The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
March 19, 2013
A Series of Lectures for People Who Prefer Pondering to Pandering
The Pros and Cons of the Most Influential Invention of the 20th Century: How the Internet and Cyber Technology Have Affected Everyone’s Life
When I was a student in college, I had a part-time job feeding IBM cards into a computer at the University of Wisconsin. The cards were about 3 inches wide and 6 inches long, and they had a bunch of mysterious perforations in them. I had no idea what the holes meant, or what the computer would do with them, but I dutifully fed them into the enormous piece of equipment, which filled a very large room. As I recall, we had to wear paper coverlets over our shoes, and put on paper gowns, in hopes we would keep as much dust as possible out of the computer room. This very early and hugely expensive computer was very finicky, despite being a Badger computer. To me the entire exercise represented $1.16 an hour, but to the scientists and other faculty members at the university, it was The Great Leap Forward in quickly making sense of masses of disparate data.
From that giant machine came, eventually, the PC, the personal computer. And from that came the computer chip. And from the computer chip came the IPad and the IPod and Facebook and Twitter and multiple thousands of other forms of cyber technology, most of them serious, but some rather silly. Nearly every business of any sort, every government agency, every bank, every school, every financial institution, every religious organization, every everything, relies on computers. No modern operation of any noteworthy human activity could exist without computers. Furthermore, nearly every institution uses the Internet to one degree or another.
With respect to the computer and the Internet, there are two types of people: those who revel in it, and those who don’t. At the outset, I feel compelled to be candid with you: I am one of those who don’t. I marvel at the ability of computers both to ingest and to regurgitate information, I readily admit how much they have revolutionized life for everyone on the planet, including yours truly, I have no doubt that they are here to stay, but I do not spend hours a day surfing the Net, nor shall I, ever. I do spend many hours each week writing at the keys of my trusty word processor. Without it, the process would be much more time-consuming and the results much less gratifying. A word processor certainly represents cyber technology, and as such, I am very grateful for all the people who made it possible. However, if this lecture were to have a brief and also alliterated title, it would be A Troglodyte’s Take on Technology. Without reservation, I admit to being one who is happy with all the advancements of technology, but I do not actively avail myself of most of them. I still admit to dwelling in the caves, along with the other troglodytes and Luddites.
A couple of years ago, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote an article called The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. When assessing the Internet, he says that there are three kinds of people making three kinds of appraisals. He calls them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever Wasers. Never-Betters think computers and the Internet are about to usher us into a stupendous new Utopia. Better-Nevers think we would be better off if the whole Cyber Revolution had never happened. Ever-Wasers think things like this happen regularly in the modern world, and some people are delighted with it while others are aghast. I have sympathy with all three positions, but if someone forced me to decide which group I most favor, I am a hybrid Never-Better/Ever-Waser, as you shall likely see for yourself.
Let give you a pro-computer illustration, and then an anti-computer illustration. Recently I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine who lives in western New York State. (By the way, I am highly supportive of Alexander Graham Bell and his amazing technological invention. It beats e-mail hands down any day, in my opinion.) Pete used to be the general manager of a ski resort in Ellicottville, NY. Now, in semi-retirement, he works part-time for a different resort there. Pete told me about the computer chips in snow guns that have made Holiday Valley a much more profitable ski center. The chips program the snow-making machinery to go on automatically when the thermometer gets down to a certain temperature at night, and then they go off by the time the slopes open in the morning. But if the temperature should rise above freezing during the night, once the snow guns are on, they stop operating. Artificial snow doesn’t bring skiers to Ellicottville, Pete said. Natural snow elsewhere (in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toronto) does. But artificial snow keeps the skiers at Holiday Valley once they get there. This is a technological advancement made possible only by computer chips. It makes Holiday Valley a great deal of money. And they don’t needs humans there all night to turn the snow guns on or off, so it also saves money.
