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[The following two articles appear in Issue #85 of Netfuture, which also includes other material. The full issue is available at http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture.]
I'm Glad the Net `Corrodes' My Culture (Marcelo
Rinesi)
I prefer cyberspace to Corrientes
Who Are We Without Our Technologies? (Muktha Jost)
Culture connects us with timeless questions
[In this and the following article you will find striking statements by an Argentinian youth eager to escape his own culture via the Net, and an (East) Indian immigrant to the U.S. who has had little choice but to leave her culture behind. When Marcelo Rinesi sent me his brash and likable assault, full of youthful energy, I immediately thought of Muktha Jost. As part of a project with an Iowa State University class that NETFUTURE's Lowell Monke was teaching, Muktha had entered into a little correspondence with me, and I was impressed by the rather more nuanced and anguished accommodation she had been trying to reach with her adopted culture. Hers, I now thought, was very likely the kind of place to which Marcelo's mostly healthy explorations would eventually lead him. So I asked Muktha to write some comments in response to Marcelo -- a "letter from his future", if my surmise is correct. For reasons that should be clear, I opted not to impose on Marcelo, a non-native English speaker, the usual editorial criteria for NETFUTURE articles. His piece is reproduced essentially just as received. The essays he refers to can be found at www.oreilly.com/~stevet/meditations/. I imagine it would be well to hear further from both these readers as time goes by. SLT]
I've enjoyed and learned from your intelligent writing; your arguments even forced me to accept that the Net is a corrosive cultural force, against my previous opinions. Thanks for that. But, with all due respect, I'd like to ask: so what?I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.
Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).
It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty. And values, too. It verges on the pathetic, but while my school was trying to teach me low-profile traditionalism, conservadurism and respect for authority (no matter how wrong), I was learning curiosity, respect for differences, admiration of talent well used, a hate of war, injustice and stupidity, and emotional and intellectual honestity from .... Star Trek, the hacker mythology (the traditional one Minsky, Paper, Knuth, Von Neumann not the current criminal clowns) and good Sci-Fi. How could I swap a culture that cheers intelligence, curiosity, talent, debate, humour and weirdness for a culture that enforces traditionalism, blatant media manipulation, economical profit by cheating and plain non-thinking? Sure, not all or most of the Net's material is any good, but the mere existence of good things is enough. And I don't think the culture I describe is unique to my city....
Again, I want to thank you for your essay, because it was reading it that I finally understood how the Net is culturally corrosive. But what you seemed to find negative, is exactly what I love about it. Maybe there is a non-zero amount of adolescent bashing on all this I am 19 :); probably a lot of young people love or would love the chance of choosing and, in a certain degree, if they are not too brainwahsed, engineering their own culture. The Net simply gives us a huge amount of raw material to do it, and a certain freedom from geographical and chronological constraints (not only nobody knows you are a dog: nobody knows you are "too young to understand it"...a saying that I heard WAY too often during my childhood).
Warm regards, Marcelo
PS: While this was waiting in my "Unsent Messages" box, I read your essay about Tinkerers. Again, I agree with you (althought this time I was already aware of it), but I have to oppose my statistically insignificant but personally relevant own experience. I have what I think are meaningful goals: I want a peaceful, prosper world, where physical well- being is an effective rigth and checking the govs and corps the global hobby. I want to state and answer as many good questions as I can, about everything, everywhere. I want space colonies and exploration. I want informed, intelligent democracies. I want the religious and nacionalistic fanatics universally mocked about. I want to live for centuries, healthy, sexy and working. I want access to every book ever written, every poem and every painting. I want to do six impossible things before breakfast, and then ... , sorry, I couldn't resist :). And none of those goals came from the traditional, socially cohesive, and personal contact-oriented, mind you culture around me (motto of the country: "Get a job. Any. And don't get caught"). I developed them before getting on-line, but it has been a lot of help for me to find out whole lots of other people that share my dreams and work towards them.
Marcelo Rinesi
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto
Episkopos of the Discordian Society
[I asked Marcelo to send just a little more information about his immediate context and occupations. He replied with the following note. SLT]For the factual data, I am just finishing my summer holidays and resuming my struggle for a maths degree at the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste. The rest is either too personal, too nasty or too intermitent to be worth publishing. In any case, I'm still struggling with the old problem of growing and finding who I am, what is this place, and what the hell I am doing here [(c) Vonnegut, kind of] so between this letter and the last one, you know as much as anybody about me, including yours truly :).
