NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #93      A Publication of The Nature Institute       August 19, 1999
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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.

NETFUTURE is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
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Quotes and Provocations
   Fear of Healing
   Is High School Dispensable?
   Bhutan and Fiji: The Elusive Influences of Television

The Columbine Shootings (Stephen L. Talbott)
   Why television violence matters

DEPARTMENTS

Announcements and Resources
   Waldorf Education Goes High-Profile
   Information Appliances May Prove More Frustrating Than You Think
   A Down Home Newsletter from Maine

About this newsletter


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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Fear of Healing
---------------

Just as I was publishing my commentary on alternative medicine and the
placebo effect in NF #88, an article appeared in Science magazine (April
9, 1999) entitled "Can the Placebo Be the Cure?"  The author, Martin
Enserink, tells how the placebo effect "bedevils" antidepressant drug
trials, posing, for drug developers, "an occupational hazard that masks
the effects of potentially useful compounds".  "But", the article goes on,
"there's more to it than that":

   Some psychiatrists and clinical psychologists are fascinated by the
   power of the placebo effect, viewing it not as a problem but as a
   source of insight into mental health.  And a few ... go further,
   challenging the scientific basis of much of the multibillion-dollar
   market for antidepressant drugs:  They argue that many compounds, even
   those with good scientific pedigrees, may be little more than
   sophisticated placebos themselves".

Enserink cites a study suggesting that 75% of the effectiveness of
antidepressants is owing to the placebo effect.  Moreover, the researchers
who conducted the study, Irving Kirsch and Guy Saperstein, argue that even
the remaining 25% may be little more than a disguised placebo effect.
This is because as many as 80% of the participants in a "double-blind"
study can guess correctly whether they're taking the "real" drug or the
placebo, based on the presence or absence of side effects.  So the
expectation of improvement is greater among the drug group, accentuating
the placebo effect in that group.  (This is presumably why Prozac, a drug
advertised as having few side effects, has proven most effective where the
side effects are greatest.)

The May 7 issue of Science contained a number of follow-up letters, none
of which disputed the substantial role of the placebo effect.  One writer
remarked that "it is difficult to find such a reliable phenomenon that has
lacked scientific attention", while another opined that "clearly,
traditional views of drug action need to be revised.  Neither shooting the
messenger nor denial is the answer".  And a third wrote:

   The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.  Placebo
   disparagement has been going on for decades.  I see no reason to
   believe that mere data should cause it to change.

It's a strange situation:  There's this bothersome effect that has the
unwelcome tendency to make people well, so the medical research
establishment struggles harder and harder to prevent the effect from
"contaminating" its rigorous investigations.  What is wrong with this
picture?

What the placebo data shows us, I think, is that even a medicine that
imagines its patients to be collections of complex technical mechanisms,
and that does its best to erase every contrary assumption from the medical
transaction, fails to succeed entirely in the erasing -- and can thank
this failure for much of the efficacy of its treatments.


Is High School Dispensable?
---------------------------

Sensible words can show up in strange places -- in this case, People
Magazine.  Bard College President Leon Botstein is interviewed in the
July 12, 1999 issue, and he says bluntly that we should get rid of high
schools.  After tenth grade, students should move on to higher education,
job training, or some form of national service.

This makes eminent sense if the only alternative is high school as we now
have it -- a ghetto walled off from the larger society and from the world
of adult work, and, all too often, with no meaningful family life for the
student to fall back on.  Isolate kids from the grounding potentials of a
stable community embedded in a real landscape and pursuing real work, and
they will create their own society with its own, very likely warped
values.

After the Columbine shootings, Botstein met with Bard students:

   I was struck by how many of my students recognized the sort of sports-
   dominated, clique-driven atmosphere of the high school as described by
   the press.  They said they had felt like outsiders, ostracized and
   taunted by the others.

Describing high school as "an artificial world, a world of puerile notions
of beauty and what is masculine or feminine", Botstein points out that
universities and businesses give respectable place to what is despised in
that juvenile world.

   Who's running Microsoft?  The popular jocks?  No.  Probably the nerds.
   People in college begin to take their lives seriously.  If they are
   interested in business, they start to admire Bill Gates, or if it's
   science, then they admire Watson and Crick.  They join the real
   conversation of life.