Now for the anti-computer illustration. Most of the people in this room received a letter from the South Carolina Tax Department saying that a government computer in the Tax Department had been hacked by somebody, and that it is possible the stolen information will be used to withdraw money from our bank accounts. The theft may result in a) nothing; b) a minor nuisance; or c) a major personal disaster. If the SC Tax folks still had your name only on an alphabetical list in a very large card file in Columbia, this could not have happened. But without computers, they also would be very hard pressed to accomplish what our state tax laws require of them. Without computers, we cannot be properly and fairly taxed.
The IRS resolved 500,000 identity theft cases last year, but it still has 300,000 unresolved cases. In 2012 it had twice as many identity-theft computer whizzes as in 2011. An additional 35,000 IRS employees are trained to spot identity-theft issues on tax returns on other IRS forms.
Let us now contemplate a small series of pro/con factors regarding computers. First the pro-, and then the anti-. All banks use computers. All banks use computers. Your car has numerous computer chips. Your car has numerous computer chips. Hearing aids have computer chips. Hearing aids have computer chips. Smart phones use computer chips. Smart phones use computer chips.
You get the idea. The very thing that improves these realities also botches them up more severely when, you should pardon the expression, the chips are down. You get notices from the bank saying something is amiss when it isn’t. Your dashboard lights up with little icons you’ve never seen before, telling you your car is about to explode or blast off for Mars or heaven knows what, because you’ve never seen these strange symbols, and until you stop and search through your owner’s manual, which is like reading Sanskrit, you don’t know whether to act immediately or make an appointment with the dealer sometime in the next week, unless the light goes off, in which case never mind - - - maybe.
In 2004 there were still a lot of newspapers in business, most of which were dailies. Back in those bygone days, in a poll reported called “Abandoning the News,” the Carnegie Corporation said 39% of respondents under 35 told them that in the future, they intended to use the Internet for their news. Just 8% said they would rely on a newspaper. Do you find that insignificant, interesting, or alarming? Can people get objective, well-researched news from the Internet, especially Internet blogs?
In 2012, spending on digital advertising exceeded that for print advertising for the first time in history. Does that bode well for the nation or world, to say nothing of newspapers and magazines? In 2012 $37 billion was spent on digital ads, and $34 billion on print. It is estimated that by 2016 the figure will be $55 billion for digital, and only $31 billion for print. Does that give anyone pause, or should we just shrug it off?
A Department of Defense study suggested that the financial meltdown of 2008, which resulted in a loss of $50 trillion of global wealth, may not have occurred solely because of poor regulations and bad risk management but because of coordinated attacks by “financial terrorists intent on destroying the American financial system.” That seems very improbable, but if true, it is not merely frightening; it is blood-curdling terrifying.
Remember when it was predicted that Facebook would bring in $100 billion when Mark Zuckerberg went public a year ago? It didn’t happen, and what it did generate quickly went south before recovering somewhat. Technology is enormously lucrative for some of its most innovative entrepreneurs, but inventions can fizzle quickly, because somebody comes up with a better, cheaper mousetrap and the world starts beating a path to their door instead. The Tech Bubble fifteen years ago or so is illustrative. Technology has been a great boost to the economy, except for when it wasn’t --- or isn’t.
And on the other hand, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation dropped off two computerized tablets in two remote Egyptian villages. No instructions were given to anybody about anything. The computer tablets were loaded with games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs. Within five days, each village child was using an average of 47 apps, after two weeks they were singing songs from the laptops, and within five months they has figured out how to use the camera. I would be hopeless in that situation, as you might be as well, but fearless kids can do things geezers could never accomplish if we worked at it for fifty years.
Barack Obama and his advisers have been astonishingly successful in employing the Internet for campaign purposes. By investigating who responds to what kinds of advertising online, they have added millions of names to their e-mail message lists, and they have raised tens of millions of dollars in small contributions from the people on their lists. Further, there are relatively few costs in contacting all these American voters.
