NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #83      A Publication of The Nature Institute      January 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.


CONTENTS
--------

Editor's Note

Quotes and Provocations
   Trust Me: I'm Vulnerable
   How to Beef Up Your Infant's Knowledge Base
   Imagining a Better Potato
   When Technology is Smoke and Confusion

DEPARTMENTS

Letter from Des Moines (Lowell Monke)
   Wired Schools, Broken Trust

Correspondence
   Does NETFUTURE Hold to a Masculine Standard? (Rebecca Lynn Eisenberg)
   Response to Rebecca Eisenberg (Stephen L. Talbott)

Announcements and Resources
   The Monsanto Files

About this newsletter


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                              EDITOR'S NOTE

One of the stranger notions in modern journalism is that every bit of
commentary, in order to be relevant, must be given a tie-in to some kind
of "breaking news".  I hardly need to tell you that this is not the policy
of NETFUTURE.  Rather, the truth and importance of an item, together with
the likelihood that it contains something fresh for most readers, is what
I require.  That's why, for example, the current issue summarizes and
comments on an "ancient" story from last October's New York Times
Magazine.

That's also why I often do not report "breaking news" such as the
Carnegie-Mellon study on Net use and depression or the recent Educational
Testing Service study about the effectiveness of computers in teaching
math to fourth and eighth graders.  As these studies pile up by the
hundreds, they do little to affect the attitudes of knowledgeable people
-- and for good reason.  They give nice, precise numbers that no one has a
clue about interpreting.  The imbalance between statistic-gathering, on
the one hand, and conceptual profundity, on the other, is so great in
contemporary social science that almost the only responsible thing for any
investigator to do is to work at clarifying and deepening concepts.  One
needs to struggle to see things in different ways -- even though every
such alternative view effectively scrambles all the data gathered from
previous vantage points.

Take, for example, the computer's use in math education.  What exactly is
the comprehension, what are the skills, we are trying to teach?  You'll
recall the piece in NF #80 ("Toddlers as Geometricians") where I cited
John Alexandra's remark:

   We may think ... that we need to get children to memorize the idea that
   a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.  But even
   one-year-old children already know this:  when frightened, they will
   run to their parents in the straightest of straight lines.  At that
   age, however, they know it only in their legs, where this knowledge is
   unconscious, asleep.

So then:  where, on the journey from legs through imaginative
consciousness to abstract consciousness, should we look for the straight
line in a fourth grader?  How would we test for an age-appropriate
understanding?  And if we test a fourth grader for the most purified,
abstract grasp of things (as we must, if we would achieve standardized
results), are we taking a measure of the child's long-term cognitive
health or of his developing imbalance?

Well, these aren't the kinds of question one often finds in the
literature.  Imagine the social conversations we might have if journalists
probed on this level instead of merely passing along the endless stream of
statistics from poll and experiment!  Statistics always presuppose -- and
result from -- the answers we give to questions like those just asked; the
problem is that we are not often aware of the answers we have presupposed.

In any case, offering people different ways of seeing things is as good a
description as any of what I try to do in NETFUTURE.  It is gratifying to
hear from readers -- as I often do -- that, despite the prevailing
journalistic canons, this exercise is appreciated.

SLT

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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Trust Me: I'm Vulnerable
------------------------

Phil Agre made an important point about trust a while back.  When people
talk about building secure mechanisms for electronic commerce so that we
can trust each other, they're using the word "trust" in direct opposition
to its usual meaning.

   To trust someone, in normal usage, is precisely to place yourself at a
   certain risk without formal guarantees of your safety.  If you don't
   trust someone, then you insist on contracts and proof and collateral
   and documentation and video surveillance and elaborate cryptographic
   payment protocols and so forth.  And if you do trust someone
   then you don't insist on these things.  (Red Rock Eater News Service,
   Dec. 15, 1998)

I've long noticed a parallel oddity in the way people speak of being
vulnerable on the Net.  As the story often goes, the shy, the outcast, the
hurt, and the maladjusted find a safe haven on the Net.  They can "risk"
expressing their true feelings -- they can be "vulnerable" -- because the
medium gives them relative anonymity and the option of a quick disconnect.

Lost in this picture, of course, is what vulnerability means:  to be at
genuine risk.  My favorite story is the one told by the young woman who
visited online "singles' bars":  she didn't need to worry about what she
was getting herself into, she said, because as soon as anyone started to
misbehave, "Poof!  I'm gone."  Some vulnerability.

