NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #104     A Publication of The Nature Institute        March 21, 2000
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            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
---------

Editor's Note

Quotes and Provocations
   Bill Joy's Warning from on High
   Education by Acronym
   The New, Soulless University?
   Why Do We Celebrate Change While Refusing It?

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   Email Is Not a Solitary Activity (Jiri Baum)
   Response to Jiri Baum (Langdon Winner)
   Against Electronic Voting (Steve Baumgarten)

Announcements and Resources
   Loka Institute Conference
   Adbusters and TV Turnoff Week

About this newsletter


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                              EDITOR'S NOTE

In the forthcoming Whole Earth (Spring, 2000), Howard Rheingold offers a
nice compliment to NetFuture:  "an important critical voice in the age of
hype".  His brief note cites NetFuture alongside Phil Agre's Red Rock
Eater News Service (http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html) --
excellent company to find oneself in!  Whole Earth, by the way, is as
stimulating and useful a magazine as you will ever find.

At the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference (CFP 2000) in Toronto,
I'll deliver an April 5 luncheon address entitled "How Technology Can
Enslave Us".  For information about the conference, which runs from April
4 - 7, see http://www.cfp2000.org/ .

Incidentally, I keep full details of my speaking schedule at
http://www.praxagora.com/~stevet/personal/schedule.html .  I'm usually game
to combine one event with another in the same geographic area.

SLT

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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Bill Joy's Warning from on High
-------------------------------

It is wonderful to see Bill Joy's warning about high-tech risks (Wired,
April, 2000) producing such an impressive media splash.  The warning's
origin in the high-tech engineering pantheon, together with its appearance
in a publication wedded to exciting images of the high-tech future, seems
to have guaranteed maximum notoriety.  We can hope that Joy's effectively
written piece will pry open the media a little further for public
discussion of technology's risks -- even after the sensation of the moment
fades into the next curiosity.

In one of the first counters to Joy, Microsoft's chief technology officer,
Nathan Myhrvold, was quoted in the New York Times saying,

   People have made apocalyptic predictions about technology constantly
   for as long as there has been technology.  I think it is because change
   frightens them.  What is more, the most common form these dire
   predictions take is "this next generation of stuff -- wow! that is
   really different and scary"

This is about as know-nothing and childish as you can get.  Does Myhrvold
really think that "people have always said X" is grounds for dismissing X?
The question is not whether "change frightens people"; it's whether the
changes currently in question should frighten people, which happens
to be the entire burden of Joy's essay.

The refrain heard so often that "people have always feared new
technologies" contains an implicit companion claim that this fear has
never been justified.  How did Myhrvold manage to miss the twentieth
century?


Education by Acronym
--------------------

The Department of Defense's Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) committee
has released the Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM),
which specifies a Web-based Learning Management System (LMS), including an
XML-based Course Structure Format (CSF).  It's all intended to encourage
the re-use of instructional content -- rather, I suppose, as acronyms
enable the convenient re-use of ugly phrases.

SCORM requires content to be independent of context-specific, run-time
constraints.  That's the whole point.  You could call it context-free
education -- education that does not arise out of the moment, out of the
teacher's encounter with these students who have just had their own
particular life experience in this setting.  Anyone preparing SCORM
material must eliminate precisely the elements that make an encounter most
engagingly personal and alive.

As a simple condemnation, however, this is most unfair.  Anyone preparing
a print-based curriculum (or any other form of curriculum intended for use
by a large number of people) must also aim for context-free presentation.
And -- as long as there remains a teacher to re-enliven the material in a
genuine engagement with students -- there is hope for true education.

The comparison with books is the right one, I think.  It should remind us
of the abuses of the book -- of the way book learning so easily substitutes
for learning.  In fact, it seems to me that the long decline of mainstream
educational institutions, leading to all the contemporary expectations for
their demise, is owing most of all to our failure to resist successfully
the downward pull of the book.  A static, container model of education (as
if wisdom were in the book, in the compilation of words) reduced our
attention to the inner dynamics of understanding.

This is why I am not sanguine about the immediate prospects for SCORM and
all the other computer-based visions of a new education.  Having done so
poorly with the challenge of the book, how will we resist the vastly more
efficient "containerization" of knowledge offered by the computer?  After
all, it is the computer that has made terms like "information" and
"database" -- the one to be shoveled into the other -- triumphal landmarks
on the modern cultural landscape.

Related articles:

** "Can Open Standards Suffocate Us?" in NF #82.  Discusses the growing risks
   of the general drive within technology to standardize everything.



The New, Soulless University?
-----------------------------

True education is, at heart, a matter of seeing with new eyes what one
previously "knew".  This seeing with new eyes always requires a kind of
metaphorical stretch.  And nothing enables the metaphorical stretch more
effectively than an opportunity to see through the different eyes --
through all the expressive presence -- of another human being, a teacher.