Researchers say that the average American spends twelve hours each day consuming information of various sorts. That represents 100,000 words, or 34 gigabytes of data. More and more of that information is read on a screen, and less and less on a sheet of paper. Can the average American brain properly process that much information? Is critical thinking jeopardized by such an avalanche of data? Are there any changes in the neurological structure of brains subjected to so great a flood of cybernetic words, images, and ideas?
Remember Julian Assange, and Wikileaks? So many news items have flashed through your consciousness it may have slipped your mind. The Army Pfc. who provided the files has pled guilty to his crime, and may spend twenty years in prison because of it. Over 77,000 classified documents were made public by Mr. Assange and his organization. Because he could do it, he did do it. To date, he has not been hauled into any court anywhere in the world for his major test of technology and breach of national security. Was what he did ethically acceptable? What do you think?
George Hotz is the hacker’s hacker, the nerd’s nerd. He is a young man in his early twenties who has been breaking into other people’s computers for a decade or so. In an interview, Mr. Hotz said, “I don’t hack because of some ideology. I hack because I’m bored.” He is a technological whiz, and he simply likes to break into computers belonging to individuals or institutions. It is an intellectual game with him.
Originally, hackers were pranksters. It was fun, and relatively harmless. Those folks were “white-hat hackers,” like George Hotz. They did it for the pure pleasure of being able to do it. But then hackers became people who stole credit card information, or entered the electronic grid of major corporations or governments. They are called “black-hat hackers.”
Computer hacking is a major concern, especially when intellectual property is stolen by the billions of dollars each year. Many Chinese are shameless hackers who steal all kinds of valuable information, in effect filching money out of the pockets of scientists, performing artists, tech companies, and other individuals and corporations. The Red Army has a large unit of hackers who constantly attempt to steal information from the US government and military.
How accurate is a blog? (If you don’t know what a blog is, you are even more behind the times than I. And by the way, my PC spell-check is so antiquated it tells me there is no such word as “blog.”) I have read, but not on the Internet, that the Internet is filled with people claiming that the Sandy Hook shootings never happened, that it was all a federal government ploy to get rid of guns. Some people are so undiscerning that they think if this tripe is found on the Internet, it has to be true. But how much on the Internet is fact, and how much is opinion? I am giving you opinions in this elocutionary broadside, backed up by facts, but at least you are hearing it rather than reading it on a screen, and you can decide for yourself more objectively as to its veracity.
Perhaps I could have gleaned all the material online I am presenting to you, but I would be much less inclined to believe it to be accurate. I underline things I read in magazines and newspapers, and then cut up the pages and put them in my Lecture files. It wouldn’t work nearly as well if I read all this stuff online. Then, I would have to print out scores of pages, then underline what I had already read. I am too much of a thrifty Scotsman to print all that. Further, I am sufficiently chagrined with the trees cut down to make my newspapers and magazines, that I don’t want to add to the ecological ethical dilemma by printing scores of online pages.
There are presumably 311.5 million Americans, and 425 million computers, I-Phones, I-Pads, etc. We have more computers than people. What does that mean? Does it compute?
Zogby International is a polling company. Over five years ago they reported that 11% of the respondents they contacted said they would be willing to have a computer chip implanted in their brain in order to have direct access to the Internet; 13% said it would be good to implant chips into children to keep track of them, 24% agreed that the Internet could serve as a replacement for a significant other, and 78% of 18-24-year-olds have a social networking profile at a site like MySpace or Facebook. To a troglodyte, those figures leave me almost speechless. Well, sort of. I doubt that I will ever be literally speechless. I read in the paper a while back that MySpace is either dying or dead. I don’t know that to be true. I suppose I could Google MySpace and see what happens, but I’m not going to. After all, we troglodytes do have our principles. The most astonishing of those statistics is that 24% said that the Internet could serve as a significant other. That is a gloriously romantic sentiment, if ever there was one, isn’t it?
