Computers are everywhere in society. And through the current efforts to connect a whole society to a national - and later worldwide - data 'super highway', computers are about to transform jobs, human relationships and communication habits. While the industry supports this idea, only few think about the negative influence on society coming along with a digital 'global village', children being educated by computers and human relations and experiences depending on computer screens (1). This is what this book is about.
The book has 25 chapters, and a three-part appendix, filling about 450 pages. The chapters are divided into four main parts:
This text will summarize the main parts of the book and evaluate it in the 'Final Remarks' section. Numbers in parentheses like '(1)' are footnotes.
In the first chapter - a preface where the author
mentions most
of the topics he will discuss in later parts of the book - the central
question is: "Will human ideals survive the Internet?"
The author is concerned about the confusion of human qualities and technical
capabilities and about the impact of computer mediated multimedia
communication on personality. 'Scattering' is what he calls the
superficial attitude of receiving as much 'input' as possible to one's senses
but not reflecting about it. Analogies to television zapping or driving cars
out of pure boredom are made. The computer screen as a primary source of
'world experience' is set equivalent to a complete loss of freedom:
"...all of Cyberspace ... is available through this
small window on my desk. ...until recently most windows mediating the
world to us in such a restrictive fashion had steel bars in them. Not
many welcomed the prison [in the way the computer windows are
welcomed]." (p.15)
People's attitude towards computers and the way computer use is
currently promoted by its advocates is the focus of part one. Obviously
Talbott knows Neil Postman's Technopoly - he writes about the
influence of a technology on it's users (2).
Personal responsibility for computer use is what humans should develop
in face of the machine - developing the discipline to be a human and not
a biological input device.
Talbott faces the vision of a 'network community' with pessimism. Why should
humans enter a paradise of understanding and tolerance just because they are
connected by a communication network? And why would a networked world -
run by the same people that didn't fight all the misery in the
pre-networked world - be better just by being on the network, leaving the
homeless at least with the ability to communicate to humans far away
while he starves (chap. 6)?
The promise of freedom through free access to information processing is
one of the biggest visions of the networked age. But Talbott is sceptical
and states: freedom is being, not doing. Turning the world
into a nice place needs a certain state of mind, not a state of
technical communication (chap. 7).
Complex technical systems sometimes reduce freedom by turning into systems
that seem to have a life of their own without a controlling power. This
is what Talbott calls 'Things that run by themselves'. Society's rush
towards computer connectivity is such a 'thing': many connect to the
network even without the need to do so because many others do.
Talbott suggests to playfully explore and evaluate the computer
technology and mentions the risks of participating without a need to do so:
"I would not look toward businesses that leap into a market opportunity
just because it's there - letting themselves grow explosively as the
opportunity allows, until the whole market suddenly collapses (as tends
to happen when you are dealing with artificially created 'needs') or
changes its character." (p.102).
The 'global village' is questioned in chapter 9. What is a village
culture? And what will happen to cultures that are not compatible with
computers or that simply don't have computers? Talbott suggests that they
will be assimilated into a technological imperialism, forcing the world's
cultures to fit into the western computer culture.
Computer application at the workplace do not only increase efficiency but
can lead to increase the lack of communication between
employees or workgroups. The reader is presented an example where employees
of a workgroup increased productivity through using a computer-based,
anonymous discussion group, yielding a "lack of intimidation"
between the participants (p.117).
Talbott argues that here is an obvious human to human communication problem
that is solved through computers by isolating the humans - not by bringing
them closer together.
Part one's conclusion is, in short: be awake, think for yourself, don't
do things because others do them. Talbott says: humans seem to have a
certain preference for mechanical procedures - and the computer is the most
powerful tool to reduce human thinking to a sequence of mechanical
procedures (p.132f).
Part two covers the issues of computer-based education in the age of
hypermedia networks. Talbott examines the much-promoted opportunity for
children to communicate with children in other countries using the
Internet.
Global understanding, tolerance and breaking down cultural barriers are
expected from Internet-based education. But the network communication
experience is not necessarily applied to personal relationships by the
children, as a teacher running a communications project at a school is
quoted: "...I have yet to see any of the ...students, who spent weeks
'talking' with students in Kuala Lumpur, say so much as a word to the
Southeast Asian students [who are their schoolmates]..." (p.140).
The author fears the further undermining of the human teacher. In his
opinion, human interaction is the only useful way to learn about humans.
He doesn't want computers to be banned from education, but he wants
students to have a base of real-world experiences before they enter
'Cyberspace' - to enable them to see the differences between the natural
and the artificial world.
Talbott draws parallels to television science and nature education
programs by presenting modern people's frustration when joining
guided nature trips where the animals just don't show up to 'perform' like
they do on television programs. The lack of real nature experience and
expectations to see the television highlights lead to this.
