering) easily makes matters worse. The television is at least to some slight degree still a family affair; the computer carries me away from my family even when I am home. (This is no argument for the balance-restoring effects of television!)

• In the relation between self and other, the computer sucks us into that hypnotic, unbounded, solipsistic space behind the screen, into which we stare. We may be present physically with those around us, and present textually with our online correspondents, but these "presences" are all too easily managed without ever stepping out of ourselves into full engagement. Put it this way: it's much easier to meet and dismiss the panhandler who slips a message into my email box than the one blocking my path on the street. My methods for dealing with the unsolicited request over the Net can be sophisticated and painless; on the street the issues are never quite that simple, and can never be put quite so cleanly out of view.

• A balance that could be added to the ones I mentioned earlier sets artifice and abstraction against the natural world. Computers, of course, have given us artificial intelligence and virtual reality, and they are masters of abstraction. As essential as our explorations in these new directions may be, they can only remain healthy so long as they are balanced by the refreshment and inspiration, the revivification, we receive from the given (rather than the made) world. We were born into this given world, and it is hubris to believe we can spurn it as the source of wisdom, devotion, courage, and love.

It is a worthwhile exercise to think further -- from your own experience -- about the various balances bringing life and health. The nice thing about this line of thought is that none of the distorting influences of the computer just described is an inevitable influence. We can learn to blink and rest our eyes, and to type "pianistically," just as we can refuse to slight our families and the natural world. The quest for balance never allows us to reject one side of a dynamic altogether, but only to seek a counter to it that raises it into the sphere of health.

It is the essence of human life, I suspect, to struggle with imbalance -- to pursue wholeness, productive rhythm, and harmony. The computer is perhaps the most pronounced disrupter of wholeness, the most radical expression of one-sidedness, mankind has yet known. For that reason, it may conceivably prove in the end to be our servant in achieving the most profoundly integrated and harmonious life mankind has known.

Without dissonance, there can be no music.

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