NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #77 Copyright 1998 Bridge Communications October 6, 1998
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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
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Quotes and Provocations
Privacy and Prejudice
Loosing Genetic Restraints (Scene 1)
Loosing Genetic Restraints (Scene 2)
Does the Computer Eliminate Boring Work?
Emoticons
DEPARTMENTS
Correspondence
Tips for Television Watchers? (Francois VanSteertegem)
The Value of a Real Canadian Goose (Stuart Cohen)
Yes, We Can Sing Through Email (Bryce Muir)
Would Hemingway Use Emoticons? (John Mihelic)
Documenting Paralinguistic Practices (Bob Parks)
Who Said That?
About this newsletter
---------------------
** What Readers Are Saying about NETFUTURE **
"I earn my living in the computer industry and I'm not sorry I do,
but I recognize that technologies change our modes of
perception and consciousness as well as social and economic
context and behavior. I think these are the most critical issues
of the next century. I am drawn to NETFUTURE by both my curiousity
and my desire to make choices I won't regret."
(For the identity of the speaker,
see "Who Said That?" below.)
==========================================================================
QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS
Privacy and Prejudice
---------------------
There's a puzzle on the Net, having to do with privacy and prejudice.
Privacy, of course, is a hot issue today, and rightly so. Sitting at my
terminal in my basement, I can probably find out more about you than you
would care to divulge freely. In fact, the question playing itself out
right now in courts and legislative chambers and corporate strategy
meetings is whether we will all be wholly exposed on the Net.
But this sits rather oddly with what many have proclaimed to be the Net's
greatest achievement: it frees us from bias and bigotry. The idea is
that I can't see your age, sex, race, or handicap, and therefore I will
hold no prejudicial feelings against you.
This, as I've pointed out before, is nonsense. We've always managed to
discriminate against each other on the basis of intangibles such as belief
fully as well as on the basis of external traits. In fact, as long as
anything is left of the other person, we can find something to
discriminate against. All of which suggests that our ease in getting rid
of discrimination on the Net is simply our ease in getting rid of the
other person.
But, far from being an end to prejudice, this begins to sound
uncomfortably like that euphemism for murder -- "termination with extreme
prejudice".
So the puzzle is this: are we finding ourselves wholly exposed on the
Net, or are we disappearing into the darkness between the bits and bytes?
The answer, I think, is that both are occurring, and they are fully
consistent with each other. As we reduce ourselves to bodies of
information, collections of data, and screensfull of text, we are less and
less there. There isn't much of the individual left to
discriminate against in any deeply personal sense. But at the same time
it's difficult to feel any great respect for the impersonal precipitate of
data that is all we have left.
Our inappropriate exposure on the Net, in other words, is a direct
consequence of our absence from the Net. The two belong together. An
individual whose privacy is worth respecting is also an individual real
enough to be discriminated against by those so inclined. And only a
community whose life together is vivid and multi-dimensional enough to
invite these qualitatively different responses will have any chance to
shape institutions that encourage the respect and discourage the abuse.
Loosing Genetic Restraints (Scene 1)
------------------------------------
In the short note, "Is Genetic Engineering `Natural'?" (NF #75), I
commented on the wrongheaded notion that genetic engineering is just as
natural as the seed selection and breeding that have gone on for
millennia. One of my points was that a critical awareness of the risks
inherent in current genetic manipulations does not imply that we must be
uncritical about earlier practices, whether natural or not. From time
immemorial we have been given the opportunity to carry out our earthly
stewardship in irresponsible ways.
Now Craig Holdrege (author of Genetics and the Manipulation of Life)
brings to my attention a couple of highly questionable examples of
conventional breeding:
* There are hobbyist chicken breeders who -- to judge from the pictures
in their magazines -- are more interested in bizarre effects that
tickle our human fancies than in the integrity of the chickens
themselves. (I'll have more to say about this idea of integrity in a
subsequent issue.)
* Belgian beef have been bred with such overgrown muscles that they
cannot be delivered naturally; birth requires Caesarian section.
The assumption that critics of today's technological imbalances must be
enamored of older practices is oddly widespread. Anyone who often speaks
publicly, as I do, about the risks of modern technologies is inevitably
met by comments such as "Do you read books? They're a product of
technology!" Or "Books can have undesirable effects, too!" -- as if this
should blunt one's concern about where we're going with technology today.