(This is not to say that a person who is incapacitated by insecurity may
not find temporary therapeutic value in the Net's relative anonymity.  But
this is less a virtue of networking technology than a failure of the
community to embrace and make a place for all its citizens.  And surely we
ought to hope that the sufferer can exchange invulnerability for normal
society as quickly as possible.)

That the promise of electronic culture should so commonly be put in terms
that mistake human qualities such as trust and vulnerability for their
opposites seems to me terribly significant.  What we see here, I think, is
the projection of our psyches into the external machinery of the Net.  The
machinery stands in place of the inner work of trust and of risk-taking.
We are, as a result, powerfully tempted to abandon the human struggles
upon which the future of society hangs.

You find the same sort of projection at work when technical networks are
mistaken for social networks -- a confusion that overlooks the generally
corrosive effect of the former upon the latter.  And likewise when
information flows are mistaken for learning.  (In general, and in most
contemporary contexts, the intensification of these flows actually works
against learning, for reasons I will be discussing in the near future.)

In all these cases, bewitched by the objectified products of our own inner
activity, we have lost awareness of the activity itself.  More and more we
are content to fiddle with computers and the other machinery of our
existence while remaining forgetful of ourselves.  (See also "Forgetting
Ourselves in the Age of Automatons" in NF #23.)


How to Beef Up Your Infant's Knowledge Base
-------------------------------------------

On Dec. 22 ABC News online ran a little story called "Wired Babies".  It
began, "Jessica Barton turned 1 this month, but she's already spent more
hours in front of a computer than many Americans have in a lifetime." Then
it continued:

   How young is too young for a baby to be put in front of a computer?
   Child psychologist Will Staso says there is no lower age limit.  He
   even backs up a company's claim that its software, Babywow, makes kids
   smarter.  Babywow displays words and plays sounds in several languages.
   "These are sounds that a child can't hear in a normal environment",
   says Staso.  "Presenting infants with information that can expand their
   knowledge base can have a positive effect on their developing
   intelligence."

This item has been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks while I've
been too stunned to know what to say.  The knowledge base of an infant?
This is what we need to worry about?  And the way to help is by playing
recorded sounds completely divorced from the child's meaningful
interaction with its surroundings?  Is it really so urgent to get an early
start on the habits of dissociation, the fragmentation of context, that
already vitiate modern life?

I would challenge Staso to utter a single coherent phrase about the
knowledge base of an infant -- an infant, remember, who does not yet even
possess language.  What really seems to be at work here is the belief that
"stimulation is good", period.  By itself, this nonsensical belief would
justify inflicting random pain on a child.  However, it is not stimulation
as such that counts, but a warm, nurturing, human environment where the
verbal expression is the natural speaking of the overall context.

The essential, unitary nature of the infant's world is something Staso, as
a psychologist, ought to know a little about.  But it doesn't need a
psychologist to grasp it.  The best description I know of, despite a form
of expression we today quite naturally find alien, comes from George
MacDonald, a nineteenth-century Scottish cleric:

   [The infant's inward condition] is one, I venture to say, of absolute,
   though, no doubt, largely negative faith.  Neither memory of pain that
   is past, nor apprehension of pain to come, once arises to give him the
   smallest concern.  In some way, doubtless very vague, for his being
   itself is a borderland of awful mystery, he is aware of being
   surrounded, enfolded with an atmosphere of love; the sky over him is
   his mother's face; the earth that nourishes him is his mother's bosom.
   The source, the sustentation, the defense of his being, the endless
   mediation betwixt his needs and the things that supply them, are all
   one.  There is no type so near the highest idea of relation to a God,
   as that of the child to his mother.  Her face is God, her bosom Nature,
   her arms are Providence -- all love -- one love -- to him an undivided
   bliss.  (From MacDonald's essay, "A Sketch of Individual Development"
   in A Dish of Orts)

The infant, you might say, dreams his own existence within this Mother-
world.  We must gently help him to wake up over time, but if we do it
wisely, it will be less a matter of shattering his dream than of helping
him to discover, in clear daylight, its infinitely far-reaching truth.
The attempt of those panderers who push software like Babywow is to wake
the child prematurely -- into a nightmare of random, meaningless
stimulation.

(Thanks to Joel Kahn for passing along the news item.)


