+ Page 50 + ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### April, 1994 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 50-73 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057 Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as PHILLIPS IPCTV2N2 on LISTSERV@GUVM ---------------------------------------------------------------- A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO: LITERACY AND TECHNOLOGY Gerald M. Phillips Foreword "The Coming Anarchy" by Richard Kaplan [1] makes it clear that some of us enjoy extraordinary privilege. We live in a "favored" land. We are well fed in mind and body and have the luxury of toys. This essay is about our new toy, The Internet, and the impact it will have on literacy. The "happy few" that enjoy the Internet will live inside a fortress buffered from the ninety percent of the world preoccupied with survival and governed by brutish and repressive forces. The information society will not give them voice, nor can it do much to reverse the onrushing forces of starvation and dictatorship. Elitism is inherent in the Internet. According to Lloyd Brodsky [2] "You have to be able to read and write. (This eliminates the hefty percentage of adults who are functionally illiterate not to speak of most children.)" Brodsky [2] notes that despite icons and the mouse, literacy is an absolute requirement. Furthermore, he notes, access to a computer and a network denied most people, especially in the Third World. You must be sophisticated enough to need information. Most people are quite content with what they receive from ordinary media. It is questionable whether they will be willing to pay for services offered on the Internet. The assumption underlying the proposed National Information Infrastructure is the assumption that some one(s) will make a good deal of money from it. + Page 51 + Those of us who participate now are both pioneers and sybarites. We enjoy the rhetorical privileges Richard Lanham [3] so eloquently describes. We who can exchange notes and look things up ought not take any of this for granted. It may be temporary. The Internet will become important only when business and government use and control it. Then we will pay money for our simple pleasures. It is hard to believe NII is only a dream, there has been so much written about. According to the "hype," NII is a grand conception of how computer communication unified with cable and broadcast TV will provide literate Americans with limitless opportunities to communicate, interact, be entertained, and spend their money. What is Literacy? "Literacy" is defined as "the ability to read and write" [4, p 1122]. According to USA Today, [9-16-93] Americans are no longer literate. This means that the greater number of Americans cannot balance a checkbook or program a VCR, and are sufficiently "challenged" to depend on third parties to handle their income tax returns. They prefer a mouse and cute little pictures when they use computers. At the moment, claims remain undocumented about what the Internet can do for literacy and education. They are in the panacea class, reminiscent of assertions in the 50s [5] about how television could/would save the "American educational system" (whatever that was). This was before Newton Minow and others called TV a "vast wasteland." Today, it is the norm to bad-mouth TV, and de rigueur to allege CD-ROM represents the salvation of the western world [3]. But there are those who argue that the trend toward icons and clicking mouse buttons will cripple literacy [6]. There is an implicit tautology that as hieroglyphics replace words, it will be impossible to train people to produce the hieroglyphics. The definition of literacy does not specify what a person should be able to read or write, so we default to E. D. Hirsch [7] and Allen Bloom [8]. In their terms, NII is one of those ideas Americans must understand to be considered literate. + Page 52 + In its essence, literacy is a religious concept. "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God," (John I, 1) sums up logos in the spiritual realm. Today, Noam Chomsky's [9] theory of "deep structures" offers a quasi-scientific demonstration that juxtaposition of subject/predicate characteristic of reading and writing in every known language is intrinsic in human biology. The development of alphabets was convenient [10]. It facilitated record keeping and mathematics and led to the development of rules and regulations (grammar and syntax.) These regulations remain in force, even for the computer. Hackers soon learn that while they may get away with solecisms in social conversation, computers find them unacceptable. Whether one uses keyboard-based DOS/PC or an icon-controlled Mac, commands must be properly sequenced. Whatever glowing words are said about the wonders of computer communication or multi- media, the bottom line is that the computer is a literate and linear machine. It employs binary mathematics and depends on grammar. When humans fail to follow the rules, the machine does not respond correctly. Lanham [3] waxes eloquent about how the computer takes us into an oral and rhetorical world. No argument with that, with the small proviso that it takes us there from a binary and literate base. The computer is an unsubtle analog of the human brain [11]. The humans who designed the machines couldn't resist using "pure" logic in designing them to behave the way they saw themselves ideally. Given the proposition that the computer facilitates a move from literacy to orality [12] and from philosophy to rhetoric [3], we can now explore the steps from the original orality to contemporary literacy, so we know what we are changing from and to. Scribes. When the world shifted from an oral to a written culture, it changed the nature of eschatology entirely. Instead of having to take the word of itinerant, somewhat shaggy, and always poetic prophets about the nature of the deity, people could read the Scripture. Whether on slate or papyrus, writing enabled humans to make ideas permanent through "time binding" [13] Written language also reinforced the human sense of time and mortality [14]. + Page 53 + Writing created an elite, the scribes or soferim, essential keep records of business contracts as well as Covenants with the deity. The records were essential to an orderly society because they provided the fundamentals of the common law [15] Judges resolved disputes over business contracts; theologians