Certainly older technologies can have undesirable effects. (For a
discussion of some of these effects, see "Every Tool is an Obstacle" in
NF #12.) But who is denying this? It would be much more sensible to look
for the problems in our use of earlier tools, and then to expect that
these problems are becoming ever more acute as the tools become both more
powerful and more definitive of our lives.
So it is that the abuses in chicken and cattle breeding can now be
performed much more quickly and more casually. The technician need
scarcely be distracted by the animal itself. There's none of the
Frankenstein drama and messiness. We can construct our monsters in a
clean and well-lit place.
We are, in general, less and less constrained by technical limitation.
But if we abandon ourselves to the excitement of the technical
breakthrough for its own sake, we will produce chaotic results. This is
because the organism itself, respectfully understood in its wholeness and
integrity, is our only guide not only for what is ethical, but also for
what will work in any full and meaningful sense. The geneticist's sharp
separation of ethical questions from practical ones signifies his
inattention to the organism's wholeness, and therefore his inevitable
clumsiness even in practical matters.
Loosing Genetic Restraints (Scene 2)
------------------------------------
With the proliferation of genetically modified organisms in the
environment, many observers worry about the transmission of the altered
genes ("transgenes") to closely related, wild species through sexual
reproduction. An immediate, practical concern, for example, is that genes
for herbicide resistance in agricultural crops will spread to weeds,
rendering the herbicides useless. Since most crop plants (and related
weeds) are self-pollinating, this danger was thought to be minimal.
But now a startling bit of research reported in Nature (Sep. 3, 1998)
has upset this assumption. Working with mustard plants, Joy Bergelson
and her colleagues at the University of Chicago have shown that transgenes
can introduce unexpected pollination behavior. Most mustard plants are
both mother and father of their own seeds, with pollen crossing from one
plant to another only about three times out of every thousand
pollinations. But transgenic mustard plants with an introduced gene for
herbicide resistance were twenty times more likely to cross-pollinate. As
a report at Nature's online website puts it, "Something had made the
transgenic plants more promiscuous".
Moreover, this difference holds even between the transgenic plants and
other plants possessing the same herbicide resistance via a natural
mutation and conventional breeding. Somehow the artificial process
changes things. As the Nature article concludes,
Whatever the reason, the effect is worrying, and deserves looking into
further. Bergelson and colleagues point out that this particular gene
has already been introduced into dozens of agricultural crops, so it is
important to find out whether increased promiscuity is a common
consequence of genetic modification.
(http://helix.nature.com/nsu/980910/980910-1.html)
Who knows -- someday we may even try to learn about the inevitable "side
effects" of genetic alterations before loosing the organisms wholesale
into the world.
Does the Computer Eliminate Boring Work?
----------------------------------------
Back in the 1960s, Studs Terkel wrote his classic book, Working, based on
interviews with hundreds of Chicagoans. The picture he sketched was not
pretty. But in their Second Annual Big Issue (Dec., 1997) the editors of
Forbes ASAP assured us that things are different today:
Reading Terkel's Working now is like scanning an ancient text. If there
is one common emotion that emerges from the Babel of voices in Terkel's
book, it is boredom. Boredom is the leitmotiv of the Industrial Age.
Almost everyone, from the spot-welder to the CEO, is deeply bored in
Terkel's world. His people dream of a job that is meaningful,
challenging, and so fulfilling that they would never want to leave it.
They got their wish. Today, in the information age, the world of work
is now so intellectually challenging, meaningful, and compelling that
we are never bored. (http://www.forbes.com/asap/97/1201/index.htm)
On the other hand, if our evident need for distraction is any measure, we
may be just about the most bored people ever to walk the earth. Are
data-entry workers never bored? Or the customer service employees whose
official mission in life is to explain to anonymous callers how to plug in
their new printers? Or the growing legions of programmers responsible for
maintaining old code? And what about the armies of conscripts pressed
into mind-numbing duty against the Year 2000 bug?