A New Yorker cartoon shows two women coming through the front door in the home of one of them. A man, presumably the husband of one of the women, is lying on the sofa. A pizza is on the coffee table. The man has picked up a piece of pizza by a gripper attached to a computerized miniature helicopter, and with his joy stick, he is lowering the pizza into his open maw for a bite. The man’s wife says to her friend, “Technology is ruining us.”
Well, probably not. Or at least not yet. Besides, I have read that fire departments are experimenting with using very small drones to fly into burning buildings, looking for people, to avoid having to send in firefighters for that dangerous task. In theory, and perhaps in fact, that may be an outstanding idea.
Facebook has enabled countless people who have been adopted as children to locate their biological parents. That is an enormous advantage --- provided the biological parents and the adoptive parents approve. But Facebook and other such social networks can do within hours or days what might previously have taken years, if the information could be discovered at all. I don’t even know how Facebook works, never having seen it, but however it does what it does, that is an example of an amazing “app,” as they say in Techno-Speak.
After a tornado, a lady in Indiana used Facebook to help people find valuables which were lost in the storm. A little squib in the paper said she created an “I Found Your Memory” page, and by means of it she returned birth certificates, photographs, paintings, and other items. A woman in Cincinnati found another woman’s high school diploma as the result of a tornado. Before returning it to her, she had it properly framed. Fantastic.
Computers and other forms of technology are doing extraordinary things in medicine. Human beings are living much longer and better because of this technology. Diagnostic tests using computers detect health issues which heretofore might never be diagnosed until it was way too late. Fantastic.
Skype audibly and visually connects family members and friends across hundreds or thousands of miles instantaneously. Dick Tracy told us for decades it was coming, but at last it has come. And it costs only whatever the monthly service fee is. Fantastic.
For some people though, all the technology becomes just too time-consuming or stressful. The New Yorker: two men in a bar. The one says to the other, “I used to call people, then I got into e-mailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone.” How many of us have become victimized or insidiously lobotomized by our gadgets?
Lots of money can be made instantaneously because of computers in financial transactions, and lots of money can keep from being lost by the same means. There are obviously downsides to all this, but still it enables people who spend all day watching the ticker tape to act immediately, even though ticker tape no longer ticks nor is it a tape, but is instead a constant line on CNBC. Technology has revolutionized the financial industry. Fantastic - - - I guess.
Major universities around the world are putting some of their best professors online who teach some of their most popular courses. Students can take these courses for a fraction of the cost they would pay were they in residence at these prestigious schools. The courses are called MOOC by an acronym: massive open online course. M.I.T. and Harvard sponsor an introductory course on circuits, whatever that might connote. It sounds technological to me, and therefore no doubt like an oblong blur. The man who heads edX, the non-profit which arranged for that particular MOOC to be offered, said that 150,000 students signed up for it worldwide. That represents more students than M.I.T. has had graduate in its entire history. Many students are starting to earn degrees from courses they have taken online. Fantastic - - - I guess.
Hillary Clinton opened 194 Twitter accounts to engage in electronic-diplomacy, or e-diplomacy for short, although it isn’t much shorter. By Twitter she could reach millions of citizens of other nations, putting her spin on what our nation is trying to do diplomatically. Twitter influences how other people think about the USA, and she wanted to make that as positive as possible. Fantastic.
Is Google thoroughly reliable? I don’t know. I never used to use to Google, but now I do, at least occasionally. However, sometimes I get information with which I disagree. Wikipedia in Googleworld is especially dubious, as far as I am concerned. Bartlett’s is still better for quotes --- if Bartlett’s has the quote, which sometimes it doesn’t, which is when I go to Google, and then wonder if I am getting the straight scoop.