interpreted religious covenants [16]. The written word is immutable for computers, too. The program either works or it doesn't. In case of failure, we follow the law of RTFM or call in a consultant. It is virtually impossible to conceptualize computer software or hardware of any level of complexity that does not have a written manual somewhere early in the process. As clergy interpreted God's law, and justices interpreted the common law, so the law of computers requires interpretation. The Old Testament is interpreted in the Babylonian Talmud through the Thirteen Hermeneutical Rules of Rabbi Ishmael as specified all editions of the Orthodox Jewish Daily Prayer Book [17] The New Testament has various interpreters and the civil and criminal law has its own body of interpretive law, but there is always an interpreter. As often as codifications appear, they attract commentary, and so fundamental documents proliferate as each generation attempts to produce order. There is no reason to believe that things would be different in an electronic world. Already, search devices, formal archives, and books of fundamentals are proliferating from companies like Que, O'Reilly, Osborne, etc. to codify indexing and searching in hyperspace. Redaction. The ascendancy of the written word came with redaction of the Bible which made the word of God permanent and consequently, binding. There were, of course, various versions. In the western world: Septuagint, Vulgate, Dore, and Douay vied for ascendancy, but eventually King James rendered a version in the sacred tongue of God, English, and all was well (at least until Joseph Smith brought us an even newer testament). In the middle east, the Koran assumed a relatively consistent form although its various interpreters, Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Sufis offered their own commentaries. In the final crunch, redaction of the word of God brought us universal religion but in denominational form. Interpreters were always necessary. + Page 54 + In hyperspace, there is nothing to redact. It is already written. Thus, though it may have an oral flavor [3], codified and orderly from the start, and thus, canonical. It will become more so as standardization of hardware and communications protocols are produced for the convenience of business and government. Censors. In any case, the integrity of the testaments was preserved by a favored group. In The Name of the Rose [18] the custodians of wisdom prevented interdicted works from reaching the multitudes. It really is not clear how much counter-culture thinking the Holy Office destroyed and how much by entropy, but it is clear that once vital ideas which once were alive and kicking simply disappeared because the books in which they were written disappeared. Perhaps, not as much as might be lost by a hard disk failure. Still, we dare not underestimate the importance of archives. In the world of Fahrenheit 451 [19] human memory again became the repository for the world's wisdom. We cannot forget that the entire Biblical tradition, as well as the great Greek, Roman, and Norse myths, were archived, indexed, and retrieved by human memory, analogous to the retrieval of archived material from electronic memory. The use of mnemonic systems in pre-Biblical and classical Greek times was widespread and they resulted in remarkably consistent retrieval [17]. The computer may help us preserve paper, but it will not alter the basic algorithm of memory (storage) and retrieval (indexing), both bases of literate societies. Philosophers/Scientists. Within the parameters (note: the word parameter must be used at least once in all scholarly writing) of available storage capability, philosophers and scientists "produced" wisdom and stored and indexed it. It accumulated in book form. Gradually, the gap between philosophers and scientists was bridged, and they produced a rhetoric for each of the academic disciplines. A ponderous archive already exists in book form, and it proliferates. At the moment the number of scholarly journals is estimated upwards of 70,000. (I should have a note here, but I must depend on the oral tradition. I believe I read it in an issue of Chronicle of Higher Education. I am sure a good gopher artist could find a reference given a week or so to poke around.) If the figure is close to accurate, given four issues a year per journal, there must be close to a million scholarly journals resting accessible in repositories, some even occasionally read. (A recent "shirt-tail" study in a major discipline ascertained that the typical scholarly article was read by 4-1/3 persons. The 1/3 person, I am informed, refers to first year M.A. candidates.) + Page 55 + Again, electronic capability comes to the rescue. By putting this archive into electronic form, we save paper and storage space and speed up retrieval time, although the knowledge remains, lexical, visual, or audible. It is there and putting it into digital form will not change its semantics. What is worth knowing? Given the limited capabilities of even extraordinary humans, however, there is a question about how much of this knowledge we can actually use. A given person can read (watch or listen to) only so much in his or her lifetime. Allotting an ordinary amount of time for eating, sleeping, lovemaking, and earning a living, most folks have limited time. Even those with the job description "scholar" are daunted by the amount of information available. Add to the contents of existing libraries and government repositories, the endless drivel of innumerable computer networks and bulletin boards, stores without editing or filtering, the amount of available screed will be logistically unmanageable. With electronic searches, one can drown in unsorted information (as anyone who has seriously gone gophering can testify). As anyone who has indulged in a hypermedia lesson can testify, it is very easy to become confused while examining information in a disorderly way. There is a dark side to progress. The tendency to canonize will eventually take over in the world of electronic information, and some authority somewhere will pronounce on the electronic acceptability of a digital text, just as editors, publishers, librarians, and the scholarly hierarchy have worked together to make what we presently have available manageable. Those who command this electronic "knowledge" will exert a great deal of control. Whoever is excluded from it is a "Barbarian." We face a Huxleyian future; literate people against the proles [20]. In our world, it is computer literate people guarded by armed (and faithful) proles against the "rabble" [21]. Oligarchy vs. Kakistocracy We may now consider the role of technology in literacy. Lanham [3] argues that electronic communication takes us back to an oral and responsive mode. No question about that, if we consider the lists and bulletin boards (and multi-media). Archives are archives, however, and an index performs the same job in card or electronic form. What the Internet does is provide another forum for those who want to argue and evangelize. But it is still only an elite group who can use it. The essential argument of this essay is that electronic communication will create a democratic minority separated from a kakistocratic rabble. Electronic communication is only available to people who 1) can afford it; 2) have a reason for using it; 3) can learn how to use it. + Page 56 + Our society presently maintains two intellectual oligarchies: those who own information and those who can process it. Consumers of information are useful for they often produce income for the providers. They are, however, dependent on those who own, produce and process it. The electronic world has emerged in a form acceptable to the consumers. Right now, it is supported by those who purchase access or have it provided by their employers. Kaplan [3] notes that roughly ninety percent of the world's population will be entirely unaware of the wonders of technology. Over-copulation has produced sufficient overpopulation so that 100 years from now most people will be starving [USA Today, 2-22-94, P. 3A]. Most definitely they will not be consuming electronic information (although they might find the printout paper palatable.) There are relatively few who consume information and relatively little information worth consuming. Technologists keep generating electronic "databases" because they can. We are offered "gopher" and other techniques supposedly to find worth while "stuff" in it. But the size of the electronic "stack" defies the searcher. It is hard enough to manipulate the electronic library catalogs, much less the product of the lists and bulletin boards. Most citizens, however, to whom electronic information is available won't take the time and trouble to do the sorting. To them, the potential 5-800 TV channels had some appeal. In any case, they will depend on specialists to prepare and sort it for them. A few might find hypermedia books intriguing, but they would confuse most people. The electronic data base is far from democratic. It just shifts the balance of power. Anyone may be able to write and publish what they like but some intermediary will be necessary to decide what people actually see and hear. Someone must control the contents of the hypermedia books and virtual reality experiences. They will be de facto editors. Democracy and Knowledge At the moment, the amount of information we have at our fingertips has become totally unwieldy. As an anonymous sage once said, "the amount of agricultural byproduct in the world has reached critical mass and there will soon be no place where one can stand and keep their shoes clean." + Page 57 + Exercising choice in information is a relatively modern concept made necessary by its proliferation. People prefer canons and catechisms. Formerly, the amount of information from which to choose was manageable. In the fourth century B.C., Bishop Isidore of Seville [22] disseminated a compendium of all human knowledge. Quintilian [23] advertised that, in his academy, he could teach everything about everything. For centuries, knowledge remained constant. The church protected literacy through an official canon. The shift from oral tradition to written text meant it was no longer necessary to rely on memory. Greeks and Hebrews alike created finite wisdom by writing it down. Writing made it possible to speak aux siecles instead of to a responding audience. The distinctive feature of writing was that it denied the concept of group. Rhetoric was addressed to the group; philosophy to the ages. Written prose was part of the Platonic search for truth, while rhetoric addressed mundane decision-making. Occasionally the categories overlapped. In the electronic culture, people can use lists and bulletin boards to address an anonymous "crowd." While potentially democratic, it is flawed. As Kierkegaard [24] noted: ...a crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction. It was, thus, important to canonize the spoken word by redacting it. In electronic media, redaction is immediate. Words can be archived the moment they are uttered. But once they are uttered they are written and thus available for the canon. An electronic canon may emerge only when the mass of stored information is filtered and purified. Eventually, an elite corps of technologists and editors will sift electronic information for those on the outside, exactly as commercial producers screen television fare and editors select books. + Page 58 + Choice is inherent in chaos. Even in a random set, some things will happen more than others; some things will become prominent. The nightmare of 500 video channels becomes more vivid when we think of the process of canonization of the information. The "alphabet" channels now offer something approximating a national culture. 500 channels will facilitate the formation of ideological enclaves. Soccer fans with soccer fans; bigots with bigots (and there will be room for specialized bigotry.) Blacks, whites, gays, and Tziganes can stay with their own kind. People will speak only to those to "speak their language." Rhetoric will no longer be addressed to the uncommitted; it will become exhortation and incantation to the faithful. There will be no audience to address; no one to persuade. This kind of sequestering is already happening in the newsgroups on USENET. We must remember that Greek wisdom left the Attic peninsula only when it was written down and shared with others willing to receive it. In our modern intellectual world, the McNeill-Lehrer follows simply do not cut Tom Brokaw a break. Consider another example: in the Babylonian Captivity [17], Jews expelled after the fall of the second Temple migrated to northern Persia where they were governed by oligarchies of scholars at the Academies at Sura and Pumbeditha. While the government was by an educated elite, access to education