But don't despair. Discordianism is far more interesting than myself, and far more interesting than anything I can tell you about it. If you will ever trust anything I say, trust this: go to Yahoo, search for Discordianism, or search as you prefer for a text called "Principia Discordia". If you find it less than amusing, weird and almost thought- provoking, tell me, and I'll print and eat my words (isn't it wonderful the way the Net sometimes makes literal what was once rethorical? eat that, Negroponte!) BTW, maybe you already knew it, it didn't strinke you as interesting, or both, but if you have to put anything at all about me, put at least that I love and belive the latin phrase in my something like that (can't be sure, my latin amounting to nihil, and my english being one of the WaReZ I got from the Net :)
Thanks again for your interest, but also thanks for all the thinking I had to do about what I am doing now to answer your questions. Hope you gain from this as much as I.
Best wishes, Marcelo
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WHO ARE WE WITHOUT OUR TECHNOLOGIES?
Muktha Jost
(mbjost@iastate.edu)Marcelo,
I can think of many answers to your rhetorical "So what?" if the Net is a corrosive cultural force, but the most compelling one is about you and just you. Don't you care to find out who you are, after you've peeled away layers and layers of conditioning that both the native and technological cultures have wrapped you in?
I was born and raised in India for a full 24 years, and nothing I say can fully explain the richness of that life. As a young adult, however, and quite naturally so, I had nothing but resentment toward that culture. My first experiences here in the U.S. seemed to soothe all those angry tremors -- no living in the mercy of the bureaucracy, no long lines, no bribes, no "Eve teasing," no dust, no controlling patriarchs, no fighting the traffic for hours, no human waste to duck in the sidewalks, no beggar children to remind you of the pain and embarrassment of hunger, no voluptuous movie stars and dogma-spewing politicians staring down from billboards and seducing those poor of currency, imagination, and values.
But it didn't take long for that same critical outlook that tipped the scales against my native culture to begin to see the glaring flaws in this culture too.
My field is instructional technology, mostly computers in education, especially kindergarten through grade 12. The image that is most common today in my field is this: the camera from behind and above the computer focusing on the face of a child, maybe two, with an almost ethereal glow as they fix their gaze on the computer monitor. A couple of teachers stand behind them beaming with pride as their prodigies contemplate and "learn" from their "cognitive partner", the computer. This reminds me of the scene in a Hindu temple. As the priest offers your prayers and worldly gifts to the idol in the dark sanctum to the sound of bells and mantras and to the smell of Jasmine flowers, followers bow in long gender lines and pray most publicly with a reverence that matches our belief and faith today in the power of computers to educate our children.
You know what, Marcelo, as my friend says, the power of the computer to educate the child is as vacuous as the powers of the Wizard in the "Wizard of Oz" to get Dorothy and her friends back to Kansas. Neither my intuition, nor my insights through observations or the numerous research findings that I have to read ever lead me to conclude that computers can significantly help children learn, with the exception of children with special needs. On the other hand, my observations point me to all the vested interests of the software and hardware manufacturers who influence educational technology policy (toward more computers in schools) at all levels.
I was once in a classroom where a professor announced to a group of 150 undergraduates that she did not believe in the educational value of "Morph" software until she witnessed this in a second grade classroom. She then proceeded to show the work of a second grader who morphed herself into Barbie!
So, Marcelo, if you ask me SO WHAT? This is why. It robs you of your thinking, especially your critical thinking ability. I am convinced that young people have to learn this crucial skill from a community of real -- not virtual -- people.
There is no image that is crystal clear, no truth that is indisputable, no face that is totally beautiful (except my mother's), and no detail that is completely descriptive of the social milieu that I grew up in. It was all pretty much a tangled mass of chaos much too complex and bewildering for me as a child, but I learned much from that. I didn't know it then, but I had a great childhood. Lots of bright moments, lots of dark ones, lots of life, lots of death, lots of laughter, lots of pain. In all, a decent exposure, somewhat like the combination we look for to develop the image in a photograph. I learned much from the warm Hindu home that I grew up in and the strong bonds it nurtured with my siblings, the Catholic school with the strict nuns, my Muslim, Sikh, and Parsee friends, and the contradictions in my culture and in myself.
