NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #105     A Publication of The Nature Institute        April 18, 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
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Editor's Note

Quotes and Provocations
   Genome Hackers
   What Happens When You Medicalize Childbirth
   Banning Teenagers to Furtive Little Holes

Automobiles on the Road to Nowhere (Stephen L. Talbott)
   Is the digital economy repeating yesterday's mistakes?

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   Education Includes the Transmission of Attitudes (Klaus Rieckhoff)
   The Book's Weakness Is Also Its Strength (Wendell Piez)

About this newsletter


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                              EDITOR'S NOTE

The feature article in this issue looks at some remarkable parallels
between the automobile's conquering of the American landscape and the
current land rush in cyberspace.  The essay draws heavily from James
Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere.

The conference, "PlaNetwork: Global Ecology and Information Technology"
will bring an impressive array of geeks and activists to San Francisco,
May 12-14.  For the most part, the participants seem to have few
misgivings about how their embrace of computer technologies will play into
their environmental concerns, but I was asked specifically to address
"shadow-side" considerations.  Guess I've typecast myself.  Playing the
role to the hilt, I've entitled my talk, "Information Technology is the
Root Cause of Environmental Destruction.  Why Should We Look to It for
Healing?"  Here's the abstract:

   The threats to our environment are an expression of our longstanding
   alienation from the natural world.  With its aggressive disinterest in
   the qualities of things (which are the things), science has led
   us in a several-hundred-years' abandonment of nature.  A key feature of
   this drive is the reduction of nature to information.  A companion
   feature is replacement of the desire to experience and know by the
   desire to manipulate and control.

   Technology is the effective instrument of this devilish substitution,
   and has aptly been described as the knack of so arranging the world
   that we don't have to experience it.  By embracing technology without
   enough respect for its alienating and destructive potentials,
   environmental activists are helping to worsen the very disease they
   want to heal.  But if we can muster that respect, then
   technology can indeed serve the healing process.

For information about the conference, see http://www.planetworkers.org/ .

SLT

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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Genome Hackers
--------------

Last month a 17-year-old girl won first place in the Intel Science Talent
Search for an impressive bit of cryptographic work using DNA sequences.
Many would be surprised to learn how common it has become for secondary
school students to work with DNA.  In what passes for high school biology
these days, students are often given sophisticated, highly automated kits
enabling them to carry out various recipe-like manipulations of isolated
DNA.

Of course, this training as lab technicians has little to do with
understanding the world of plants and animals -- and a good deal to do
with the cultivation of false and one-sided notions about living
organisms.  But there's no denying the glamor in those kits.  And while
such abstractions as the students employ may reveal almost nothing of the
world's biological richness, there is nevertheless power in them -- a
power that is all the more fearsome for the fact that it is mostly blind.

If there's one thing hackers understand, it is the appeal of blind power,
which might be described as throwing a wrench into the works and seeing
what happens.  This  brings to mind a recent comment by Donella Meadows,
who teaches environmental studies at Dartmouth:  "It is only a matter of
time before [biological] hackers appear who think it might be fun, as
computer hackers do, to create and release their own viruses".

If and when this happens, we'll get a fresh perspective on the shallow
characterization of computer viruses (and their hosts) as living things.
The real danger is not in the fanciful prospect of raising our machines to
life, but rather in the already entrenched practice of treating living
things as if they were machines.  In this game, it is not only Intel prize
winners, but also hackers, who will feel quite at home.

(Donella Meadows' brief, excellent article is available at
http://www.tidepool.org/gc/gc3.17.00.cfm)


What Happens When You Medicalize Childbirth
-------------------------------------------

One symptom of our society's unhealthy and almost worshipful relation to
technology is the medicalization of more and more aspects of our lives --
lives typically framed by sterile and ugly hospitalizations at birth and
death.  Concerning the longstanding and highly strange American
medicalization of childbirth, here are a few statements reproduced
verbatim from a flyer put out by the Citizens for Midwifery:

   ** The U.S. ranks twenty-fifth internationally in infant mortality
      (National Center for Health Statistics, 1993).

   ** All the European countries with perinatal and infant mortality rates
      lower than those of the United States use midwives as the sole birth
      attendant for at least seventy percent of all births (Suarez, S.H.,
      "Midwifery Is Not the Practice of Medicine", Yale Journal of Law
      and Feminism 5, 2 1993).

