roundtable: visions of Content

roundtable: visions of Content

visions of Content

Rick Crawford (crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu)
Wed, 22 Mar 1995 22:15:55 -0800 

Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 22:15:55 -0800
From: crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu (Rick Crawford)
Message-Id: <9503230615.AA17678@ivy.cs.ucdavis.edu>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: visions of Content


This is an important issue, and (as usual) we are not the first people
to recognize and attempt to address it.  Let's learn from offline 
knowledge:

First, to help deconstruct the dreams of computer romantics,
Langdon Winner identifies a complex of mistaken assumptions:
   "(1) people are bereft of information; (2) information is knowledge;
    (3) knowledge is power; and (4) increasing access to information
    enhances democracy and equalizes social power.  Taken as separate
    assertions and in combination, these beliefs provide a woefully
    distorted picture of the role of electronic systems in social life."
        --  Langdon Winner in "The Whale and the Reactor: A Search
            for Limits in an Age of High Technology,"  1986, p. 108


In the old days (check the date !-), this was called the Knowledge Gap:

    "If you do not have information to begin with, or know what new 
    information could be assembled, initial inferiority is bound to be 
    sharpened and perpetuated.  This *unequal bargaining position* will 
    affect all relations --- whether labeled aid, trade, investment,
    transfer of technology, technical assistance, or any other."
                     -- Hans Singer, 1975


    "Unequal access to *practical* information tends to be
    self-reinforcing, and over time, the inequality tends to grow."
         -- Oscar Gandy in "Beyond Agenda Setting:  Information Subsidies
                            and Public Policy", 1982

Here's a longer excerpt from a speech by Neil Postman:

----------------
Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and 
losers.

In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the
computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like
military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax
collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now
indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural
sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage
to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners,
teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers,
dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now
intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more
accessible to powerful institutions.  They are more easily tracked and
controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly
mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often reduced
to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They
are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations.
   [this stuff included in Gandy's term, Info *Subsidies*  -rick]
The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead
of teaching things that are more valuable to children.
In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers that they NEED
    [emph. added  -rick], which is why they are losers.

It is to be expected that the winners - for example, most of the
speakers at this conference - will encourage the losers to be
enthusiastic about computer technology.  That is the way of winners,
and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the
average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track
of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists.  They also tell them
that they can vote at home, shop at home, get all the information they
wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary.  They tell
them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly
neglecting to say from whose point of view or what might be the costs
of such efficiency.

Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the
wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal
relevance to the quality of the losers' lives but which are
nonetheless impressive.  Eventually, the losers succumb, in part
because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the masters of
a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The masters, of course,
come to believe this as well.  The result is that certain questions do
not arise, such as, to whom will the computer give greater power and
freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced?
----------------

The last word (for now) goes posthumously to Christopher Lasch:

    "Those wonderful machines that science has enabled us to construct
    have not eliminated drudgery, as . . . other false prophets so
    confidently predicted, but they have made it possible to imagine
    ourselves as masters of our fate.  In an age that fancies itself as
    disillusioned, this is the one illusion - the illusion of mastery
    that remains as tenacious as ever."
          -- historian Christopher Lasch in "The Revolt of the Elites"

-rick

Rick Crawford
<crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu>

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