I learned from long summers of not having much to do. My siblings and I spent hours on the floor trailing ants to their "home," rerouting their path, and often getting bitten by them. Our "ant farms" and "bug palaces" were born out of our boredom and imagination, not out of a toy designer's day at work. Every month, on "Full Moon's Day" we sat on our terraces with a huge crowd of friends and family eating the very special dishes that were prepared for that occasion. After that, we would stretch out on colorful 'Jamukalams' and gaze at the star-filled sky as my Dad pointed out the major constellations. I preferred to stare at the awesome tropical moon and never learned as much as my siblings from that astronomy lesson. There was something so distant, so remote, and so tremendously overwhelming to be staring into space, but there was always some warm adult or child nearby to reach to -- and feel connected.
I learned from the people, and there were all kinds. The cousins were my favorite. There was no telling when they would show up, or when they would leave. A carload would descend unannounced and invade our space, our beds, our food, and our routine. To call it a din would be putting it mildly. They wore our clothes, called us names, broke our toys, but we generally had a good time and cried when they left. The carloads of caring hearts came especially in times of tragedy and need, and gave us numerous strengths to understand our sorrow. One set of those cousins visited us recently in Iowa. As, after all these years, we reminisced of the most childish tales, our children wondered at the bonds that were so evident and so swiftly revived.
Not always were our lives touched with kindness and love, not always were the punishments just. And when the chaos and contradictions and the controls got too much for me, I had only nature to run to, not a bright TV or computer monitor. Now, I am thankful for that because I learned immensely from the places and things. The guava, mango, neem and lemon trees in our backyard were my playmates many times. And the ocean. When I couldn't find an answer to my confusion from books or from people, or any acceptance to my weirdness, it was to the ocean that I went, and it never failed me. As I sat huddled by that huge blue reality that was sometimes foaming and sometimes calm, it felt like it could reach to me, and I sensed that the sea had some of the same emotions and restlessness that I did. It was there I learned that I don't have to understand everything, that to honor the mystery is to honor ourselves.
It was at home that I learned that real community is ridden with conflict, with the urgency of having to face and confront, with unexpected love, with unexpected values and with numerous possibilities. I know now that I must protect my children from all of the wonderful trappings of technology so they may look at each other and the moon; so they may fight with each other and learn how to resolve conflicts rather than be a passive sponge of violence and consumerism; so they don't fall into the well of safe 'online' communities that let us hear and understand only what we want to hear and understand. I hope instead they will be awed by a sea of human possibilities and struggles.
I am well aware that a lot of this is based on a very personal and subjective view of what education and life are all about. Your philosophical slant and love for peace, respect, curiosity, depth, and meaning caught my interest, but oddly enough, these are exactly the things that I find the Net snatching from me. Most of the time, though, this thieving is clandestine. For instance, this whole facade of equality on the Web. I am convinced it simply bypasses our differences and drugs us into thinking that there can be a world without racism, sexism, bigotry, discrimination, and oppression. All those are alive and well in every part of our lives, and in every part of the world, and unless we stop hiding behind those computer and TV monitors and face others, naked in our anger, frustrations, hurt, and sadness, we will do nothing to reduce the suffering caused by the inhuman acts of humans. The Net gives you the hope that there's a place you can go to where everyone is equal. When you need a haircut, though, you have to get off that highway to the cybermall and find your way out into the real world for a hairdresser. And when that hairdresser charges your white friend $17 for her haircut and $28 for yours so you won't come back (this really happened to me), how is the Net going to help you soothe your anger and hurt? Are you going to feel at peace with the world?
As for your laments about the traditional cultures, I think they are most valid. There is much in these cultures that restrains and chokes us, that mocks our youthful hopes and cheats our idealistic desires. There is a lot in history that can help us understand the idiosyncracies about our cultures, and maybe even come to terms with them, but history is last in the prioritized curriculum through which we learn. Math and science drive a global curriculum that has our children racing for the most lucrative jobs while leaders claim that history is "bunk." It is all too easy to feel choked by the postmodern problems of old cultures when we don't really know our own "stories." Understanding has to come before acceptance.
I would argue with you, however, about where you can find depth, meaning, understanding, and perhaps some peace. Remember, too, that only three percent of the world's population owns computers and fewer are connected to the Net. An understanding of the world and our place in it can only come from a struggle with a human context, not some technology-mediated half-reality. Here, I'll resort to the life of Leo Tolstoy who was regarded in the late nineteenth century as the greatest living writer. The superlatives that fill the writings about him come because of his struggles with a human context -- his own wealth, appearance, the poverty of his tenants, the merits of his enemies, the longing to educate children without dogma and theory, philosophical differences with his wife, and his well-meaning generosity that only led his tenants to the bottle.