   ** From $13 billion to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care
      costs by developing midwifery care, demedicalizing childbirth, and
      encouraging breastfeeding (Frank A. Oski, M.D., Professor and
      Director, Department of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University School
      of Medicine).

   ** Today, only six percent of U.S. births are attended by midwives
      (National Center for Health Statistics, 1995).

Many states, like my own state of New York, have outlawed traditional
midwives.  Happily, these laws are routinely flouted by a corps of
dedicated midwives, often at great risk to themselves.  I know a number of
them, and can only wish that the larger, technology-enthralled medical
profession showed half the dedication to patients that these women
demonstrate.


                          ---------------------

Related articles:

** "Notes on Health and Medicine" in NF #88.  A discussion of midwives,
   placebos, and treatment of the whole person.

** Citizens for Midwifery:  http://www.cfmidwifery.org/.



Banning Teenagers to Furtive Little Holes
-----------------------------------------

James Howard Kunstler, in The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and
Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, has this to say about
suburbs:

   As a teenager I visited my old suburban chums back on Long Island from
   time to time and I did not envy their lot in life.  By puberty, they
   had entered a kind of coma.  There was so little for them to do in
   Northwood, and hardly any worthwhile destination reachable by bike or
   foot, for now all the surrounding territory was composed of similar
   one-dimensional housing developments punctuated at intervals by equally
   boring shopping plazas.  Since they had no public gathering places,
   teens congregated in furtive little holes -- bedrooms and basements --
   to smoke pot and imitate the rock and roll bands who played on the
   radio.  Otherwise, teen life there was reduced to waiting for the
   transforming moment of becoming a licensed driver.

Of course, the Net is seen by many today as at least a partial remedy for
this loss of communal places.  But Kunstler's book suggests -- to this
reader, at least -- that the principles underlying the automobile's
devastation of the civic landscape continue to work in our society's
furious development of online real estate.  For some notes on The
Geography of Nowhere, see the following article.

SLT

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                   AUTOMOBILES: ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)

Notes concerning The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of
America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1994).  Paperback, 303 pages, $13.

Our society appears to be following the same strategy with its computer
and digital networking policies that it followed earlier with its
automobile and asphalt networking policies:  First, and at all costs,
build the infrastructure and put the new devices in the hands of the
consumer; then, a few decades later, check out what this has done to
society.  If it has hollowed out our institutions -- well, that's for
historians and sociologists to quibble over; there will always be plenty
of new technologies promising a bold and bright future.

If today's digital policymakers would read up on the history of the
automobile, they could scarcely avoid some grave self-doubts.  A good
place for them to start would be a couple of the chapters in James Howard
Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere.


Birth of the Suburb
-------------------

Americans, Kunstler notes, developed the peculiar idea that "neither the
city nor the country was really a suitable place to live".  This idea
found expression in the suburbs that sprang up along the new railroad
lines in the mid-1800s.  Perhaps the first such development was Llewellyn
Park in the heights of Orange, New Jersey, built in 1858 within easy
commuting distance of Manhattan.

Llwewllyn Park, situated around a "600-foot-high rocky outcropping crowned
by looming pines and hemlocks", was a place of extraordinary, wild beauty.
Ravines with streams cut through the property, flowering shrubs and rustic
pavillions (with benches for walkers) were added at considerable expense,
and ten miles of carriage road circled a fifty-acre, wooded common.

   Everything was deformalized:  the streets were crooked and winding,
   gardens rambled, asymmetrical houses sprouted towers like fairy-tale
   castles to create a fanciful sense of timeless historicity -- where, in
   reality, there would dwell just so many widget manufacturers who
   depended for their fortunes on the implacable routines of business
   conducted in the gridded streets of Manhattan.

It was in many respects a wonderful setting, one that could number the
likes of Thomas Edison among its residents.  And yet, Kunstler adds, it
was also artificial, lacking nearly all the elements of an organic
community:  productive work, markets, cultural institutions, different
classes of people.

In 1869 the firm of Frederick Law Olmstead (designer of New York's Central
Park) was hired by a Chicago real estate business to turn sixteen hundred
swampy acres along the Des Plaines River into a railroad suburb.  While
Riverside, as it was called, became in many ways a template for the later
automobile suburbs, it did preserve some attractive features:  an
extensive park along both banks of the river; woodsy squares at the
terminus of some roads; planted street meridians; separation of vehicular
and pedestrian paths at different grade levels; and "the sequencing of
views so that a trip to the park flowed uninterruptedly from open green
lawn, to riverbank, to mysterious wooden glade".  There was ample public
space conducive to walking.