was entirely democratic. It was based on the written body of lore referred to as Talmud, the close commentaries on the Bible that attempted to fulfill dina d'malchuta dina (the law of the land shall be Divine law to you). Through reasoned argument and sometimes unreasonable argument based on Biblical text and previous commentaries, the scholars attempted to synthesize God's law so that the exiles could live in harmony with their governors. The immutable written text provided a body of law about which commentaries could be written. There was debate, reconciliation, decision -- even on the commentaries. Eventually appellate jurisdictions codified the religious decisions into the 613 laws which govern Orthodox Judaism. Essentially the divines of the early Catholic church followed the same process as they developed a catechism. Following cognate paths, Jews and Christians alike developed the notion of a connection between literacy and law. And the moment it was written down it became subject to interpretation. + Page 59 + "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic" wrote Aristotle [25]. And the two remained in dialectic juxtaposition with logic, the third member of the trivium. Authorities like philosophers, scientists, and divines discovered "truth," often by scrutinizing texts. They disseminated their findings, which, in turn, became the objects of more inquiry generating more publication. Whether it is appears in electronic form (with multimedia), it is published. Making it public is tantamount to publication, and it becomes the object of more rhetoric. Still, the book will remain in some form. It is the source of literacy, essential to the development of technology We must acknowledge that the traditional book is still the most convenient self contained portable learning apparatus providing instant retrieval of information with no power source required. In fact, all one needs is a candle and a match, and the information in a book is theirs for the reading. Dictators and kings know this and tend to suppress literacy. It is easier to control public band width than private bookshelves. (Consider the "Clipper chip." Governments know the power of electronic books and they will control them as they must.) When only a few people have God's word, they can interpret and dispense it to serve their own purposes. Those who eventually own the Internet will also own the minds it reaches. You can depend on it. Electronic Education and Indoctrination The underlying presumption of educators is that a literate population sustains a democracy. In fact, the principles of democracy form the cornerstone of the canon. In this era of political correctness, assaults by other voices on the traditional democratic creed literally threaten the nation. A nation requires a shared language and a common set of principles about government and the rights of citizens. This is the most powerful guarantee of free expression. The tradition can still be canonized, even if it is in electronic form. Electronic innovations have potential for expediting the delivery of education, but they are form, not content. Though Lanham (1993) argues a convincing case that multi-media will affect the method of education, he does not show how it will affect the content. Educators have always had "visual aids." The ERPI Classroom Film has been every coach's best friend. Multi-media can be equally potent as indoctrination as education. + Page 60 + It is not hard to conceptualize Klansmen going through virtual reality experiences to teach them whom to hate. Whatever package the children receive will be the product of editing. Somewhere along the line, in any educational milieu, there are editors and censors. Multi-media instructional packages do not just spring forth by themselves. They must be carefully designed and as of this moment there is little evidence that they do much to improve instruction [26, 27]. The democratic process feeds on education. Literacy gave impetus to general education. Lanham [17] describes the schools of Quintilian (1963) dedicated to train aristocratic sons as orators, defined as "a good man who speaks well." Instruction was encyclopedic, based on the Trivium (logic, rhetoric, grammar) and the Quadrivium (music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic). Movable type facilitated enrichment of the curriculum, permitting it to blossom in the Renaissance. But it didn't really revolutionize education. It remained a process of imparting facts and moral values to young people. Literacy enabled civil liberties to develop. The rhetorical/oral society was too often the prisoner of inartistic proofs offered by tyrants. Writing encouraged constitutions and legal precedents which in turn discouraged tyranny and slavery. Libraries were the center of the colonial American colleges. Although originally conceived to educate clergy and support the established, the spread of literacy stimulated the growth of the professions and made respectable participation in business. Once books are dispensed, they cannot be controlled. Universal learning became the cornerstone of universal democracy. It makes one flinch to think that the new NII will be under the control of business and government. All it takes to end the flow of information is cutting one wire. The decisive point in the growth of democratized education was the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1861 [28] which granted land to the several states for the purpose of "teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts to the sons and daughters of the working class." State educational institutions grew on all levels, and by the 1920s, the "state schools" competed intellectually with the best of the hallowed private institutions. The normal colleges designed to train teachers evolved rapidly into state funded all-purpose institutions of higher education. America was ready for the GI Bill [29]. + Page 61 + The GI Bill put the last coffin nail into the casket of aristocratic education. It was originally designed to keep the flood of returning veterans off the labor market until it was ready for them. But it actually served to democratize higher education completely [29]. Now college became universal as high school had been. And with the GI Bill came the burgeoning of junior and community colleges, proprietary trade schools, as well as a plethora of grants to provide remedial training for those the high schools did not properly