As the Forbes ASAP editors see it, our salvation comes from the chip and
the Net. Okay. Look at the financial service vocations that have so
dramatically re-shaped themselves around the chip and the Net. How easy
would it be for the employee of a typical investment firm to place his
investments based on meaning and conviction -- on a sense of personal
responsibility for what his funds do to the world -- as opposed to the
dictates of number-crunching algorithms? Admittedly, making money for
its own sake can be a pleasurable distraction, assuming you don't think
too much about the nations or villages whose economy you could just as
easily be destroying as helping. But this empty mathematical exercise
hardly counts as an advance in the meaningfulness of work.
Then there's the farmer, enclosed in the cab of his huge tractor,
traversing thousands of acres while a computer tuned in to a Global
Positioning Satellite allocates varying doses of fertilizer to each small
sector of the farm's grid. The most likely result is that a concern for
abstract "total inputs and outputs" replaces meaningful contact with the
land. The farmer no longer feels directly responsible for the processes
of life, death, and resurrection going on in the soil. He no longer
experiences himself as intimately woven together with them. And, in any
case, these processes are most likely being rendered sterile by his
current fertilization practices. Does he really find this kind of work
more meaningful?
You pick a vocation, and I'll give you another example. The fact is that
the computer is an engine of abstraction, removing us -- so far as we give
it free rein -- from direct engagement with the sources of meaning in the
world. Certainly we can reach across the barriers of abstraction: the
investor can seek out real value behind the mathematical value, and the
farmer can take the time and trouble to know his land intimately and care
for it in a deeply satisfying manner. But it requires an effort that runs
across the grain of all those efficiently operating chips celebrated
in Forbes ASAP.
If the editors of that publication are convinced we've entered a new era
of meaningful work, it's because, as they put it,
command and control are dead. The chip and the Net have killed it.
But this misses the whole point. The issue is not centralization (with
its need for command and control) versus decentralization (with its
distributed intelligence). No, the real question has to do with the
overall balance between computation and the non-computational. That is,
it has to do with the balance between syntax and meaning -- between frozen
forms of intelligence on the one hand, and our own fluid expressive
potentials on the other. It hardly matters whether the patterns of frozen
intelligence are centralized or not. As every spider knows, you can
immobilize your prey with a delicate web just as well as with a stinger.
This is an important issue, having a great deal to do with our seemingly
inevitable drive toward ever greater standardization. I'll have more to
say about it in the future.
Emoticons
---------
Since the early days of the Net, "smiley faces" and their kin -- so-called
emoticons, or emotional icons -- have attracted huge interest. And they
still do, if the response to "Can We Sing through Email?" (NF #76) is any
indication. (See Correspondence below.)
I don't mean to denigrate this interest when I profess my own long-time
difficulty in connecting to the huge mass of commentary about emoticons
and other paralinguistic devices. For example, when one reader talks
about the "revolutionary implications" of email usages such as this:
don't we wish it were true
I can only wonder what new principle is introduced here. After all, we
always had the option of saying
I feel a bit wistful.
But my high school English teacher's emphatic advice is perhaps more to
the point: a good character sketch doesn't tell the reader what a
person is feeling, but rather shows the feelings. That is, the feelings
are exhibited at work, coloring the dialog, action, and imagery. As John
Mihelic puts it in his letter:
Does Gore Vidal need smilacons to convey sarcasm? Would the King James
Version have been improved with them? Hemingway? Orwell? C'mon!
Email is a written medium, just like writing on paper. If something is
well-written it will show through.
Not that email conversation has to be high literature. I suppose my
general take on emoticons -- admittedly not the result of a lot of thought
-- is that they readily substitute a reduced, highly stereotyped
vocabulary for the infinite range of expressive possibilities found in the
language as a whole. There may well be an honored place for such a
reduced vocabulary, but if there is a revolution in communication going on
here, I hope someone will point it out to me.
What really troubles me about many discussions of online communication is
the odd reluctance to grant any differences at all between modes of
expression. Since writing can have its "imagery" and its "musicality",
there must not be any significant difference between writing on the one
hand and a painting or sonata on the other.
But this just seems obtuse, and prompts me to reiterate the point of my
original article: it is important for us to enter with great sensitivity
into the differing qualities of the various modes of communication.
Otherwise, we cannot know with any fullness what it is we are saying.
I am not, however, suggesting the existence of absolute barriers between
different types of expression. No expressive medium can exhibit such
barriers. It is the essential nature of meaningful expressions to shade
into each other, to interpenetrate and color each other in a way that
purely logical constructs must not.
