roundtable: Re: nonprofit culture

roundtable: Re: nonprofit culture

Re: nonprofit culture

Joseph Ransdell (BNJMR@ttacs.ttu.edu)
Thu, 17 Mar 1994 17:04:13 -0600 (CST) 

Date: Thu, 17 Mar 1994 17:04:13 -0600 (CST)
From: "Joseph Ransdell <BNJMR@ttacs.ttu.edu>" <BNJMR@ttacs.ttu.edu>
Subject: Re: nonprofit culture
To: roundtable@cni.org
Message-Id: <01HA319GB07M8Y5B0D@ttacs.ttu.edu>

Jayne Sebby says:

  -------------------------quote---------------------------------
  My prediction for NII?  It'll end up like the phone companies -- 
  everyone pays for the service and conference calls to specific parties
  will be the primary use (and a hell of a lot easier to make!).  If 
  people want to use them to disperse info to the general public, it'll 
  be either via a commercial format or in some version of cable's 
  community access channels (a great idea that flopped).  This is, of 
  course, assuming that everyone can receive every "road" but that's not
  guaranteed either.  After all, everyone can get almost all the info 
  they want at a public library, but how many can or want to go there?
  ---------------------unquote-----------------------------------

I think what Jayne says has some considerable plausibility, if the
function of the NII is simply to be that of making more information
available to more people in more different ways than before.  What
makes it exciting in prospect, though, is not that but rather that it
seems to promise a radical restructuring of our *communicational*
relationships, and with it an inescapable challenge of rethinking what
communication is. 

I wouldn't have the slightest interest in the NII myself if the only
promise it held forth was more information availability.  Apart from
special purposes we don't need more information in any general way,
and I see no reason to believe that even the more efficient
organization and distribution of information would in itself be of
help overall in improving the quality of human life.  For every gain
in efficiency there is a corresponding and very real possibility that,
on balance, we would be better off without the increase in control
implicit in it. 

When a human culture is as conspicuous in its inability to exercise
and teach self-control as this one is, where extreme exaggeration
shows itself in every way imaginable (catch the news tonight for the
latest mass murder, for example), more control is no solution:  an Uzi
machinegun is a very powerful instrument of control, but nobody could
suppose that we are better off than with the older machineguns which
it can outperform by an order of magnitude, whether fired by a
soldier, a policeman, or a gangster, or a solitary brooder. 

But communication, and particularly the bi-directional or
"interactive" type of communication which the new technologies hold
out as a promise, is another matter.  I won't elaborate on this
further here but only point out that this very message you are
presently reading, from someone you have never heard of with no 
political clout, is itself evidence of what this can mean when you
consider that it is occurring--and not something merely promised!--as
part of a social deliberation about policy in a nation of several
hundred million, in a world of billions of persons that will be
affected by it.  This is not a matter of mere information transferral
but of a radical change in the empowerment of persons. 

I suggest also that we can reassure ourselves that we are still
heading in the right direction if we accustom ourselves to raising the
question, at every critical juncture in our deliberations, of whether
the policy we are working to establish will or will not have the
effect of extending our communication and bringing others within it
noncoercively--which is, after all, just another way of describing
what it means to be a peacemaker. 

Thanks to Jayne for a very stimulating and level-headed observation. 

Joseph Ransdell
bnjmr@ttacs.ttu.edu
-------------------
Dept of Philosophy
Texas Tech University
Lubbock TX, 79409

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