prepare for college. The complex system of education available in democratic societies depended on a canon central to which were principles about the nature of government and individual freedom. Around this core was a body of literature presumed to define the human experience through western and predominantly Anglo-Saxon eyes. Much of the canon came from an oral tradition, however, and it changed to admit the experience of later immigrants. It is changing again, but the basic principles are as sacrosanct as religious principles. To scrap the canon entirely would be to place our democratic system in jeopardy. Loss of literacy would be tantamount to surrender. Neither a literate nor an oral culture alone can sustain a complex democracy. Up to now, society has supported the logistics of literacy with community based free public libraries and a thriving publishing enterprise. Literally, hundreds of thousands of books and periodicals are published in the U.S. and Canada yearly. They flood into the libraries and are in the U.S. are accessible to anyone who can walk in or get in by other means under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under the NII, however, large corporations and government bureaucrats would not only control the archives, but the means of accessing them as well. This poses a frightening threat. And there is the "rub." Reading, writing, speaking, and listening, said Robert Maynard Hutchins [30], the barbarisms known as communication skills, are essential to the operation of this literate and democratic society as is the independent and uncontrolled access to knowledge. We have already established that "literate" and "democratic" go together. Now we must find a way to accommodate to new forms of oral expression, i.e., to synthesize electronic rhetoric with the oral and written forms of rhetoric that presently exist. Presumably, it will be done as it always has; people of intelligence, competence, and taste will select from the available material and control its dispensation. It is the process called formal education. Some will resist it and some will stay outside, but the process will not change, despite the influx of new means of delivery. + Page 62 + In the world where technology and literacy marry, we can expect to see an increase in functional illiteracy. There are estimates that as many 40% of the people in our society are currently functionally illiterate. The equivocal phrase appears to mean that people watch too much television and do not read so many books. We can expect functional illiteracy to rise when people discover what technological skills they must master to cope with the world in which they will live. And television, or whatever form of diversion the people choose will continue to attract them away from more challenging tasks. Panem et circensis is a political mandate and toys are essential in our sybaritic life-styles. People judge us by our toys, clothes and recreation. Literacy was being strangled even before the assault on it by technology. In essence, the overspread of a technological oral culture represented by virtual reality, Nintendo, and the NII will still further challenge the democratic canon. Technological advances multiply personal choices to the point of confusion [30]. With all messages being equal, there is no message. As Don Alhambra sang to Marco and Giuseppi: In short, whoever you may be, To this conclusion, you'll agree, When every one is somebody, Then no one's anybody. Gondoliers, Act II (660) So, when we have infinite choice in information, we have no choice at all, until information is given to us by those who have preempted the authority to choose. And someone will. Eventually, electronic information will produce a canon based on the criterion of what people are willing to pay for. The Outline of a Nightmare Scenario In the 1930s, American industry sent a travelling show, called "Century of Progress" to the elementary schools of this country. Children learned that by 1950, they would all be flying around in helicopters and park them on their flat roofed houses. During the show, a man sat on a microwave stove. Waves were beamed through his body and he fried an egg in a frying pan he held on his lap. (No word about his offspring, if any.) Although Babbage had invented his machine fifty years earlier, there was no mention of computers. + Page 63 + The computer could be considered a technological revolution or it could be considered nothing more than a way of enabling us to do what we already do, but faster. It is clearly a convenience. It helps us write, draw, amuse ourselves, and store and retrieve information. It does not confer telekinetic power on us nor does it enable us to fly. And you still have to learn to read in order to use it. Tautologically, however, you can use it to teach reading. The computer is technological gratification, perhaps, but hardly a revolution. In fact, the nightmare scenario suggests that it enables humans to make bigger and better errors. We have already noted that it has polarized society into the technologically privileged and the drones. A shirt-tail poll of 44 Internet users on a private network evokes the testimony that use of computer communication has materially reduced their reading. Furthermore, they sacrifice live socialization for their Internet pals. The opportunities to acquire misinformation via computer are virtually limitless. Databases are unmanageable, searches unproductive, even with the most advanced devices. Those who have been forced into unemployment by advancing technology can hardly be expected to sing its praises. We have been promised an educational panacea, an entertainment miracle, a source of friends, and the means to change the way we think. Is there a dark side? There is, and we must look it in the eye. The NII is inherently exclusionary. This is necessarily redundant. Access requires expensive equipment. Many people now have it provided gratis by their employers. At some point, Internet privileges now taken for granted will suddenly become very expensive. We will then learn how valuable freedom of expression is to people. The same is true of recreation devices like computer games and virtual reality. Technological orality will discourage the literacy it requires to sustain itself. The oral medium of Internet is inherently literate. Programmers need to know language, especially syntax and grammar. The relatively inexpensive book and magazine