Imagining a Better Potato
-------------------------

If you missed the exceptional article, "Playing God in the Garden", in the
Oct. 25, 1998 New York Times Magazine, it's well worth looking up.
Focusing on the Monsanto corporation and a genetically engineered potato,
author Michael Pollan wonderfully elucidates a mad mix of science, policy,
bureaucratic denseness, public ignorance, corporate arrogance, and sheer
insanity, all of which coalesced into a stark fact of 1998:  forty-five
million acres of American farmland were planted with genetically altered
crops.

As to the safety of these crops, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin has
remarked, "We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism
develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one
rude shock after another."  Nevertheless, few Americans are aware that
they are eating genetically altered crops daily, and government regulating
agencies have taken a number of steps to discourage the labeling that
would give consumers choice in the matter.

Among the revelations you'll find in Pollan's article are these:

** Some of Monsanto's potatoes have to be registered as a pesticide,
because the plants produce the Bt toxin in every cell.  (Bt is a
bacteria-produced poison that is approved for use on crops by organic
farmers.)  However, you will not find any label on these potatoes
informing you that you are eating a full-strength insecticide, and the
bureaucratic logic behind this omission is a marvel to behold:  the Food
and Drug Administration says that the potato, despite being eaten by
humans, is not a food, but rather a pesticide, for purposes of Federal
regulation.  Therefore, no label is required.  The Environmental
Protection Agency (which regulates pesticides) says the potato is a food,
not a pesticide.  Therefore, no label is required.

Meanwhile, don't expect Monsanto to take such a radical step as to assume
responsibility for its own actions.  As Phil Angell, the director of
corporate communications, says, "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the
safety of biotech food.  Our interest is in selling as much of it as
possible.  Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."

** The idea that farmers would plant parts of their fields as pesticide-
free "refuges" to help slow down the development of insect resistance to
genetically engineered pesticides turns out to be a fiction -- if not a
joke -- to both farmers and Monsanto.  Upon discovering this, Pollan
commented,

   It probably shouldn't come as a big surprise that conventional farmers
   would have trouble embracing the notion of an insect refuge.  To insist
   on real and substantial refuges is to ask them to start thinking of
   their fields in an entirely new way, less as a factory than as an
   ecosystem.

** Monsanto is fully aware that its insecticidal crops will result in
insect resistance to one of the most effective pesticides approved for use
by organic farmers.  Responding to this, a company vice-president advises
us not to worry, since Monsanto can easily produce new (non-organically
acceptable) toxins.  "Trust us", he said, presumably adding under his
breath, "to destroy organic farming."


A central element in industrial agriculture is monoculture -- the devotion
of huge acreages to the same crop year after year.  As Pollan points out,
"monoculture is poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work":

   Very simply, a field of identical plants will be exquisitely vulnerable
   to insects, weeds and disease.  Monoculture is at the root of virtually
   every problem that bedevils the modern farmer.

Pollan found organic farmers working hard to adjust their fields to
nature, while conventional farmers work "equally hard to adjust nature in
their fields to the requirement of monoculture and, beyond that, to the
needs of the industrial food chain."  On the conventional side, for
example, farmers engage in protracted warfare with net necrosis, a disease
of potatoes.  When Pollan asked an extremely successful and efficient
organic farmer about this disease, the farmer replied, "That's only really
a problem with Russet Burbank [potatoes], so I plant other kinds."  But a
neighboring conventional farmer can't do that:

   He's part of a food chain -- at the far end of which stands a long,
   perfectly golden McDonald's fry -- that demands he grow Russet Burbanks
   and little else.

All of which illustrates that there is no single villain in this picture
-- even if companies like Monsanto are doing their best to play the role.
We who eat McDonald's fries take our place alongside the industrial farmer
in upholding the system -- and many others stand with us.  We remain
largely unconscious of the fact that we are choosing between two different
ways of viewing the world.  Pollan captures the choice well:

   Monoculture is in trouble -- the pesticides that make it possible are
   rapidly being lost, either to resistance or to heightened concerns
   about their danger.  Biotechnology is the new silver bullet that will
   save monoculture.  But a new silver bullet is not a new paradigm --
   rather, it's something that will allow the old paradigm to survive.
   That paradigm will always construe the problem in [a conventional
   grower's] fields as a Colorado potato beetle problem, rather than as a
   problem of potato monoculture.

