THE MEDIA ARE FASCINATED BY THE NEWEST MEMBER OF THEIR group, the information superhighway, marveling at its apparently limitless potential. Cyberspace, virtual reality, the World Wide Web, five hundred channels of interactive television—what a brave new world this is to be. U.S. vice president Al Gore, a committed environmentalist, is also a strong supporter of the limitless benefits of the information superhighway.
But beneath the hype and techno-adulation, there are troubling questions. Theodore Roszak’s book The Cult of Information raised some of them:
For the information theorist, it does not matter whether we are transmitting a judgment, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are information.… Depth, originality, excellence, which have always been factors in the evaluation of knowledge, have somewhere been lost in the fast, futurological shuffle.… [T]his is a liability that dogs every effort to inflate the cultural value of information.… We begin to pay more attention to “economic indicators” than to assumptions about work, wealth and well-being which underlie economic policy.… The hard focus on information that the computer encourages must in time have the effect of crowding out new ideas, which are the intellectual source that generates facts.
Here is another take on the so-called benefits of information and the computer revolution from Allen D. Kanner and Mary E. Gomes, authors of The All-Consuming Self:
Priority is being given to the technology necessary for around the clock interactive shopping. Television sets are being transformed into electronic mail catalogues. The goal is to allow viewers to buy anything in the world, any time of day and night, without ever leaving their living rooms.
Clifford Stöll, author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, has been deeply immersed in the information network since its inception. His five modem-equipped computers are plugged into the info world, he surfs the Net regularly, and he loves his cyber-community. Nevertheless, he has profound misgivings about the technology:
They [computers] isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience.… [M]ore than half of our children learn about nature from television, a third from school and less than 10 percent by going outdoors.… [N]o computer can teach what a walk through a pine forest feels like. Sensation has no substitute.
Curious students who are excited about learning will take to computers as readily as they do to literature, history, and science. But Stöll reminds us that
isolated facts don’t make an education. Meaning doesn’t come from data alone. Creative problem solving depends on context, interrelationships, and experience. The surrounding matrix may be more important than the individual lumps of information. And only human beings can teach the connections between things.
We are surrounded by information and information technology. But they do not tell us what we need to know: how to live in balance with the natural systems of the planet. Ecological issues require a different kind of information: material we can use for long-term thinking, for seeing connections and relationships, and for acting in cautious, conservative ways.
Writing in the Dominican Quarterly, Philip Novak cautions that excessive information can have another very damaging effect: “Superabundant information is grand, until we understand that it can rob us of the peace that is our spiritual birthright. We have only recently realized our need to develop an ecological relationship with the natural world. Perhaps we must also realize our need for inner ecology, an ecology of the mind.”
Computers have been pushed as one of the great revolutionary hopes for education, and Steven Jobs, the fabled cocreator of the Apple computer, has been one of the strongest advocates of this notion. But even he has had second thoughts, according to an interview he gave to Wired magazine’s Gary Wolf in 1996:
I used to think that technology could help education.… I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve.… Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
The reason that computer technology fails to deliver on its expectations is that whereas information can be accessed in vast quantities and with great speed, education is about sifting through it, making sense of ideas and what we perceive. No computer can do that, as Alan Kay, one of the pioneers in personal computing, testified before Congress in 1995:
Perhaps the saddest occasion for me is to be taken to a computerized classroom and be shown children joyfully using computers. They are happy, the teachers and administrators are happy, and their parents are happy. Yet in most such classrooms, on closer examination I can see that the children are doing nothing interesting or growth-inducing at all! This is technology as a kind of junk food—people love it but there is no nutrition to speak of. At its worst, it is a kind of “cargo cult” in which it is thought that the mere presence of computers will somehow bring learning back to the classroom.
Or as Neil Postman said in the Utne Reader, “We have transformed information into a form of garbage.”
Even a big booster of the information revolution like former U.S. president Bill Clinton warns us, “In the information age, there can be too much exposure and too much information and too much sort of quasi-information.… There’s a danger that too much stuff cramming in on people’s minds is just as bad for them as too little, in terms of the ability to understand, to comprehend.”
In our infatuation with the seemingly wondrous possibilities the computer creates, we welcome it into the school only to find that it has become another vehicle for marketing opportunities. Marketing companies like Lifetime Systems design commercial packages to look like educational material, wrote David Shenk in a 1994 article for Spy magazine. The company points out the opportunities to prospective clients: “Kids spend 40 percent of each day in the classroom where traditional advertising can’t reach them. Now you can enter the classroom through custom-made learning materials created with your specific marketing objectives in mind. Communicate with young spenders directly, and through them, their teachers and family as well.”
The highly fragmented offerings in an ever increasing menu of television channels have been paralleled by a growing number of both news channels and news programs. Along with CNN, MSNBC, SKY, BBC World, and CBC Newsworld, we have the analogue of print tabloids in Hard Copy and Cops. As Shenk says:
The news-flash industry supplies us with entertainment, not journalism, and as such is part of the problem of information glut.… Our fundamental understanding of Bosnia or the stock market is not going to change, no matter how many news-bites we hear about them. To actually learn about the subject requires not a series of updates, but a careful and thoughtful review of the situation.
As the quality of air, water, and landscape degenerate from the assault of human activity, more and more of our fellow human beings find themselves in sprawling megalopolises. In cities we are distanced from the natural world, spending more and more time in search of stimulation in shopping malls, electronic games, and television. In lieu of the experiences of the real world, we now have all of the gut-wrenching, adrenalin-rush, sensory overload of “virtual reality.” The truly horrifying aspect of the cyber-world is that it appears to be better than the real world. After all, one can access the virtual world of sex and experience every kinky possibility without fear of contracting AIDS, feeling guilty, or being caught by one’s partner. We can take part in a gunfight, lose, and live to shoot again; race a car, crash, and walk away; or get blown up or beaten to a pulp without pain or injury. Who needs a real dangerous world when all of our sensations can be zapped to the max without risk?
During the ’70s, on a noon-hour television talk show, the host asked me, “What do you think the world will be like in a hundred years?” I replied, “Well, if there are still people around then, I think they’ll curse us for nuclear power and television.” The host did a double take and, ignoring my caveat about still being around, asked, “Why television?” My answer was as follows: “Well, Bob, you just asked me a pretty tough question. If I had answered, ‘Gee, I’ll have to think about that for a minute,’ and then proceeded to think without saying a word, you’d cut to a commercial in less than five seconds. Because television cannot tolerate dead space. It demands instant response. There’s no room for reflection or profundity. It’s not a serious medium.”
Reflecting now on that answer, I wouldn’t change my assessment. However, that response was given years before the multichanneled universe of cable, which demands even faster, snappier programming to keep our attention. The one element that the real world of nature requires for us to experience it is time. So the more our children experience nature through television and films, the more they will be disappointed when they encounter the real thing. Wild things don’t perform on cue. They are shy. Often they are active only at night or underground. Nature allows us only rare moments when there might be a flurry of activity. And the waiting makes the experience all the more satisfying when nature does reward us.