All this compares favorably to modern residential subdivisions where

   the streets have no other official function except to funnel the cars
   to and fro.  One of the problems with cars is that all drivers are not
   highly skilled -- often they are even drunk -- and accidents happen.
   So to remove some of the danger that drivers pose, highway engineers
   have developed a standard perfect modern suburban street.  It is at
   least thirty-six feet wide -- same as a county highway -- with generous
   turning radii.  This makes it easy to drive well in excess of thirty
   miles an hour, a speed at which fatal accidents begin to happen.  The
   perfect modern suburban street has no trees planted along the edge that
   might pose a hazard to the motorist incapable of keeping his Buick
   within the thirty-six-foot-wide street.  The street does not terminate
   in any fixed objective that might be pleasant to look at or offer a
   visual sense of destination -- no statues, fountains, or groves of
   trees.  Such decorative focal points might invite automotive
   catastrophe, not to mention the inconvenience of driving around them.
   With no trees arching over the excessively wide streets, and no focal
   points to direct the eye, and cars whizzing by at potentially lethal
   speeds, the modern suburban street is a bleak, inhospitable, and
   hazardous environment for the pedestrian.

The insecurity of the pedestrian in an environment thoughtlessly
engineered for cars reminds me of the web surfer's plight in an
environment whose "streets" are being engineered for rootless commerce.
Just as principles of safety (for cars) were built into the asphalt
streets and highways, so also there is a desperate search on the Net today
for mechanisms of security and trust.  Of course, as others have noted,
trust in this case is at least as ambiguous as the safety of roads.  We
enable "trusted transactions" online by implementing protective measures
that are necessary precisely because real trust is lacking.  Little
thought has been given to the consequences of such a massive shift of
society's business from contexts of trust to contexts of distrust.

But back to Kunstler's story.  If Riverside and its kin never developed
proper civic centers, it was because

   they were not properly speaking civic places.  That is, they were not
   towns.  They were real estate ventures lent an aura of permanence by
   way of historical architecture and picturesque landscaping.  They had
   not developed organically over time, and they lacked many civic
   institutions that can only develop over time.  They were a rapid
   response to a closely linked chain of industrial innovations:  steam
   power, railroads, and the factory system.  More, these suburbs were a
   refuge from the evil consequences of those innovations -- from the
   smoke, the filth, the noise, the crowding, the human misery -- built
   for those who benefited from industrial activities.

For all that, many suburbs were, before the coming of the auto, "lovely
places to live:  green, tranquil, spacious" -- and only a short train ride
from the city.  "Teenagers' access to the city was as easy as the adults'
and a driver's license was not required to get there".

Kunstler summarizes the early, nineteenth-century suburbs this way:

   In places like Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Brookline, Massachusetts ...
   the fortunate few could enjoy the dream of an achieved Arcadia
   completely insulated from the industrial economy that made it possible.
   It was an artificial way of life in an inorganic community that
   pretended above all other virtues to be "natural".  It drew wealth out
   of the cities and dedicated that wealth to private pleasure-seeking,
   returning little in the way of civic amenity.  It was nice while it
   lasted, but it didn't last long in its classic form.  Its own
   popularity killed it.

   When successive waves of land developers came along and gobbled up the
   surrounding countryside, they destroyed the rural setting that had
   provided all the charm.  When the automobile entered the scene it
   became, in Leo Marx's apt phrase, "the machine in the garden", and made
   a mockery of the suburban ideal.  Afterward, all the elements that had
   gone into creating an illusion of dreamy timelessness -- the rambling
   wooded streets, the fanciful houses with their storybook turrets and
   towers, the deep lawns and elaborate gardens -- were unmasked as mere
   stagecraft.  They had stopped time for little more than half a century.
   Pretending to be places of enduring value, the American suburbs had
   proved to be made of nothing more lasting than parcels of real estate.

New zoning regulations were designed to protect real estate values in such
suburbs.  In conjunction with the automobile's arrival, they would help to
create socially one-dimensional communities.  "Never had the upper class
so systematically separated itself from the rest of society" (a phenomenon
we see repeating itself on a still grander scale in Silicon Valley, with
its astronomical real estate prices).  While the house itself "became a
kind of factory for the production of comfort", there was little room for
tradespeople because suburbs had no economies of their own.  "This was
intrinsic to their charm.  Economic activity remained behind in the city
and workers stayed there with it, near their work."