By our actions, we accede to one view or the other.  It is remarkable that
in an era of sophisticated systems analysis and all the rest, we find it
extremely difficult to see or feel the connections between ourselves and
the larger order of things.  We don't experience our system-defining
choices as system-defining choices.  Those who do make personal
choices in light of the larger picture, and who therefore raise questions
about what is good for society, typically find themselves dismissed as
quixotic neo-Luddites.  They are charged with resisting inevitable
technical progress, against which no individual should try to stand.  So
much for systems thinking.

Happily, though, quixotic neo-Luddites have been scoring some points in
agriculture.  See the following article.


When Technology is Smoke and Confusion
--------------------------------------

I managed an organic farm back in the Seventies, so you can imagine my
satisfaction in seeing organic food "go mainstream" these past few years.
But I was still unprepared to come across an article in the prestigious
science journal, Nature, under this heading:

   In comparison with conventional, high-intensity agricultural methods,
   "organic" alternatives can improve soil fertility and have fewer
   detrimental effects on the environment.  These alternatives can also
   produce equivalent crop yields to conventional methods.  (Nov. 19,
   1998)

There is nothing particularly obscure or difficult about the data
supporting this conclusion, and the data have been readily available for
decades.  That the conclusion has finally appeared in the pages of
Nature is less an indication of new discoveries than of cultural
shifts allowing more people to open their eyes to what formerly was
invisible -- invisible because incommensurate with their entire outlook.
As the author of the Nature article remarks (referring to an
accompanying report on an experiment with maize), "This advance is not
based on a miracle of technology but is a lesson from agriculture's past
that may presage its future."

The article is by David Tilman and is entitled "The Greening of the Green
Revolution".  Tilman briefly lists some of the costs of conventional
farming:

   contamination of groundwaters, release of greenhouse gases, loss of
   crop genetic diversity and eutrophication of rivers, streams, lakes and
   coastal marine ecosystems (contamination by organic and inorganic
   nutrients that cause oxygen depletion, spread of toxic species and
   changes in the structure of aquatic food webs).  It is unclear whether
   high-intensity agriculture can be sustained, because of the loss of
   soil fertility, the erosion of soil, the increased incidence of crop
   and livestock diseases, and the high energy and chemical inputs
   associated with it.

According to Tilman, half to two-thirds of all nitrogen fertilizer enters
non-agricultural ecosystems, causing serious environmental problems.  In
the conventional plots of the maize experiment, "sixty percent more
nitrate was leached into groundwater" than in the organic plots.  This
illustrates how "the green revolution and the large-scale livestock
operations that have come with it are reminiscent of the early stages of
the industrial revolution, when inefficient factories polluted without
restriction."

Tilman comments that the results of the maize experiment "may seem
astounding, or even suspect, given the widespread use of chemical
fertilizers.  They are not."  He reminds us that the United Kingdom's
Rothamsted Experimental Station has been running similar trials
continuously for over 150 years, with organically fertilized plots
producing yields of wheat fully as high as the conventional plots while
retaining more carbon and nitrogen in the soil.

You may recall that, just when dissatisfaction with conventional education
was reaching a peak less than a decade ago, with calls on every hand for
reform and experiment, the Internet came along.  All the energy of reform
was quickly diverted toward the inordinately expensive goal of wiring
every school.  The educational issues disappeared behind the smoke and
confusion of new technologies.

The question in agriculture today, I suppose, is whether the vivid case
for reform will likewise disappear -- this time behind the smoke and
confusion of biotechnology, with "miraculous" quick fixes all too easily
helping to sustain an underlying, pathological relation to nature.

SLT

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                       WIRED SCHOOLS, BROKEN TRUST

                               Lowell Monke
                         (lm7846s@acad.drake.edu)


                                                    Letter from Des Moines
                                                          January 19, 1998

(This column is adapted from part of an address to the conference on
"Education and Technology: Seeking the Human Essentials", Columbia
Teachers College, Columbia University, December 4-6, 1997.)

Four years ago an article appeared in the education section of Newsweek
under the title, "We Have Seen the Future: it is in Iowa."  I don't know
whether it surprised anyone else, but it sure shocked a lot of us teachers
in Iowa.  The article was, of course, about technology -- specifically, the
Iowa Communication Network (ICN), a fiber optic network the state was
building to provide high-speed computer communication among all schools in
the state.