You can see this by recognizing the metaphorical potential of all
meaningful language, verbal or otherwise. Metaphor leaps across barriers,
enabling us to grasp what lies beyond the "given" possibilities of the
language. Only a dead, literal language, stripped of expressive qualities
(for example, a computer language) disallows metaphor. If a medium lends
itself to any expression at all, then there are no intrinsic limits to
what one can express through it.
I always remember in this regard the remarkably significant communication
achieved by some of our Vietnam prisoners of war, who could engage in
nothing more than occasional tapping on the walls that separated them.
And it occurs to me now that, instead of saying "sonata" above, I could
have said "Beethoven's ninth symphony". Yet Beethoven in his deafness
never heard the symphony. Or did he? How could he have composed it
without hearing it? Was the written notation on the page, for him, the
same as a performance after all?
All one can say, again, is that there are no absolute, inherent limits
upon what we can give or receive through any type of human expression --
even if we are blind and deaf, like Helen Keller. Yet we shouldn't forget
how daunting Helen Keller's struggle was. Moreover, we all face
the reality of our own current limits, and if there are lessons suggested
by Beethoven and those prisoners, we could put them this way:
* It requires a lifetime of incredibly disciplined and single-minded
effort to deepen one's mastery of a particular field of expression, as
Beethoven did.
* There is nothing like being thrown together in a real place, both
incommodious and life-threatening, to encourage the discipline that
leads to deeply felt, profoundly meaningful expression.
It's a long way, of course, from the prison cell and composer's study to
the routine exchange of emoticon-strewn email. But if, as a society, we
recognized not only the unlimited potential of the written symbol but also
the blood and sweat between us and the realization of that potential, then
I would feel much better about the prospects for new, electronic forms of
communication whose main advertisement to date has been how "easy" they
are.
SLT
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==========================================================================
CORRESPONDENCE
Tips for Television Watchers?
-----------------------------
Response to: "America Screws Up" (NF-76)
From: Francois VanSteertegem (fvanst@atl.com)
Sir:
I was much impressed by your suggested tips for America Links Up sponsors
-- a bona fide attack of common-sense if I ever saw one. But did you
notice? Most of the net-related hazards to which your tips refer are the
same hazards that lurk in TV-land. There's even the low signal-to-noise
ratio that you cite in "Is E-trash Necessary..." Hmmm.
Regards
Francois VanSteertegem
The Value of a Real Canadian Goose
----------------------------------
Response to: "Following Up" (NF-75)
From: Stuart Cohen (stuart@shore.net)
Steve:
I also quote the story about the boy and his father seeing the
rattlesnake, and the impression it made. A few weeks ago we were visiting
my mother in the Berkshires. My daughters swam in the lake, as usual, but
what excited my 7-yr old was a moment when a couple of Canada geese -- a
very common bird hereabouts -- swam a few feet in front of her. That
night we watched a number of true-life-nature shows on the TV. One was a
remarkable effort by a dedicated team showing wolves hunting wild bison in
the remotest regions of northern Canada. I was impressed, but my daughter
barely budged.
There is no substitute for direct experience. In other words: virtual
reality isn't.
I continue to appreciate your efforts.
Stuart Cohen, Photographer/Writer
Creator of Marblehead 2000 Photo series documenting life in a small town
at the coming of the new Millennium
Yes, We Can Sing Through Email
------------------------------
Response to: "Can We Sing through Email?" (NF-76)
From: Bryce Muir (pegbryce@gwi.net)
> Can We Sing through Email?
Sure. We do it all the time in written correspondence. My "vocal"
styling changes to suit the person I'm writing to. If it's someone I've
related to face-to-face, that certainly informs my diction, but I respond
to cues in text I read, even from "strangers", and couch my responses in
similar tones. Don't we all?
I'm not convinced that written language is so divorced from aural language
that we don't mimic tonality in a textual dialogue. What's jargon, if not
a cult singing, or dialect, if not folksong? Granted, some writing is
tone deaf, but then some face-to-face conversation is as flat as Kansas.
I once sat on a teletype pony loop (I was a radioman in the Navy), where
every keystroke on each machine was mimicked on all the others. The
nature of the circuits were such that you had to keep typing to maintain
the connection, and this was accomplished by rhythmically hitting the
figures and letters keys (analogous to the shift key) while you were
thinking what to spell out next. It turns out that everyone had his own
rhythm, and you could tell who was talking by listening to the beat.