What the student learns above all else is the teacher -- that is, he
learns a set of inner, cognitive gestures.  We are most inclined to forget
this wherever our subject matter has degenerated into a body of technical
and largely meaningless information.  Here the student can let go the
strenuous labor of shaping his mind to the tensions, paradoxes, and
gymnastic grace of any profound truth.  A collection of shoveled facts is
all he needs.  Once he's reconciled himself to this, he's ready to be
taught by Arthur Levine.

Levine is president of Teacher's College, Colombia University, and author
of a New York Times op-ed piece, "The Soul of a New University" (March 13,
2000).  Referring repeatedly to the education "industry", Levine cites his
biggest fear:  some company will come along and hire the world's best
teachers and then offer a high-quality, cut-rate education.  "A top-notch
professor on our campus touches a couple of hundred students a year.  The
lower-paid online professor may touch thousands.  The economics is not in
our favor."

(It happens that a couple of days after Levine's essay appeared,
entrepreneur Michael Saylor announced the gift of $100 million as a down
payment on an electronic, "Ivy League-quality" university offering
everyone in the world a free education based on lectures by the "geniuses
and leaders" of our time.  Levine's economics is looking more desperate by
the day.)

How does one professor "touch" thousands of students a year?  Wasn't this
precisely the promised benefit of television?  Buying the advertisements
for distance education with all the uncritical enthusiasm of a grade
schooler surfing the Web for goodies, Levine asks, "Why do we need the
physical plant called the college?"  Then he cites with approval the
corporate entrepreneur who told him,

   You know, you're in an industry which is worth hundreds of billions of
   dollars, and you have a reputation for low productivity, high cost, bad
   management and no use of technology.  You're going to be the next
   health care:  a poorly managed nonprofit industry which was overtaken
   by the profit-making sector.

So Levine stands among the increasing number of education prophets who
seem incapable of distinguishing between two propositions:  first, that
education (like virtually everything) has an economic dimension; and
second, that education is an economic matter pure and simple.  As
obviously false as this latter proposition is (what price do you put on a
well-placed metaphor, or a mind's moment of insight, or a student's
cognitive maturation?) it seems to be taking ever wider root.

That Levine has reconceived educational content as a shovelable commodity
is also evident when he says,

   It's possible for all of us to feel we're sitting in the same
   classroom.  It's possible for me to nudge (via e-mail) the student from
   Tokyo and say, "I missed the professor's last comment.  What was it?";
   have my question translated into Japanese; have the answer back in
   English in seconds.

This fantasy of adequate machine translation carries a degree of validity
only in those mostly technical disciplines where a living, metaphorical
language capable of conjuring the often-reticent truth has decayed into a
predictable, univocal language fit only for transmitting facts in terms
that carry no surprise.  Language, in other words, that needs no
expressive teacher and that has been drained of its ability to help us see
with new eyes.  Language fit for training, but not education.

Once you've accepted the idea that the educator trades in commodities, it
no longer seems grotesque to restrict your students to the level of
machine communication.  Arthur Levine has erected an entire vision of
educational renewal upon this economic presupposition.  In reality, he's
asking for the reduction of education to those impersonal and insipid
elements that have already led many institutions like his own into
decline.  Hearing him speak is almost to wish these institutions good
riddance.

Levine and his kin should look around themselves and tremble.  Yes,
corporate-style, online training programs are booming -- but only because
the current, distorted economic system is demanding them, not because the
content is deeply meaningful or students love the programs.  If you really
want to see what's new -- if you want to see where students are being led
by their own desires and sense of need -- look at the thriving holistic
education centers like the New York Open Center, the Omega Institute in
Rhinebeck, New York, Esalen in Big Sur, California, or Hollyhock in
British Columbia.  Or the small, low-profile, nature-centered outdoor
schools and camps springing up everywhere.  Or the innumerable, mission-
oriented, mostly nonprofit organizations that offer intense, focused
educational experiences (like The Nature Institute where I work; two
students are currently resident here, because they desired to learn about
Goethean science from Craig Holdrege, one of the few people in the country
qualified to oversee their work).  Or just the local extension education
centers at high schools, community colleges, and universities.

At many of these places you find teachers (often itinerant) and students
joining together for a few hours or weeks or months in pursuit of a
practice and an understanding.  Some of the organizations mentioned above
began as New Agey, crystal-gazing, feel-good escapes from sober life --
and my personal distaste for the touchy-feely aspects of their programs
remains (perhaps rather too) extreme.  But there is no doubt that they are
now broadening out and tapping into a huge vein of educational need in our
society.  It is the same vein that the really good teachers in traditional
schools have always managed to work, where education means the self-
transformation of both student and teacher in their mutual encounter.