will become more expensive as less people want them. This will create a marvelous paradox. The illiterate will be denied the tools of literacy and will be thus excluded from the techno-oral society. + Page 64 + The techno-oral society will be under siege from the outset. As Kaplan [1] pointed out, the privileged will be under constant attack by those doomed to struggle for simple survival. The techno-orals will require powerful security forces to preserve their privilege. Complexities of technology will exclude all but the motivated. This brings us to the cliche, "user friendly." There are really very few people who can design computers and train them to respond to human commands. Simple commands are essential to generalized computer use. Even mouse learners must memorize sequences and as icons proliferate, they will be forced to learn a language of glyphs unsuitable for reasoning or poetry. But even the ability to give commands in proper sequence is not sine qua non of computer literacy. There was a bit of doggerel scribbled on the wall of a lavatory at one of our great university computer centers. I really hate this damned machine, I wish that they would sell it. It never does what I want. Only what I tell it. Entrepreneurs exploit consumer incompetence. Mac, Windows, OS2, NeXT Operating systems, the mouse and other devices that simplify the use of the computer are still arcane to most users. They can do some jobs, without understanding why or how. There is a whole industry dedicated to making it possible to compute without knowing about computing. Production of manuals and commentaries today approaches Talmudic proportions. Publishers get rich publishing books that purport to make it easy to use complex programs. The net effect is that it becomes more difficult to train the people who will design the next generation of computers. As techno-orality forces a decay of literacy, it sews the seeds of its own destruction. These realities have not yet dawned on the producers and managers. They are still busy supplying the demands of the elite presuming that everyone will eventually become elite. Their present preoccupation with profit are based on some fragile assumptions about the techno-oral world which obscure their view of the future. + Page 65 + Driving Assumptions and Inherent Fallacies The most egregious assumption is that the computer will eventually contain all knowledge and that it will be immediately accessible by everyone. This does not differ from the assumptions made about the Bible, to wit, all of God's word had been revealed and now it remained only to interpret it. The first part of the assumption is a prediction that is well on the way to coming true. The assumption about accessibility is a bit more troubling. In the new techno-oral world, you can only find what you look for. The process of computerizing library indexes is still insufficiently mature to eliminate card files and browsing. It is hard to conceive of computers so sophisticated in natural language that they could drive associative searches. Furthermore, no one has yet conceived a "curious" computer. When you add the abstracts of articles, indexes of tables of contents, plus the accumulation of network commentaries, government documents, and miscellaneous materials and archives, the searcher is confronted with a virtually unmanageable database. Gopher, Archie and similar devices only gather information. They do not judge it. Many researchers have found themselves overwhelmed with mostly unusable information because the computer cannot judge what it finds; it can only follow orders. A second assumption is that everyone has a reason to use the computer to facilitate knowledge acquisition. Most of what is stored is not used. The question of who will pay for the maintenance of archives has not yet been answered. Most users will continue to use computer facilities to sustain casual and recreational conversation. They can talk about the potential of the databases, even though they are impossible to use. Anyone who has ftp'd to sunsite.unc.edu to request a copy of the Health Security Act will understand that it is very difficult to read 1300 pages. A paid expert can do it, and analyze it, and abstract it. That is the way it is done now. It will probably continue to work that way. Most people will not use the massive and expensive archives. They will be of value even to a more elite elite. The rest of us will depend on edited digests even as we do now. + Page 66 + We have alluded, above, to an untenable third assumption; people are willing and able to pay for these privileges. No one knows who will buy 500 channels, but pay-per-view is not exactly a resounding success yet. And the failure of the Bell-Atlantic/TCI merger signals a distinct wavering of faith in the potential of those 500 channels. There are a number of additional assumptions of questionable defensibility. It makes messages immediate. There is no question about this. Phone and Email permit instantaneous contact independent of distance. It is questionable how valuable this immediacy is. The advantage of asynchronicity is the possibility of delay and the privilege of discarding remarks at sober second thought. The disadvantage is that it discourages genuine human contact desperately needed by most humans. Because it is technologically modern, its messages are of higher quality. Actually, there is a tendency for ease of typing to inhibit composition. Clearly, William Shakespeare was not impaired. Would his work have been improved by the computer? Not if he had to RTFM to master all the documentation. Because it is easy to store, it is worth storing. At the moment, "gophering" has proliferated to the point where it is no longer possible to search. Attempts to discover specific material usually results in an inundation. It would be interesting to discover how many people actually use gopher to find useful information, and how many play with it because it is there. Because it is entertaining it makes learning easy. The verdict is far from unanimous on the role of computers in education. There is no doubt that computers are effective in teaching people about computers. Tests and studies of hypermedia and multi-media systems (including virtual reality) versus traditional teaching methods simply have not been done. Advocates of high tech teaching assert that the intrinsic technical quality of such systems make them superior. Sadly, they are not available