It turns out that the ICN has not been the panacea many thought it would
be and these days it is rarely spoken of as a model for the future of
education in this state, much less the country.  But that hasn't stopped
us from taking our new role as cutting-edge educators seriously.  In fact,
last year the governor's commission on education proposed putting a laptop
in every student's book bag.  I've heard rumors that the next step is to
put satellite hookups on all of the tractors.


A Contract with America's Children
----------------------------------

I, too, take my responsibility to stay out on the cutting edge seriously,
so I am going to describe for you the newest high-tech product being
distributed in my district.  It's called the AUA.  I'm fairly certain you
haven't seen it touted anywhere yet.  For one thing, it's not electrical;
nor has anyone figured out how to sell it to schools (yet).  In fact, it's
just an old-fashioned page of paper -- four pages actually.  Yet it could
be one of the most revolutionary developments to result from the
technological transformation of our schools.

AUA stands for Acceptable Use Agreement.  Thousands of schools across the
nation already have them.  Des Moines Public Schools finally adopted a
fairly standard version last fall.  Its purpose is simple:  to set the
conditions for appropriate use of the Internet in the classroom.  I'm not
going to include the document here; it's a lot of legalese.  But to give
you an idea of its effect, I want you to imagine that you have sent your
eight-year-old child off to her first day of school.  You have images of a
bright, warm classroom, a loving teacher who immediately goes about the
task of building a close, trusting relationship with your child.  That
afternoon your eight-year-old brings the AUA home to you, with
instructions for you to read it and explain it to her so she knows the
rules and consequences.  Then you're supposed to sign and return it, so
she can get on the Internet.

You read through the document and eventually come to the section,
"Liability," which reads like this:

   The district does not make any warranties, whether expressed or implied
   including those of fitness for a particular purpose with respect to any
   services provided by the system and any information or software
   contained therein.

   The student and his/her parents or guardians will hold the district
   harmless for student violations of copyright laws, software licensing
   requirements, student access of inappropriate materials, violations by
   the student of others' rights to confidentiality, free speech and
   privacy, and damage to systems accessed by the student.

You stop for a minute to figure out what in the world this means and how
you are going to explain it to your child.  You move on, and when you get
to the end of the AUA, you have to sign your name, right below this little
reminder of what could happen should your eight-year-old not follow the
rules:

   Violations of the acceptable use guidelines, any district policy or
   procedure, or any federal or state law, rule or regulation may result
   in disciplinary action up to and including expulsion.  Violations which
   may be criminal will be referred to appropriate law enforcement
   officials.

This, along with oceans of information, is what the Internet has brought
to schools.  It has inserted this threatening, legal document directly
between the teacher and the student.  It hasn't stirred much controversy,
at least in my school, because it really is a legal necessity, and
because, as one parent told me "It's a small price to pay to get my child
on the Internet."

This attitude puts a smiley face on Jacques Ellul's observation that with
any technical progress, "...its harmful effects are inseparable from its
beneficial effects" (1990, p 39).  But Ellul also said that the harmful
effects tend to be "long-term and are felt only with experience" (1990, p.
73) and that these problems tend to be more treacherous and difficult to
solve than the original problem.  So it might be worthwhile to think a bit
about just how small a price the AUA really is.


The Child as Criminal Suspect and Consumer
------------------------------------------

First, this document makes very clear that the district is giving its
students access to a dangerous tool.  This puts the district itself in the
odd position of having to construct a legal shield to protect itself from
its own students' use of the learning tools the district gives them.

That is certainly an issue worth pondering.  But what is revolutionary is
the liability clause, in which the district disavows all responsibility
for any harmful cyberspace experiences that occur to any of its students.
This is radically new.  In effect, the district is telling parents that
not only does the district not trust their children, neither can the
parents any longer trust the district to protect their children while in
the classroom from the nastiness that exists in the outside world.  When
it comes to computer-mediated communication, in loco parentis is out, and
caveat emptor is in.

It's interesting to me that these agreements have been implemented all
over the country with hardly a word of discussion among national education
leaders.  It didn't even require school board approval in my district.
Here we are thirty years after the "hidden curriculum" was revealed in all
its subtle indoctrinating power, and we seem to have forgotten to apply it
to computers and the Internet.  Maybe there aren't any consequences from
treating a first grader as both criminal suspect and naive consumer.  And
of course, this kind of tough, distrustful atmosphere exists "out on the
street."  But it is something we aren't happy about, something we
recognize as a coarsening of the community -- in fact, it's something we
have always looked to education to help overcome.  The classroom, like the
home, has always been viewed as a haven against this kind of
depersonalized treatment.  The classroom may not have always lived up to
that ideal, but the AUA engraves this dehumanization into school policy.