It all suggests to me that the decisive challenge today is almost the
opposite of what we are hearing.  How can we bring teachers closer to
students?  And if that's what students really want, then anyone who turns
green with envy at the thought of one teacher reaching thousands of
students through a glass screen has lost touch not only with the students'
educational needs, but also with their pocketbooks.

Related articles:

** "Who's Killing Higher Education?" in NF #78.



Why Do We Celebrate Change While Refusing It?
---------------------------------------------

In "Can't Get That Extinction Crisis Out of My Mind" (Orion,
Winter, 2000), Stephanie Mills reminds us that, as late as the beginning
of the twentieth century in Europe and America, a reasonable subsistence
living was still known.  "Many of our great-grandparents provided their
own food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and entertainment."  But now

   we're consumers, not gatherers or producers.  We're at the mercy of
   dimly understood industrial processes and long lines of supply.
   Because the sources of our goods are so widely scattered, it's nearly
   impossible for us to comprehend the effects of our way of life on the
   biotic community.

The challenge here is not to find our way back to subsistence living, but
rather to live knowingly and wisely within the increasingly complex
earthly context that sustains us.  Despite her pessimism about our gaining
the knowledge to act wisely, Mills is not altogether without hope:

   I do bear moral responsibility for the consequences of my consumption,
   but we consumers didn't originate the lifestyle.  It has taken
   relentless, well-crafted persuasion -- and occasional coercion -- to
   override the common values of frugality and sharing.  Over the course
   of the twentieth century, by means of mass production and global
   transportation, an ersatz version of the gluttony of nineteenth-century
   financiers has been democratized.  The process feeds itself:  as
   commerce reduces the beauty, abundance, and complexity of the land,
   nature compares ever less favorably with the bazaar.  But even Muzak
   and designer athletic shoes can't make up for ecosystem collapse.  As
   earth's wildness and human cultural diversity are rendered down to feed
   stock for the global economy, we do begin to notice.  We cannot buy our
   way out of this situation, and the market will not lead us.  To arrest
   the final consumption of the earth, nothing short of epochal,
   devolutionary change of the political economy is called for .... The
   cure for our ravening estrangement from, and destruction of, the rest
   of the biotic community is reinhabitation.

This got me to thinking along a tangent.  Mills' invitation for "epochal
change" will, of course, be widely dismissed as unrealistic.  I myself run
into this charge whenever I cite the need to make choices about
technology, or to wrest control of the automatic processes so powerfully
at work in the globalizing high-tech sphere.

But there's a strange conjunction of attitudes here.  Today epochal change
is so widely embraced and celebrated as to be trivialized.  The new
millennium, new economy, emergent global consciousness, evolutionary leap,
end of science, post-human development -- such phrases continually invite
us to embrace radical change, and we scarcely blink.  So what is the
stumbling block in Mills' call for epochal change?

The problem, I think, is not so much that people consciously disagree with
her values or aims; it is that she is calling for change rather than
announcing it.  She is asking us to take responsibility for change.  This,
apparently, just seems preposterous.  Sometimes it appears that the only
change fully believed in or fully welcome in our current rush toward
globalization is the kind delivered automatically by technological
"advance" -- the kind that happens to us instead of the kind we consciously
and responsibly choose.

All of which suggests that Bill Joy's worry about automatisms (robots)
eventually displacing humans should be rephrased in terms of the
technological realities today.  Somehow our machines are already
managing to subvert human choice.  (A lot more needs saying, of course.
As it happens, this will be the theme of my address at next month's
Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Toronto.)

SLT

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                              CORRESPONDENCE


Email Is Not a Solitary Activity
--------------------------------

Response to:  "Results of a New Technology Poll" (NF-103)
From:  Jiri Baum (jiri@baum.com.au)

Hello,

[Langdon Winner wrote:]

   Let's face it:  Large numbers of Americans are finding satisfaction in
   computer games, email, chat rooms, and Web browsing and are perfectly
   happy doing these things in more or less solitary ways.

I'd be interested to know how you imagine doing e-mail (or chat rooms) in
a solitary way.  Isn't the usual use of e-mail to interact with another
person?  Do you consider me a non-person, a purely computer construct?

One of the complaints the `advocates of virtual community' have with many
of these surveys is that talking on the telephone is considered social
while sending an e-mail is considered solitary.  Why?  What is the
essential ingredient that makes a phone conversation social and e-mail
not?  What distinction can one make between a presumably-social TTY (deaf)
phone call and an Internet discussion?

Like most people, I haven't seen the raw data, so I can't comment on what
difference removing this distinction would make to the conclusions.  Maybe
lots, maybe little, I don't know.  Maybe the data collected doesn't admit
such analysis.  But it is very annoying to see people, some of whom really
ought to know better, make such flawed arguments.