in most educationally deprived areas and their presence in affluent areas may be considered just another "frill" until formal empirical tests are extensively run. Furthermore, disadvantaged children will not have access to computers when they become disadvantaged adults. + Page 67 + Because it is easy to use a computer for communication, it improves communication. We need only look at the phone to resolve this issue. Phone conversation is usually for immediate transfer of messages. On the other hand, it is often very difficult to relate to the party at the other end. It is easy to forget and far too easy to respond without thinking. Simple facility does not improve over the potential for argument of face-to-face confrontation. Nor does facility improve felicity. Claims about the computer Utopia are exaggerated. For some workers, all the computer means is a "piece-work" existence, where employers monitor keystrokes. Clerks at airport terminal desks use a great deal of very complex design and information, but on their end it is as repetitive and boring as an assembly line. A startling editorial column in USA Today (January 21, 1994, pg. D1) states that most Americans are incompetent to run their computers. Furthermore many people have computers which cannot reach the Internet in any form. Despite the talk of NII, the vast majority of Americans do not know what is available now, and the talk about the future makes no sense to them. Although the number of homes with computers is growing, they are rarely used for sophisticated operations. Credibility is a major issue. It is difficult, if not impossible to referee electronic texts. That means we must either take each other's word for "it" or regard everything published with suspicion. Electronic journals have been notoriously unsuccessful at attracting quality submissions. Ingelfinger-Relman restrictions tend to deter responsible scholars from sharing their work through electronic media. Bread and Circuses: Americans love entertainment. What is the difference between the Internet and Nintendo? In a great many ways, computing, both at home and on the Internet, is a recreation. The exchanges on the Internet, the use of bulletin boards and lists, and the private relationships developed through on-line contact, are salubrious, but not necessary. And they are costly. There are users who require rapid access to databases or computer power to run complex design, modeling, or statistical programs, but to most users, the computer is a way to indulge oneself in social activity, type documents, or play games. + Page 68 + On the practical level, there are enormous publication problems inherent in communication on the Internet. --- All computer communication is vulnerable to eavesdropping and susceptible to censorship. --- It is not clear how rights to intellectual property will be protected. Lanham [3] suggests authors will develop new motivations. It would be like depending on physicians whose only motive was eleemosynary. --- Freedom of Speech remains a major issue and in some cases has become license. Those who have experienced the Internet understand the complex issues of copyright and archiving that affect all Internet exchanges and databases. Furthermore, in many public lists, potential participants are discouraged from contributing because of pressure from organized groups and flames from anonymous individuals. It takes a reasonable amount of psychological strength to keep civil discussion going in most of the groups. Some groups are moderated, but moderation often mitigates freedom of speech. It is a paradox that remains to be resolved. --- It is easy to libel (or slander) on the Internet. No one knows yet whom to sue. It will be a couple of generations before the lawyers get this and the copyright problem sorted out. Until then, contributors will be in a state of suspended uncertainty. The inability to make a profit will inhibit contribution. --- Plagiarism is already rampant. Students lift whole term papers from the contribution of others. Moral dicta notwithstanding, Murphy's principle of studenthood pertains: if students can cheat, they will. --- Retrieval of electronic information is so easy that when you attempt to do it, you usually get more than you expect and once you get it, you have no idea how to sort it out. An important matter of concern only to a few. There is the not inconsiderable problem of editing. There is no electronic style manual or system of citing material acquired from lists, bulletin boards and many archive. The purpose of citation is not only to make the writing more credible, but to assist the reader in finding new information. When Internet sources are cited, they are of the quality of personal communications since most are not archived and thus they are not accessible for corroboration. + Page 69 + As a writer, the best I can do is: "In a note to the FRISBY-L, Agnes Leffingwall noted the tendency of frisbees to fall one foot in front of the recipient." (FRISBY-L is not archived. Agnes Leffingwall can be reached as AGLE@ZZZ.yyy.edu.) Agnes may not want her Email address to be made public. I have the alternative of citing "(Agnes Leffingwall, Personal Communication, 4-4-93 2:02 PM). This alerts my reader to my source, but it does not enable my reader to check it. This has some very unpleasant implications and opens the door to ad hominem questions, which, in some cases, can be legitimate. A related problem is the matter of style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Chronic users of the Internet declare that they are free of those conventions, but even though oral in quality, in substance, Internet contributions are written and they are incomprehensible unless the rules of style are observed. Proliferation of prolix, vulgar, and unintelligible writing is the electronic equivalent of "babbling." The conventions of scholarly publishing developed for good reasons over hundreds of years. Electronic (oral) media subvert them. Until some substantial agreement is achieved on questions of citation, copyright, and style, the book will remain ascendant. The paradox is, that once we have those conventions, what is seen on the screen will be an electronic book. It will be literate. Final Review of Problems Wrong turn on the information superhighway. Right now, we face a social cleft-stick. The legislation for the NII (National Information Infrastructure) is positioned for passage. Corporations are