Where are the Powers of Judgment?
---------------------------------

It also typifies one of the most common effects that high technology has
on education.  At least one of the prices we pay for the employment of
these external cognitive tools is the arrested development of many of our
students' internal resources.  In this case the substitution of external
controls releases the student from the need to develop the inner
discipline needed to use this tool "appropriately."  We aren't willing to
wait until the child matures sufficiently to trust him with the tool; we
want to give him power now and we will stand over him with a big stick
while he uses it.  The long-range consequences, at least the ones I see,
are disturbing.

Let me use students in my Advanced Computer Technology class as an
example.  I have from time-to-time suggested to some of my students who
are having trouble coming up with challenging projects, that they design a
simple computer virus or try to break through the school's network
security. Their first response is usually to ask if it would really be OK.
When I tell them it is up to them, almost invariably the response is a
variation of:  "Hey, cool!"  And off they go until I haul them back and
reassert my authority.  Which, again, is the point I am trying to make:
once the external controls are lifted, there are no internal controls in
many of these seventeen- to eighteen-year-olds to take over.

It seems to me that if we are failing at anything in our schools today, we
are failing to develop in our students the kinds of internal human
qualities -- including ethical and moral strength -- needed to resist
abusing the tremendous power we are handing them. These qualities take a
great deal of time and effort to develop in a child, but I've come to
believe they ought to be as much a prerequisite to using powerful computer
tools as learning how to type.  Trying to teach a student to harness and
use appropriately the power of computer technology without those cognitive
and social traits is like trying to build a skyscraper without steel.
It's what forces us to rely on the external scaffolding -- the
psychological prison bars -- that quasi-legal documents like the AUA
provide.


Shall We Limit Technology, or the Child?
----------------------------------------

None of this is new insight.  The problems I see in my classroom today are
ones that Joseph Weizenbaum cited over twenty years ago.  He warned that
in conferring on our students this enormous power we must also help them
accept the immense responsibility of using it for the good of humanity.
Yet at the very time when we most need to nurture and expand the inner
resources of our children, we are diverting their energies toward
external, mechanical activities that may make school more fun, but leave
their characters untouched.

Making activities easy and painless at the cost of our children's inner
strength is no bargain.  Having failed or given up on nurturing those
inner resources, we end up with sad developments like the AUA.

It seems to me that in education, as in society at large, it is time we
began to take seriously Langdon Winner's essential question:

   How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we
   are and the kind of world we would like to build?  (1986, p xi).

I think this is the most important technology question to ponder in our
schools today.  Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck on the inverse of it:

   How can we limit human beings to best match what our technologies can
   do and the kind of world these technologies are building?

We need to turn that question around in our schools.  We need to stop
concentrating on outfitting our youth to meet the demands of a
technologically determined 21st century, and start helping our youth
develop the independence of mind and strength of character to make the
future what they will it to be.  To help them strengthen that will, along
with the self-discipline, courage, determination and social consciousness
that must accompany it, we have to start talking about limits -- not those
imposed on them by legalistic AUAs, but those which we can impose on
technology to help us better focus on developing the most deeply human
qualities of our children.


References
----------

Ellul, Jacques. 1990.  The Technological Bluff.  Grand Rapids: William
B. Eerdmans.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1976.  Computer Power and Human Reason -- From Judgment
to Calculation.  New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Winner, Langdon. 1986.  The Whale and the Reactor -- A Search for Limits in
an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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                              CORRESPONDENCE


Does NETFUTURE Hold to a Masculine Standard?
--------------------------------------------

Response to:  "Can Open Standards Suffocate Us?" (NF-82)
From:  Rebecca Lynn Eisenberg (mars@bossanova.com)

In the latest netfuture, you wrote:

   If there's any place where the spirit of exploration and the spirit of
   re-visioning should reign, it's in the classroom.  Teacher and students
   should encounter what for both of them holds something of the
   unknown -- on the teacher's part because he is engaging the subject
   matter "live", right there before the students, rather than presenting
   what has already been completely structured by bureaucrats, textbook
   authors, software, or his own memory.