High abstraction levels are another problem of image based education:
being presented with images of rotating 'billard-balls' as a model for
molecules, how many humans actually think of molecules as tiny balls? The
solution according to Talbott is to teach imagination, phantasy and real
experience to children first to enable them to understand the abstraction
as an abstraction. Computer models are compared to Lego blocks: they
can be used to build a lot of nice things, but the 'atoms' of the Lego world
are mere blocks, very abstracted from the various different components
real world and nature objects are made of.
The conclusion of part two is that children need real experience and
human contacts to be able to face a world filled with artificial,
abstract images. Children need to experience the 'spirit' of things, they
must not study dead facts to become a creative human being.
Part three deals with words - the way they are produced, processed and
received electronicaly. When producing words on a word processor - the
author observes - humans enter a hypnotic state of mind (3), where they produce words without reflection or
thought taking place before writing. The 'detached word' is mentioned as
a symptom of the age of word-processing: due to the ease of
copy-and-paste, earlier thoughts are copied or modified and the
context around them is matched to the copied blocks instead of writing out
new thoughts that match the context.
Confusion of 'information', 'wisdom', 'knowledge'
and 'logic' usually appears when the advocates of the digital
future speak. Talbott asks, what happend if the amazed 'netsurfers' were
sent to a huge library: "Would there, in these surroundings, be the
same, breathless investigation of every room and shelf, the same shouts
of glee at finding this collection of art prints or that provocative
series of essays or these journalistic reports on current events?"
(p.195f). Talbott suggests that today's worshippers of technology have
the severe misconception that the possession of huge amounts of
organized data - called information - automatically(4)
leads to knowledge, intelligence and wisdom (p.199).
The loss of knowledge that lies in the gaps between keywords when
storing on computers is covered as well as the promise of more power for
the individual (which implies the individual has to give up his or her
humanity first to receive a certain amount of digital power).
The emptiness of mechanical words is one of the main concerns in part
three. Being exposed to language completely detached from human beings
(like books, radio, television) humans lose the word's content - the
meaning. Parallel to the words becoming mechanical, humans personalize
machines and lose their ability to listen (and reflect). This is -
according to the author - indicated by browsing usenet news articles in
a very superficious way, filtering electronic mail messages with
logic-based tools, answering electronic messages immediately instead of
reflecting them. The communication has become important, it's not the
content any more (chap. 19).
This part - representing almost one third of the book - presents
the thoughts of Owen Barfield regarding words, meanings, the shift of
meanings, human conciousness and the mind. Sometimes hard to read and
quickly changing subjects, Talbott quotes various pagagraphs from
Barfield's work and draws the analogies to the computer related topics he
covered in the former three parts.
The human's shift from seeing the world - from the view of being
contained within the medieval world to 'seeing in perspective' (being
an object in between other objects within a space of unrelated objects)
illustrates the powerful influence of technology and science on the
consciousness of humans. The danger of reducing human mind's skills to
digital logic and the machine's skills are covered in a
large section of part four. The various efforts in Artificial
Intelligence are reviewed under the topic of mechanizing human behaviour as
well as the question whether user interfaces improved during
the last years or whether the users rather continued their descent to
computer's level is analyzed.
Talbott points out the universal potential of the computer: to either improve
human life or to make it worse. He manages to convince the reader that
it lies in man's hands to make the desicion to use the technology in the
right way and advocates there is still time to do the change from
unconcious to concious computer use.
The final chapter - 'What was this book about?' summarizes Talbott's
conclusion: to transcend computers, humans must ask
questions, change themselves, transform their environment and fight the
human urge to follow algorithmic patterns of thought and action instead
of thinking new thoughts. Exploring new thoughts and suffering are
necessary for human development while following algorithms prevents
development, concludes the author.
The three-part appendix offers further excerpts from Owen Barfield's work, some thoughts about virtual reality and the new views or conciousnesses it could introduce and finally a chapter about education without computers, introducing the author's favourite school system: the Waldorf school. It does not focus on computers, but offers some additional details to material that was presented in the former chapters.
This book is a unique source of thoughts about the dangers of
computerization. It shows how unnoticed and silent the unreflected
use of computers reduces human skills to the machine's capacity. It
covers an important area of computer application that was left blank in
computer literature up to now - not even the famous media
critics like Neil Postman or Noam Chomsky yet dedicated books to the
computerized society. The huge bibliography invites further reading on
this subject - which in the case of Owen Barfield's work is absoultely
necessary because part four is too compact and rich in various of
Barfield's subjects that it needs more reflection.
Talbott is absolutely right to question some of today's movements towards
computers. Reading this book is a must for every person working in the
field of computer education, new media or networking. It will change the
reader's view of the subject from a only-positive to a more critical view.
O'Reilly's displayed some of the human qualities Talbott advocates by
publishing this book. And designing the book cover similar to the
over-advertised Windows'95 operating system's sales box is for sure no
coincidence.