   Segregation by income would become a permanent feature of suburbia,
   long after servants were replaced by household appliances.  Factory
   workers would eventually get suburbs of their own, but only after the
   rural character of the countryside was destroyed.  The vast housing
   tracts that were laid down for them had all the monotony of the
   industrial city they were trying to flee and none of the city's
   benefits, nor any of the countryside's real charms.


Selling the Automobile
----------------------

The automobile's contribution to this development makes a fascinating and
instructive story.  The electric streetcar ("trolley") and the auto
appeared on the scene at roughly the same time, between 1890 and 1915.
But whereas Americans' infatuation with the auto was immediate and long-
lasting, the streetcar fell victim to aggressive public policies that left
it unable to compete.  It was the auto that captured the aura of the "new
economy".

With the Detroit assembly lines manufacturing over a million vehicles per
year, "politicians and planners soon began a massive restructuring of
American cities to accommodate the growing ranks of middle-class
motorists".  As is the case today with information technologies, many
vested interests were at work in this restructuring.  Land developers --
poised to lay down suburb after suburb around every American city as the
new roads radiated outward -- joined gasoline dealers, tire makers,
realtors, and car dealers in dominating local planning boards and lobbying
for the auto.

The lobbying wasn't always subtle.  Between 1925 and 1950 General Motors
used its financial muscle to buy up and then dismantle more than one
hundred trolley lines across the country.  When, eventually, a federal
grand jury indicted the company for criminal conspiracy in its destruction
of Los Angeles streetcar lines, the fine of $5000 equaled the net profit
on the sale of five Chevrolets.  (Don't look for even token fines when it
comes to the way high-tech corporations are gutting the nation's
educational system in favor of consumer conditioning for their future
customers and vocational training for their future employees.)

Corporate chicanery aside, the automobile's triumph was achieved at
tremendous public cost.  Already under President Hoover, a commission
concluded that the rise of local taxes between 1913 and 1930 was primarily
owing to the automobile.  Huge sums of money were required to build new
roads and re-pave old cobbled city streets.

   Chicago spent $340 million on street-widening alone between 1910 and
   1940.  The new low-density auto suburbs required expensive sewer and
   water lines to be laid before the new homes were sold -- meaning
   that the carless urban working class had to pay for the new
   infrastructure that the car-owning middle class would enjoy.  Police
   forces were motorized and many new officers hired specifically to
   control increased traffic.  Stoplights by the thousands had to be
   installed.  But perhaps the greatest cost to the public was one that
   can't be quantified in dollars:  the degradation of urban life caused
   by enticing the middle class to make their homes outside of town.  It
   began an insidious process that ultimately cost America its cities.

Given this historical tale, it is dumbfounding to see the urgent resolve
of government agencies today to grow the Internet as an end in itself.
"We've got to make the Internet faster", the chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission recently remarked, echoing the earlier and
equally blindered imperative to build faster roads.  If those roads sucked
life out of cities and led to the "geography of nowhere", what will be the
consequences of our own, much more radical attempt to transfer the entire
range of social institutions into the nowhere of cyberspace?

It's not that we can't find positive potentials in the new information
technologies.  The problem, rather, is that we have devoted vast, heavily
subsidized, and purely technical resources to throwing up the
infrastructure as an end in itself.  "Let the institutions adapt to the
new landscape or else die out", we say with smug confidence in the gospel
of technological progress.  But the only healthy approach is the reverse
of this:  our loving attention to the evolutionary necessities of this or
that institution should be what determines the technical landscape.


VA Mortgages and Interstate Highways
------------------------------------

The automobile and the associated development of suburbs helped to power
the economic boom of the 1920s.  But eventually a cycle of overproduction
of consumer products set in, fueled by paper profits from the inflated
stocks of companies that could no longer rationally grow, and exacerbated
by an increasing income disparity between blue collar workers -- few of
whom could afford a new house in the suburbs and a car to drive there --
and the wealthy classes awash in capital from the economic boom.

The Great Depression brought most of the economy to a standstill.  But not
highway building.  As part of the effort to put people back to work,
federal relief agencies spent four billion dollars on road building.
Comments Kunstler, "Back East, where most Americans still lived, the car
was regarded as a means of `recovery'.  The 1920s boom had cemented the
idea in the American psyche that the best economy was an explosive
technocentric economy."