jockeying for position. The dream: to link together all information services; phone, video, computer communications, into a complex interactive network that provides entertainment through 500 video channels, allows unlimited shopping from home, participation in government, videophone, access to endless information. + Page 70 + The nightmare lurks around the corner. For one thing, the cost of the network is beyond imagining. For another, it is questionable whether there will be enough people able to afford it. Add to that the difficulty of providing 500 channels of entertainment and supporting it commercially in a society of shrinking employment and increased taxes in a world where population now exceeds the food supply. The dramatic difference between information "haves" and "have nots" could well plant the seeds of revolution and reversion to barbarianism. It is hard to visualize the information superhighway in the Third World. Even the advanced Europeans and Japanese will have a hard time coping with the new technological order. *** American society has always maintained a literate elite. We are now developing a techno-elite centered around the Internet and use thereof. *** It is important to maintain technical skill to develop new systems and adapt to new problems, but in each generation, the complexity of design and engineering reduces the number of people able to manage the technology. The result has been a corporate oligarchy, with a few manufacturers maintaining global dominance. *** The overwhelming number of people in the U.S. and elsewhere are effectively barred from participation in a primary intellectual exercise and thus prevented from taking advantage of opportunities for which this participation is necessary. *** There is, at the moment, no real evidence that high tech innovations have led to a better life for anyone or for society in general. In fact there are charges and counter charges about the vicarious nature of the virtual experience and the sybaritic and dilettantish quality appurtenant to participation in CMC. Before we become the "communication society" riding the information superhighway brought about from the National Information Infrastructure, we must address these social and political problems, not to speak of resolving the question of whether the effort is worth while. The fabric is already beginning to tear, just a little bit. This morning (February 27, 1994) Newsday ran a bylined commentary by Joshua Quittner explaining the failure of proposed Bell Atlantic/MCI merger. Quittner cites Mark Stahlman, President of New Media Associates: + Page 71 + ...'information highway' was all smoke and mirrors. The information highway is bunk, and convergence (of technologies) is a fools dream. ...the words 'information highway' were cynically used by telecommunications executives to inflate their companies' stock. The technology...is not yet ready for prime time...nor are the markets proven. We might well consider how much of our present discussion of philosophy, rhetoric, orality, and literacy in the electronic world is based on a pipe dream. REFERENCES 1. Kaplan, Robert D. "The Coming Anarchy. The Atlantic Monthly. 273, 2. (February, 1994): 44-76. 2. Brodsky, Lloyd. Post to IPCT-L. (19 Jan 1994). (Archived on LISTSERV@GUVM.GEORGETOWN.EDU) 3. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 4. Flexner, Stuart Berg. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Random House, 1983. 5. Carpenter, Clarence Ray. Instructional Television Research, an Investigation of Closed-Circuit Television for Teaching University Courses. University Park, Pennsylvania State University, 1955-1958. 6. Levy, Steven. "Does the Mac Make You Stupid?" MacWorld. (Nov., 1990). pp.69-74, 78. 7. Hirsch, Eric Donald. Cultural Literacy, What Every American Needs to Know. 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Translated from the Hebrew by Nesanel Kasnett. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1985. 17. Phillips, Gerald. "The Theory and Practice of Rhetoric at the Babylonian Talmudic Academies." Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve University, 1956. 18. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 19. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1967. 20. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York, Bantam Books, 1946. 21. Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York, Ballantine Books, 1963. 22. Thonssen, Lester, Baird, A Craig and Braden, Waldo, W. Speech criticism 2d ed. New York: Ronald Press Co., 1970. 23. Quintilian, M. F. Institutio oratoria. Tr. by H. E. Butler. Cambridge, Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 1959-63. 24. Kiekegaard, Soren. "That Individual." in The Point of View. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. 25. Cooper, Lane (Ed.). The Rhetoric of Aristotle. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1933. 26. Ahern, Terence Charles. "The effect of a Graphic Interface on Participation, Interaction, and Student Achievement in a Computer-Mediated Small Group Discussion." Ph.d dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1991. 27. Schuerman, Robert L. "Menu Systems as Structuring Devices in Learner Controlled, Computer Assisted Instruction, the Effects of On-Menu Cueing on Selection Patterns. Ph.d dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1991. 28. Williams, Roger Lea. George W. Atherton and the beginnings of Federal Support for Higher Education. D.ed. dissertation. The Pennsylvania State University. 1988. 29. Phillips, Gerald M., Gouran, Dennis S., Kuehn, Scott, and Wood, Julia T. Survival in the Academy: A Guide for Young Academics. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1994. 30. Hutchins, Robert Maynard. The Conflict in Education in a Democratic Society. New York: Harper, 1953. 31. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1971. + Page 73 + ---------------------------------------------------------------- BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Gerald M. Phillips is Professor Emeritus, Speech Commun- ication, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 He is Trade and Applied Books Editor for Hampton Press and Editor of IPCT: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century. Email: GMP@PSUVM.PSU.EDU --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1994 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Gerald Phillips, Editor IPCT-J GMP3@PSUVM.PSU.EDU