This is perhaps to look too casually past the distortions also at work in
university, business, and science, which, after all, reflect the same
society that comes to expression in high schools.  And you can't just take
kids of any arbitrary age, put them in college, and expect them to "take
life seriously".  But, still, Botstein has a point.

Why not take the matter a step further?  If we know why college is, at
least in some respects, healthier for young people than high school, then
we also know how to improve high school.  Botstein mentions one of the
crucial factors when he says,

   Today teachers are trained in pedagogy, not in their subject matter.
   You don't have science taught by a scientist or history taught by a
   historian.  And adolescents have an unerring sense for authenticity.
   They really understand very well if you know what you are talking
   about.

This vital experience of a grounded and well-earned personal authority, I
would add, is not exactly what students are most likely to gain when they
are turned loose on the Net to pursue their education.  The kind of
authority that changes lives is not often a distant authority.

Of course, today's students don't often find a respect-worthy authority
they can relate to nearby either.  If we could figure out how to take just
this one challenge to heart, I imagine we'd be driven to redesign high
schools from the ground up.  We'd have no choice but to bring students
into the real world -- or to bring the real world to them -- because
authoritative, real-world engagement is what most readily earns their
respect.

Young people feel the powerful urge to take hold of the world in their own
right.  Without worthy models, mentors, and guides, what will they do?

As an aside:  This illustrates how all social issues are intertwined.
There's no way we're going to be able to redesign high schools without
radically changing the structure and values of the larger society.  In
particular, we won't find it easy to bring students into an educationally
fruitful engagement with mentors and real-world challenges until we have
greatly strengthened local economies and local communities.

In such local contexts students are readily seen as assets.  (As I write,
students at the Waldorf school down the street are helping to build an
addition to the kindergarten building.)  To "society at large", on the
other hand, students are simply a problem -- and a seemingly insoluble one
at that.


Bhutan and Fiji: The Elusive Influences of Television
-----------------------------------------------------

At the beginning of June the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan officially
introduced television.  The programming began with broadcast of the
celebration surrounding the twenty-fifth anniversary of the king's
coronation.

Bhutan has long defended its culture against outside influence.  For
example, a tourist tax limited the number of tourists last year to six
thousand.  With an overall population of seven hundred thousand, Bhutan
has only nine thousand phone lines.  It has no traffic lights.  It is, the
Boston Globe says, "a place with negligible crime, no lawyers, and five
thousand underemployed soldiers".

According to the first Bhutanese news anchor, the country is "trying to
take the best from the West and also the cream of Bhutan culture -- the
middle path".  Despite worries about the severity of television's
challenge, many people are optimistic.  In a local governor's words, "we
are so deeply rooted in our culture and religion that I think what is bad
or good can easily be seen by any humble person".  And a farmer remarks
that

   it would be good to have this television.  People should have a
   positive attitude to whatever they see.  Forget what's bad and just
   take the good.  Even if someone doesn't know how to steal and sees it
   on television, that doesn't mean they will pick up that habit.

True enough, and important to keep in mind.  But television and the
associated communication infrastructure take their place within a whole
pattern of societal development, and they tend to nudge this pattern in
certain directions.  The question, then, is whether this overall shift
contributes to the various forms of social breakdown that lead to stealing
-- and whether there's any effective way to work against such a
development.

Meanwhile, a widely reported study by researchers at the Harvard Medical
School documents some changes in Fiji associated with the 1995
introduction of television.  These changes have to do with young women's
eating habits and ideals of beauty.

It is traditional in Fiji to compliment someone by saying "you've gained
weight".  As a New York Times story puts it:

   "Skinny legs" is a major insult.  And "going thin", the Fijian term for
   losing a noticeable amount of weight, is considered a worrisome
   condition.

But in just the three years from 1995 to 1998, according to the Harvard
study, the number of secondary school girls reporting that they had
induced vomiting to control weight rose from three percent to twenty-nine
percent.  In a country where dieting was hardly known and calories were a
foreign concept, it now appears that more teenage girls go on diets than
in America.  "Young girls", writes the Times reporter, Erica Goode, "dream
of looking not like their mothers and aunts, but like the wasp-waisted
stars of `Melrose Place' and `Beverly Hills 90210'".