With all due respect, it strikes me as highly ironic to use the so-called
"neutral masculine" within the context of an article about "revolution"
and rejection of "standards."  The masculine is, simply, not neutral --
and using it as if it were not only conforms to (as well as reinforces) a
sexist "standard," but also is not just non-revolutionary, but counter-
revolutionary.

Your error in this regard is not uncommon, however.  It always appalled me
how the vast majority of science fiction literature, film and television
managed to express creativity of the future (and present) potential of
technology and science -- yet displayed no creativity whatsoever in
imagining a world where the sexes are equal, or even (god forbid) a
society where gender does not exist.  The few books that did describe such
an egalitarian society -- in particular Marge Piercy's Woman on the
Edge of Time -- rarely are classified as "science fiction," even
though they are.

Within the context of a society whose standards rarely become evident to
those who benefit from them, I offer one small grain of hope:  some Web
site forms list "female" before "male."   Now that is re-vision.

All my best,
rle

Rebecca Lynn Eisenberg, Esq.
mars@well.com * http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca

Columnist, Nouveau Geek, CBS MarketWatch  http://CBS.MarketWatch.Com
Regular Contributor, Silicon Spin, ZDTV http://www.zdtv.com/siliconspin
Columnist, Net Skink, SF Examiner  http://examiner.com/skink/


Response to Rebecca Lynn Eisenberg
----------------------------------

From:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

Rebecca Eisenberg --

Please understand that I don't feel I have neatly nailed down the issues
surrounding gender-neutral language.   I continually quail internally at
the less-than-perfect nature of my own choices.  I find unsatisfactory
alternatives on every hand, and have simply chosen what seems to me the
least of evils.

You might be interested in the brief essay I wrote on the subject.  It's
called "Why I Do Not Use `Gender-neutral' Language", in NF #61.  There was
also a follow-up letter by Joan Van Tassel in NF #66.  While Van Tassel
didn't comment on my main point, she nevertheless made an eloquent plea
against my position.  I haven't seen fit to change my usage as yet, but I
don't find I can relax about it either.

One thing seems clear to me, however:  in our society today it is less and
less possible to make the unqualified argument that the generic masculine
usage helps keep women subservient and unconscious.  Just the opposite:
this usage seems more likely to provoke an immediate seizure of attention
-- and a letter like yours.  That's part of the change I referred to in my
earlier essay.  There may still be good reasons for rejecting the generic
masculine, but the need for consciousness-raising is hardly one of them.

I don't happen to agree with you that my usage is inherently sexist.  (Can
words be sexist apart from the meanings we give them?  And don't those
meanings continually change with time?)  Nor am I sure what you could mean
by "a society where gender does not exist" -- which sounds like a hellish
place to me, one where both men and women are required to deny part of
themselves.  But I suspect that not much would come of our arguing these
points even if we both had the time.

In any case, I'm glad you stated your concern, even though it only worsens
my discomfort!

Steve

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

                       ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES


The Monsanto Files
------------------

In NF #82 there was a brief story about the effects of bovine growth
hormone upon the milk millions of Americans are consuming.  The Monsanto
corporation produces and aggressively promotes this hormone.  Likewise,
the current issue of NETFUTURE contains a story about a genetically
engineered potato -- again the product of Monsanto.  But the story of
Monsanto is vastly bigger and more horrifying than these items have
suggested, and you will find the larger picture in a special issue of
The Ecologist (Sep./Oct., 1998) on "The Monsanto Files".  It's quite an
amazing story of corporate rapacity -- not a theme I've often emphasized in
NETFUTURE, because it's all too easy to vilify corporations instead of
assuming personal responsibility for one's own role in sustaining the vile
behavior.

But certainly the Monsanto story needed to be told.  (I've recently been
amazed at the sheer, ugly arrogance, not to mention law-breaking, of some
of our largest corporations -- an arrogance encouraged, perhaps, by the
widespread feeling that American business is now unstoppable, without
rival on the world stage.) "The Monsanto Files" is full of articles on the
company's long history of environmental abuse, its lying, it's
intimidation of any who get in its way, and its depressingly easy co-
option of government regulatory agencies.  If this doesn't get your blood
boiling, nothing will.

The Ecologist is published in the United Kingdom.  You can contact
the subscription department at sgc@mag-subs.demon.co.uk, and the editorial
department at ecologist@gn.apc.org.

SLT

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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 #83 :: January 19, 1999

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