While it was urgently building and repairing roads, the federal government
also tackled the housing problem.  The new Federal Housing Administration
(FHA) revolutionized home-buying by making credit terms easy.  At the same
time, it set the rules for qualification, favoring new houses -- "the ones
being built by those construction workers called back on the payroll".

   These new houses tended to be located outside the dense cities, because
   during the Depression vacant land on the periphery was very cheap.  The
   kinds of houses that the FHA frowned upon were those in the cities:
   old houses with leaky plumbing, jammed into narrow lots on crowded
   streets, inhabited in some cases by immigrants or, increasingly,
   African-Americans.  Houses like these were losers from the FHA point of
   view and the agency wouldn't guarantee mortgages on them

Despite these federal programs, the problem of excess capacity kept the
economy suffering until the Second World War finally pulled it out of the
doldrums.  After the war, the cycle of subsidies was repeated, with the
new Veterans Administration joining forces with the FHA to make the
mortgage payments on suburban houses lower than the rent on a typical city
apartment.  Under new federal tax rules, mortgage interest became
deductible.  Given such subsidies, "the American Dream of a cottage on its
own sacred plot of earth was finally the only economically rational
choice."

   Whatever its shortcomings as a place to live, the suburban subdivision
   was unquestionably a successful product.  For many, it was a vast
   improvement over what they were used to.  The houses were spacious
   compared to city dwellings, and they contained modern conveniences.
   Air, light, and a modicum of greenery came with the package.  The main
   problem with it was that it dispensed with all the traditional
   connections and continuities of community life, and replaced them with
   little more than cars and television.

And so the automobile industry "boomed like never before", entering what
Kunstler refers to as its high Baroque age.

   I'll pass over the questions of styling and merchandising that
   adumbrate the American-Love-Affair-with-the-Car myth, except to suggest
   that if Americans loved their cars, perhaps it was because the machines
   allowed them to escape from reality -- which raises the more
   interesting question: Why did America build a reality of terrible
   places from which people longed to escape?

   By the mid-fifties, the Great Enterprise of suburban expansion began to
   run up against apparent limits to its growth.  Existing highways could
   not accept ever-greater volumes of traffic if the build-out continued
   apace.  But if the build-out stopped, the whole economy would nose-dive
   again, since it now was the economy.  Using public works as an
   economic pump-primer was no longer a partisan political issue ... for
   now both parties understood the stakes.  The solution to the looming
   crisis was the interstate highway system.

The plan called for 41,000 miles of new expressways.  It would become the
largest public works project in the history of the world, devouring as
much steel and concrete each year as a hundred cities.  One of the major
political justifications:  "The new expressways would ease the evacuation
of cities during a nuclear attack".

Here, at some length, are Kunstler's summarizing remarks:

   The new superhighways created tremendous opportunities for land
   development in the remote hinterlands of big cities.  An unthinkably
   long commute on old country roads now seemed reasonable on the freeway.
   So up went more raised ranches and the new split-levels.  Each of the
   thousands of new highway interchanges begged for commercial
   exploitation.  Up went shopping strips and the new "convenience"
   stores.  Businesses of all descriptions fled the decaying urban cores
   and relocated on the fringe, as close to the on/off ramps as they could
   get.

   The cities, of course, went completely to hell.  The superhighways not
   only drained them of their few remaining taxpaying residents, but in
   many cases the new beltways became physical barriers, "Chinese walls"
   sealing off the disintegrating cities from their dynamic outlands.
   Those left behind inside the wall would develop, in their physical
   isolation from the suburban economy, a pathological ghetto culture.

   The distinction between the booming economy and what that boom yielded
   can't be stressed enough [a distinction we might well make in today's
   booming economy -- SLT].  The great suburban build-out generated huge
   volumes of business.  The farther apart things spread, the more cars
   were needed to link up the separate things, the more asphalt and cement
   were needed for roads, bridges, and parking lots, the more copper for
   electric cables, et cetera.  Each individual suburban house required
   its own washing machine, lawnmower, water meter, several television
   sets, telephones, air conditioners, swimming pools, you name it.
   Certainly, many Americans became wealthy selling these things, while
   many more enjoyed good steady pay manufacturing them.  In a culture
   with no other values, this could easily be construed as a good thing.
   Indeed, the relentless expansion of consumer goodies became
   increasingly identified with our national character as the American Way
   of Life.  Yet not everyone failed to notice that the end product of all
   this furious commerce-for-its-own-sake was a trashy and preposterous
   human habitat with no future.