Jiri

Jiri Baum 


Response to Jiri Baum
---------------------

From:  Langdon Winner (winner@rpi.edu)

Many computer boosters seem troubled by recurring findings in social
scientific studies that people increasingly experience isolation from
friends and family as a result of computer use.  In my view the research
is correct and the doubters clearly in denial.  The first line of attack
was to criticize the studies conducted at Carnegie Mellon in 1998 and more
recently at Stanford University for what some folks claimed were flaws in
methodology.  But the NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School poll is absolutely
impeccable in that regard and its results echo the disturbing conclusions
of the earlier research.  All three studies have one thing in common:
Their evidence about computers and rising loneliness comes from what large
samples of computers users actually report.

Comparisons to the telephone are worth pondering.  In American culture
telephone use began as a means of business communication, but it
eventually became a crucial part of everyday, social conversation.  Social
historians note that the driving forces behind this shift of emphasis were
urban and rural women who insisted that the phone be made available to
them so they could talk to family and friends who lived some distance
away.  Thus, telephone use became a means for extending discussions,
activities and relationships rooted in personal history.

Computers can also enhance sociability and often do.  But what the social
scientific studies reveal is that digital devices often become a
substitute for social relationships rather than a complement to them.  My
own guess is that this tendency is mainly driven by the predilections of
young and middle-aged American males, although their motives for choosing
electronic isolation over direct human contact remain unexplained.  It's
apparently a "guy thing" -- a challenge for further research.

It is true that email and Internet chat are to some extent more sociable
than playing video games and browsing the web.  But it does not stretch
the term "solitary" to encompass the increasing numbers of guys who sit in
their chairs, stare into tubes and click their mice hour after hour rather
than interact with living, breathing persons nearby.  Denying that this is
a disturbing social problem reminds me of the tobacco company executives
who once refused to admit that cigarettes cause cancer.


Against Electronic Voting
-------------------------

From:  Steve Baumgarten (sbb@panix.com)

I'm putting aside for a moment my disgust at the fact that the people
involved in pushing e-voting in the Arizona Democratic primary obviously
care not a fig about security issues; privacy issues; even race-related
issues (the so-called "digital divide").

In the context of NetFuture, though, there's another issue, and one
perhaps even more important:  voting is one of the few things we do with
other members of our community in a public place.  (Jury duty is another.)
It's not really that hard or inconvenient to vote; for the times that
voting can't be accomplished in person, an absentee ballot can be used.
So what problem does e-voting solve?  And more to the point, what problems
does it make worse?

People who don't vote don't ever realize what a small but special thrill
you get from voting -- from going to a public place with other members of
your community and exercising, together, your right to choose the people
who will represent you in government.  (People who have served on a jury
report the same feeling.)  Regardless of your ethnicity, your religious
beliefs, your background -- regardless of all of this, you realize that
you have one thing in common with all of the other people you encounter at
the polls: you're all part of a community, and you're all -- at least in
this way -- equal.

The last thing we need to do is encourage people to stay home, alone, and
forget that there's more to life than just work and home.

So put aside all of the myriad security issues, privacy issues, and the
infamous "digital divide".  But doesn't anyone in Arizona realize how
fragile our sense of community already is, and how the last thing we need
is something else to further erode it?

Steve Baumgarten
sbb@panix.com

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                       ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES


Loka Institute Conference
-------------------------

The Loka Institute's third annual Community Research Network conference
will be held June 16 - 18, 2000, at Morehouse College in Atlanta.  One of
Loka's main efforts has to do with "community-based research" -- a concept
they've pretty much pioneered in this country, and brilliantly so.  "Once
described as junk science, [community-based research] has now become an
important element in government and private research.  The conference will
explore new strategies for leveraging this enhanced status.  The `how-
to's' -- in building partnerships, seeking funding, and using research to
affect change -- will be tackled."

For further information, see http://www.Loka.org/ .


Adbusters and TV Turnoff Week
-----------------------------

If you're not already familiar with Adbusters, please go to
http://www.adbusters.org/ and check them out.  They call themselves the
"Culture Jammers Headquarters", and they are full of wonderful and wacky
ideas about resisting the excesses of commercialism in contemporary
culture.  If nothing else, join them in supporting TV Turnoff Week, during
which millions of viewers will disengage from their televisions.  The week
is April 22 - 28.

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                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2000 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
newsletter for noncommercial purposes.  You may also redistribute
individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this
paragraph are attached.

NetFuture is supported by freely given reader contributions, and could not
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http://netfuture.org/support.html .

Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:

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To subscribe or unsubscribe to NetFuture:
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #104 :: March 21, 2000

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