Yet, you know what touches and inspires me the most about his life? At a point when he could have just gone on with life, he stopped and asked himself, "Who am I without all of this that is mine? This wealth, this conditioning, this way of thinking, this upbringing, who am I and what is my contribution to this world without all that?" It was only long after that pain and anguish that he embraced the teachings of Christ even though his interpretation bears little semblance to those of the TV preachers and pulpit-thumpers today.
I think there comes a time in our lives to ask ourselves "Who are we without all of this technology? Who are we without our corporate jobs, fast cars, stiff suits, fast food, designer sports clothes, answering machines, caller-ID, caller ID blocking, multiple e-mail accounts, lives on credit, mega malls, take-outs, buy-in, takeovers, cool stuff, f-words, Superbowls and flavored iMacs.
All those legendary philosophers that you mention are "with us" today because they asked the timeless soul question. In fact, that is where philosophy started -- with a yearning for the soul questions -- before science and technology gave us so many distractions. Yes, we need humor, but first to laugh at ourselves and how dependent we are on these toys of technology. Yes, we need peace, but mostly with ourselves and those we love. There is nothing global about the spiritual intimacy between two beings. It is local, contextual, and real. It cannot be captured in bits. You have to struggle to explain your culture to those who don't understand you. We have to dance in each other's shoes before we give up. We have to fight, argue, and talk. And most of all, try to understand. We can only love what we understand. When we give up on those around us in our own context, we lose a part of ourselves. We have no ties -- to ourselves, to those we could love and let love, or to a culture, any culture.
I am convinced that synthetic perfection without soul is possible on the Net and that is why it appeals to so many. Life itself isn't perfect; it never can be. It is our striving and struggle that can be perfect, but we are too much in denial to realize that. We'd much rather choose a semi- perfection than adopt lifestyle changes, or face others and ourselves. A cold mouse does not offer the warmth and affirmation of a human hand.
Ten years before he died, Tolstoy wrote in his journal:
I think of all the people I have loved, yet none can offer me the sympathy I need ... if only I could be little again and snuggle up to my mother as I imagine her ... she is my highest image of love, not cold divine love, but earthly, warm, motherly ... it is that for which my battered, weary soul is longing.
His mother died when he was two years old.
Muktha Jost
Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching
College of Education
Iowa State University
N131 Lagomarcino
Ames, IA 50011 (515) 294-3724 mbjost@iastate.edu
NETFUTURE is a freely distributed newsletter dealing with technology and human responsibility. It is published by The Nature Institute, 169 Route 21C, Ghent NY 12075 (tel: 518-672-0116). Postings occur roughly every couple of weeks. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst.
Copyright 1999 by The Nature Institute.
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CORRESPONDENCE
Re-thinking the World as Information
Response to: "Mark Pesce's Earth Toy" (NF-107) From: Michael Curry (curry@geog.ucla.edu)
Steve,
I found your piece on Mark Pesce's Earth Toy really interesting. I share your unease.
I've been working for a number of years on issues related to geographic information systems, including issues about privacy and more generally about the relationship between the GIS model of the world and the ways in which people think about the world, and the environment.
Pesce's piece strongly echoes a talk Gore gave in L.A. a few years ago, on what he termed "Digital Earth." Gore promoted the idea as an educational tool -- pick up the digital earth and manipulate it. He of course saw it as a tool for increasing environmental awareness; my own rather more pessimistic view is that it is yet another means for rethinking the world as simply information. And that "picking it up and manipulating it" is a model for thinking about the earth as something that one can truly control.
That talk was picked up by the GIS community as a sort of rallying cry, and has been often cited as a justification for amplifying the ties between GIS and digital libraries.
At the same time, Gore's talk looks backwards toward Gelernter's Mirror Worlds.
Best wishes,
MC
Michael R. Curry Professor, Department of Geography 1255 Bunche Hall University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90095
Voice 310-825-3122 Fax 305-425-0724 Web http://baja.sscnet.ucla.edu/~curry/
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
NetFuture is a freely distributed newsletter dealing with technology and human responsibility. It is published by The Nature Institute, 169 Route 21C, Ghent NY 12075 (tel: 518-672-0116). Postings occur roughly every couple of weeks. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst.
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 user contributions, and could not survive without them. For details and special offers, see http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/support.html .
Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:
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