Invariably you would pick up that beat when you started to respond, and
the "music" was hilarious. I'm convinced that audial mimicry is endemic
to the beast, and we read with our ears, and write in tune, more often
than we might think.
I often write more than I think.
Bryce
Would Hemingway Use Emoticons?
------------------------------
Response to: "Can We Sing through Email?" (NF-76)
From: John Mihelic (jmihelic@forlife.com)
Dear Mr. Talbott:
Can we sing through email?!! Am I missing something? Whenever I hear
people noting the lack of verbal inflection or of body language in email
prose, I wonder what happened to good writing. Writing is writing.
Writing that is flat or uninflected or dull is simply that -- writing that
is flat or uninflected or dull. There's no need to blame personal
writing inadequacies on the computer, any more than you'd blame it on the
pencil and the sheet of paper.
I have noticed a tendency for computer jocks to think they invented the
world, and to mistakenly conclude that because they never heard of
something that it must not exist. It appears that good writing is one of
these things. And those little smilacons are certainly part of that
phenomenon. Does Gore Vidal need smilacons to convey sarcasm? Would the
King James Version have been improved with them? Hemingway? Orwell?
C'mon! Email is a written medium, just like writing on paper. If
something is well-written it will show through.
John Mihelic, a longtime subscriber.
Documenting Paralinguistic Practices
------------------------------------
Response to: "Can We Sing through Email?" (NF-76)
From: Bob Parks (bobp@lightlink.com)
Steve,
I have followed with interest the development of "emoticons" (smiley
faces, etc.) in chat room and email communication. This development is
related, but somewhat independent of the structures developed for MOO
communication - such as ":::setting down my coffee cup:::" and ":::smiling
faintly:::".
Recently I have been noticing a new sort of paralinguistic marking
structure that may have revolutionary implications for electronic
communication. I have a dictionary that I am planning to convert to XML,
and on the XML-dev email list I began to notice the informal use of
XML-like tags to indicate complex rhetorical intent. For example, one
author said something like "although <ironic> others may have said this
before </ironic>". And another said something like "<wistful> don't we
wish it were true </wistful>. I think these sorts of XML markup could
then be linked with XSL style sheets that would give us great creative
latitude in rendering communicative intent. One author could render
these statements with distinctive fonts, or colors, or icons (similar to
Chinese characters?) or other representative modes .... And when the text
is accompanied by a text-to-speech rendering program, the intonation
could be made appropriate.
In any case, I'd like to ask if you would solicit from your readers other
examples of the way such paralinguistic features are now rendered, and
ideas on how they might be rendered. I'm doing a collection of email
quotations and paralinguistic features, and will acknowledge all
assistance.
Thanks,
Bob Parks
Associate Professor
Elmira College
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==========================================================================
WHO SAID THAT?
Working in the heart of the geographic information systems business, Lance
McKee is Vice President, Corporate Communications, for the Open GIS
Consortium (OGC). OGC envisions "the full integration of geospatial data
and geoprocessing resources into mainstream computing". To achieve this,
it brings users and providers of geographic information systems together
to create software interfaces to facilitate the exchange of complex
geographic data. (See http://www.opengis.org.)
McKee sees OGC offering a rough model for participatory steering of
technology. It is, he believes, an embryonic form of a kind of
institution that will have increasing importance as traditional
governments realize their inability to govern technology, which now
arguably affects citizens' lives more than religion, labor movements, or
local or national politics.
Mentioning his interest in "simple" things such as gardening, sculpting,
and boat building, McKee goes on to ask, "Why don't I retire, or radically
simplify, immediately?"
Because, despite the revulsion for an "unjust economy" I felt when I
was in my twenties, working in day care centers, I now want to
participate actively in the economy, for these reasons: to promote my
family's and relatives' welfare; to travel and meet interesting people
and not feel stuck in local and home doldrums; to experience first-hand
some of the changes (some good, some bad) that are taking place in the
world, with an eye toward how we direct change toward the good; and to
be able to name the terms of my life now and in my retirement.
Balancing one's life doesn't always mean moving immediately in the
direction of utmost simplicity.
SLT
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==========================================================================
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
Copyright 1998 by The Nature Institute. You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #77 :: October 6, 1998
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