Kunstler, whose book was published in 1993, expected a worsening economic
crunch because of the unsustainability of the great American build-out.
"The joyride is over", he said.  He thus failed to foresee the long boom
of the Nineties, with high-tech's heavily subsidized penetration of
society leading the way.


Losing Sight of Contexts
------------------------

Many of the parallels between the age of the automobile and the age of the
Net are evident on the face of Kunstler's narrative.  But here are a few
additional comments of my own:

** In today's "new economy", it is right to point to heavy government
subsidies and to the way business interests have been allowed to play into
society.  But it is unhealthy to forget that we are the people who do the
allowing, run the government, and carry out the work of the businesses.
As large and unconsidered as government subsidies of technology may be,
they are hardly more important than the support we all offer through our
infatuation with new gadgetry.

** Recall Kunstler's remark that suburbs begin as real estate ventures,
not civic places.  Today one can say much the same of the Net, where
government-subsidized commerce has been given carte blanche to hollow out
existing institutions and produce whatever new cultural landscape happens
to follow.  At this point we scarcely have a civic sector sufficiently
powerful to incubate the organic development of new institutions; the only
two recognized players on the stage are business and government.

Of course, many of the very early users of the Net did hold high hopes for
a new civic society of cyberspace.  But these hopes -- cast in the wildly
improbable terms of the settling of the Old West, encouraged by the
assumption that governments would dissolve, and nourished by faith in the
power of the ubiquitous digital Word to conjure "emergent" evolutionary
miracles -- were hopes such as could inspire only rootless engineers,
isolated from sentient society and quarantined in their gray cubicles.

The growth of the "third sector" -- non-governmental organizations,
nonprofits in general, and volunteer activities -- is a promising
development.  For the most part, however, these organizations still seem
more enchanted by technology than mindful of its potentials for
undermining their own agendas.  But that's another article.

** One can imagine a rough parallel to the complaints today about the
"digital divide".  It's as if an early automobile activist, concerned
about protecting the lives of the urban poor, campaigned for universal
access to cars.  There might have been a healthy impulse in this, but it
could only have worsened things if the impulse were not radically modified
by an awareness of the ways the automobile was re-shaping society.  After
all, instead of subsidies to make driving easier for the poor, it might
have been better to penalize the use of the automobile by the wealthy, if
only to reflect its actual costs to society.  In a similar vein, Richard
Sclove, founder of the Loka Institute, has proposed discriminatory taxes
on e-commerce to help counter its damage to civil society.

** The core problem brought out by Kunstler's narrative -- and even more
by the surging power of high tech today -- is the reversal alluded to
above:  We are a culture obsessed by new technical capabilities for their
own sake, rather than the worthwhile activities and institutions that all
technical capabilities presumably exist to support.  Our own activities
are conceived by the technician as mere "applications" that help to
establish the new technology, which is more and more developed as an end
in itself by people for whom this strictly technical working out of
possibilities is their life's work.

This, of course, is how it can happen that young kids just out of college
(if that) end up writing software that redefines the daily routine in one
field of work after another.  The redefinition rarely grows out of the
deepest wisdom at work in the practice being redefined -- the kid in the
cubicle most likely knows almost nothing about the practice, and certainly
has not spent a lifetime working in that field to discover its potentials
and problems.  It's true, however, that with every new generation of
software he does know more about the field, because it is progressively
being reduced to the terms of his own computer programs -- much as the
social landscape has progressively been reduced to the terms of the
automobile.

Somehow, we've got to find a way to situate ourselves in meaningful,
rooted, stable contexts -- at least rooted and stable enough for us to work
on them.  Then we can begin to develop the art of assessing technological
possibilities within these contexts.  One way to know when we've let go of
this challenge is to note the point where we find ourselves thinking
narrowly of problems to be solved rather than paths to walk or vocations
to live.  The engineering genius behind the automobile and highway system
solved innumerable problems along the way, but did not necessarily give us
places to live.

Related articles:

** "The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers" in NF #100.

** "Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (Part 3)" in NF #68.  This article looks
   at the reduction of commerce to a numbers game, devoid of any connection
   to the kind of civic value Kunstler speaks about here.