   One girl said that her friends "change their mood, their hairstyles, so
   that they can be like those characters".  "So in order to be like them,
   I have to work on myself, exercising, and my eating habits should
   change."

In a comment the Bhutanese might want to reflect upon, one of the Harvard
researchers remembered that

   What we noticed in 1995 is that people had a sort of curiosity, but it
   was a dismissive curiosity, like watching something that seemed
   ridiculous.  But over the years they have come to accept it as a form
   of entertainment.

Our pervasive forms of entertainment change the picture, the overall
cultural pattern, of our lives.  It could hardly be otherwise.

(Bhutan news report from Boston Globe Online, June 3, 1999.  Fiji report
from New York Times, May 20, 1999.)

SLT

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                         THE COLUMBINE SHOOTINGS

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)

The public discussion of the Littleton shootings is remarkable in two
ways.  The first has to do with its focus on the utterly silly question
whether television "causes" kids to go out and shoot other kids -- as if
any social phenomenon could be the result of a simple chain of causes and
effects.

We live within a semantic field.  Everything around us means something.
If you want to know how one thing "causes" another in human experience,
then consider how adding a word to a text "causes" all the other words to
shift their meanings in an infinitely subtle pattern.  This finely nuanced
shifting of everything is a far different matter from making someone go
out and commit a particular radical act.

This is not to say that the shift in meaning caused by the new word can't
be radical.  It certainly can.  But every element in the new pattern of
meaning remains something we can only assess in the context of the whole.
And in human affairs all the texts we produce, all the images, gestures,
and acts, have this word-like in character.  They say things, and what
they say counts, coloring everything else that has been said.

This leads us to the second striking aspect of the public discussion --
namely, the still widespread refusal to see that television is
implicated in shootings such as those in Littleton.

You only have to observe television directly to see that it's an
inseparable part of the same picture that includes Littleton.  It's not
just the violent images as such.  (It never pays to be too literal-minded
in matters of social influence.)  The greatest violence, I suspect, is the
wrenching apart of the concrete human contexts within which images of
violence can find their rightful and healthy place.

This is easier to see when you consider the inevitable objection by those
whose defense of television takes the form of an appeal to "all that
violence" in fairy tales.  But this ploy doesn't work any better now than
on the thousands of other occasions when it has been tried.

The child who hears about Hansel and Gretel on his mother's or father's
lap is worlds removed from the child watching the usual mayhem
on television.  Here's one way to put it:  the violence the child
experiences when listening to the fairy tale is much more real than the
violence of television.  The child knows, however implicitly, that what he
is hearing really matters, that he is facing the moral mysteries at the
heart of the universe.

And don't forget:  this heart now beats within inches of his ear.  The
frightful story has come to him upon the familiar current of his mother's
voice -- the same mother whose arms now envelop him, guaranteed to keep evil
at bay and make everything come out all right.  (How easily we ignore
context in all our analyses!)  The evil of the tale is an evil these two
concoct between them, bringing it alive with the power of their
imaginations -- and thereby also setting proper bounds to it, containing
it, learning what it means to stand above it.  This is the experience that
television so readily destroys.

The problem with television is that its violence isn't real enough.  The
contrived, contextless, and artificial nature of most television content
works against a healthy reckoning with it, while at the same time
saturating the child with now-senseless images of violence and leaving him
naked before the greatest evil in the whole situation -- namely, the
unbounded evil of producers who know nothing of a mother's enveloping
love, but only of sensation, profit, and the disgusting appeal to the
necessities of their "art" and the protection of the first amendment.

This loss of context, which means loss of reality, characterizes the
entire life of the child, who is cut off not only from any coherent family
life (thanks in part to television) but also from any grounding in the
world of adult work.  It is worth recalling here the boy who, when taken
to an aquarium, looked at the fish and asked, "Is this virtual reality or
real reality?" (NF #70).  The question is all too natural because the
images making up the child's world are increasingly arbitrary,
disconnected, and pathological.

When the images assaulting the child lack context, when they become
dizzying and skewed -- when they are sick without offering a context for
coming to terms with the sickness -- then the child's responses to life risk
becoming equally arbitrary, disconnected, and pathological.  And, at the
extreme, murderous.  As David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous,
recently remarked to me, the shadow of society can become so intense, so
vividly presented and re-presented, that eventually some few benighted
souls  will feel compelled to become its bearers.  All the more when the
distinction between light and shadow seems more virtual than real.