Goto table of contents


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                              CORRESPONDENCE

Education Includes the Transmission of Attitudes
------------------------------------------------

Response to:  "The New, Soulless University?" (NF-104)
From:  Klaus Rieckhoff (k_rieckhoff@sfu.ca)

In reading about "The New, Soulless University?" I was reminded of my
lifelong concern about the neglected if not completely forgotten dimension
of education:  the transmission of attitudes.  While the educational
literature about the transmission of content is extensive, I rarely find
mention of the importance of passing on attitudes, i.e. modes of behaviour
related to the acquisition and use of knowledge.

While it is easy to pass on content by various media, the only effective
mechanisms for the transmission of attitudes in my experience is for
better or worse through role models and that is where direct human contact
is irreplaceable:  parents, neighbours, peers, and, of course, teachers.
They are the only "real" role models, whereas TV and other media only
provide essentially "phony" role models that can nonetheless be also
effective in molding minds and characters, more often in undesirable ways
rather than otherwise.  The examples abound and everybody will be able to
relate stories about the good and the bad cases from their own life
experiences.  Yet we rarely, if ever, discuss the importance of this
dimension of learning and teaching.

Cheers!

Klaus E. Rieckhoff, Ph.D.,Ll.D.h.c.,
Professor Emeritus, Department of Physics,
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6


The Book's Weakness Is Also Its Strength
----------------------------------------

Response to:  "Education by Acronym" (NF-104)
From:  Wendell Piez (wapiez@mulberrytech.com)

Dear Steve,

In criticizing current initiatives to use electronic text encoding
("SCORM", "LMS", "CSF") to create a portable and context-free, packaged
"education", you remark on the technology 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.

Although book-technology undeniably brings with it, in my experience, just
the perils you identify, nonetheless it remains a critical element in a
true, vital education that is engaged with the contemporary world.  The
weakness of the book is also its strength:  ironically and necessarily, it
has always been the function and capacity of art to aspire to a condition
of universality, by creating an internal self-consistency and self-
awareness that can lift it out of immediate context.

This is, of course, a fiction at a deep level:  no art work, great or
mediocre, really works without a context.  But by imagining a world unto
itself, art also creates its own context, a world within a world -- so the
Sistine Chapel continues to astonish, and to proclaim a vision of humanity
that survives the world of its creation, even when we have forgotten the
references in the Sybillene figures painted on its surfaces.  If it
weren't for this capacity, works of art, including books and poems, would
never be able to sustain the myth that their external form ("the
compilation of words") is what's powerful, even isolated from the relation
between book, reader and world that (as you know) is the real ground and
source of their energy.  It should also be stressed that such works are
always products of an intense engagement with the greater world -- never
the results of mere book-knowledge.

Great educators know this, and are careful to assemble the best works
available to students, relevant to those students, capable of providing a
shared context for students to share insights among themselves, of evoking
passions while engaging reason.  A context is created and sustained,
enriching and illuminating the "real-world" concerns that students
inevitably face in their own lives.

In principle, I see no reason why electronic media formats cannot contain
the same "charge."  In fact, I think occasional passages and issues of
NetFuture evidence this -- and I have seen issues of NetFuture making the
e-mail rounds months and even years after their original composition.

Yet my experience also suggests that the isolating tendency of digital
electronic media (also a topic of NF #104) tend to mitigate against this
context-creating and sustaining power.  (And I don't need to argue this
particular point -- I've been around the track and had to assimilate both
positive and negative aspects of on-line experience.)  Again, it's nothing
about the technologies in themselves, so much as it is in the way they are
designed, deployed and put to use, the intentions and expectations they
express and cultivate.

So if I were teaching from NetFuture, I'd want to print out copies, have
the students read the issue (out loud and together if possible), and talk
about it in a group discussion.  If I couldn't do this -- maybe I was
designing an on-line curriculum -- I'd focus, as you do, on making my
presentation both self-contained and open-ended enough so that the student
would be freely able to discover a meaningful context for her or himself.
I am in complete agreement that without that, online "education" is doomed
to be nothing but technical instruction -- leaving students to learn
harder lessons a harder way.

Best regards,
Wendell Piez

(PS: FWIW, and for full disclosure -- I'm writing this while sitting on a
bed in a hotel room in the heart of Silicon Valley, where I'm teaching XML
to employees of a major high-technology company.  It's the right thing to
be doing, I believe -- but it's walking the razor's edge.)

Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285

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

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2000 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #105 :: April 18, 2000

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