I well recognize that "we're all guilty" often amounts to an effective
denial of guilt.  But I think one can reasonably say that all of us, so
far as we contribute to the darkening of the shadow and the confusions of
virtuality, do share a degree of responsibility for the actions of the
few.

Some of those who defend television point out, rightly, that isolated
images drawn from the screen and presented to horrified Congressional
investigators almost inevitably falsify the meaning of the images in their
original context.  Such an empty exercise also obliterates the context
provided by the teenage viewer.  Is he viewing actively or passively?
Does he possess a critical awareness of the media?  Does he have a healthy
home environment?

This concern for context is very much what I am urging.  But when we
actually look around ourselves, what we see everywhere is:  television
corroding context.  Television may, in fact, be the most potent destroyer
of context we have, next to the Internet.  It is, after all, what has
given us that Congressional hearing room in the first place, with all
its empty posturing.  Our elected representatives prance around in the
Nowhere space between camera and screen, a space of poll-data, spin
control, image management, and political positioning.  There's nobody
there you could talk to.

This, of course, is as much a truth of society as of television, and
that's part of my point.  The victims at Columbine High were not killed by
television.  They were killed by a society capable of watching television
and then convincing itself that what it has experienced is essentially
harmless and neutral.  This is a society that has lost its ability to
envelop the child within loving contexts, and that does not even remember
any longer the difference between a fairy godmother and "The Godfather".

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==========================================================================

                       ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES


Waldorf Education Goes High-Profile
-----------------------------------

I have often mentioned Waldorf education in this venue.  It's the only
major educational movement that has resisted the classroom-wiring
bandwagon out of principle.  Now Todd Oppenheimer (who wrote one of the
first highly visible articles questioning the way computers were being
used in education:  "The Computer Delusion", Atlantic Monthly, July, 1997)
has written a feature piece on Waldorf education in the September, 1999
issue of that publication.  Called "Schooling the Imagination" the article
is described this way:

   Waldorf schools, which began in the esoteric mind of the Austrian
   philosopher Rudolf Steiner, have forged a unique blend of progressive
   and traditional teaching methods that seem to achieve impressive
   results---intellectual, social, even moral.

I'll try to report further in a future issue.


Information Appliances May Prove More Frustrating Than You Think
----------------------------------------------------------------

NETFUTURE reader and AT&T researcher Andrew Odlyzko has written a paper on
information appliances.  From his abstract:

   The future is said to belong to information appliances, specialized and
   easy to use devices that will have the car tell the coffee pot to brew
   a cup of coffee just in time for our arrival home.  These gadgets are
   supposed to eliminate the complexity and resulting frustration of the
   PC.  The thesis of this essay is that while information appliances will
   proliferate, they will not lessen the perception of an exasperating
   electronic environment.  The interaction of the coffee pot, the car,
   the smart fridge, and the networked camera will create a new layer of
   complexity.  In the rush towards the digital era, we will continue to
   live right on the edge of intolerable frustration.

You can read the paper at www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/networks.html.
Incidentally, Odlyzko's argument provides some good illustration for what
I have called the "fundamental deceit of technology".  See that heading in
NETFUTURE's topical index at:

   http://netfuture.org/inx_topical_all.html.

However, Odlyzko does not draw out the "deceit" as strongly as he might
have.  His is a good discussion, though -- one that helps to
counterbalance all we're hearing about information appliances these days.


A Down Home Newsletter from Maine
---------------------------------

Starting Point, edited by NETFUTURE reader Ellen LaConte, is a hardcopy
newsletter that appears bi-monthly.  It grows out of LaConte's close
association with the work of Helen and Scott Nearing.  (She was president
of the Nearings' Social Science Institute from 1983 to 1995.)

The newsletter is a comfortable mix of social commentary, reviews,
environmental notes, advice about living close to the earth, and brief
quotations from other sources.  Subscription price for the twelve-page
publication is $15.  Send your subscription check or request for a sample
copy to:  Starting Point, Loose Leaf Press, P.O. Box 509, Stockton Springs
ME 04981.

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==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 1999 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:

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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #93 :: August 19, 1999

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