Jane McGonigal is the author of Reality Is Broken. She postulates that many people prefer computer games to reality, because they think they are more challenging and exciting. In her words, they “opt out” of reality for the virtual reality of their games. Recently I heard about a local man who decided he was addicted to his computer when it told him he had played over 100,000 games of Spider Solitaire (whatever that is), and he gave it up, cold turkey. It is impossible to deny that growing millions of people around the world are addicted to the politics, pornography, or pandering which is readily available online. Some folks, especially retirees, spend ten or more hours a day constantly surfing for the latest big wave of cybernetic stimulation. And why, apparently, do they do this? Because, as for mountain climbers, it is there. It exists. And they get hooked. Most people don’t, but some do.
When radio first became popular, I suspect some people became addicts. When television became popular, even more new addicts were recruited. But for some reason, the Internet seems particularly addictive. The Center for Internet Addiction Recovery classifies this obsession and/or compulsion as a condition in which “the Internet becomes the organizing principle of addicts’ lives.” Tao Ran, the director of the Beijing office of this organization, says that anyone who spends six hours a day on the Internet for at least three months may be classified as an addict. Around the world there are many millions of Internet addicts, and in this community there are perhaps hundreds or thousands. And why? Again, because it is there.
Are friendships suffering because of the time people spend online? Some people think so. However, Internetese has created one of innumerable words for overcoming this problem: “friending.” Does friending truly create new friends? Possibly. But probably? Hmmm.
Secret Service officials and political scientists have noted that the Internet has raised the level of incivility in our country. Apparently the vitriol exhibited in online threats to the President has become especially vile. In last year’s political campaign some terrible and false claims went out about certain candidates. If there were no Internet, and the people who have such venomous thoughts had to rely on print media, would they make such scurrilous claims? Not.
A while ago two Non Sequitur elderly gents were sitting on a bench outside a warm-climate retirement home. Phil says, “I heard you died, Bernie.” “Uh…nope. Still here.” Silence in the third frame. Then Phil says, “You sure? It was from a pretty reliable source.” Bernie responds, “Do us all a favor and stay off the Internet, Phil.”
Manti Te’o was a star linebacker for the Notre Dame football team. He achieved a heretofore unattained degree of notoriety when a young man he didn’t know created for him a Stanford University paramour who didn’t exist. The Internet was the primary means for the deception. This incident may have scuttled Manti Te’o’s hopes of making it really big in the NFL draft. Not long after this bizarre story broke, a Non Sequitur cartoon showed a rack of Valentine’s Day cards, with a section for “Wife,” “Husband,” Girlfriend,” and “Boyfriend.” Then there was an equally large section entitled “Imaginary Internet Fiance’.” A woman was looking at the card display, and it said in framed box beside her, “Muriel decides it’s time to stop trying to figure out anything anymore.” Only in the Internet Age could such a thought occur.
A while back the US attorney in New Orleans resigned. Two of the attorneys in his office were posting online rants on a news website in the Big Easy, using pseudonyms. Their complaints were registered against federal judges and current court cases. Proper newspapers or magazines would not allow such things to appear on their pages, but it is difficult to stop such attacks over the Internet. However, if it can be discovered who wrote such anonymous defamations, it is possible, even if hard, to prosecute them. Apparently the federal attorney feared their identity might be learned, so he resigned.
A full-page ad in an international news magazine said this in large print: “We Are Now Closed Because of Lies and Bad Reviews on the Internet.” It then had a subtext in less bold type: “Don’t Get Put Out of Business by Negative Content on the Internet.” Angie’s List tells people how to find good companies for home services. But what happens if someone gets on Annie’s or Artie’s or Amy’s Bad List? It is much harder to address that problem on the Internet than in the print media. Or at least that has been true up to the present time.
Aaron Swartz believed that information should be made public online, even if it was collected through the cybercrime of hacking. He was particularly interested in procuring federal information which the government does not want made public. US prosecutors brought 13 charges of fraud and the theft of intellectual property against him, for which he could have served 35 years in prison. He felt hounded by the feds, and a year ago he took his own life. From 2010 to 2011 indictments for cybercrime went up 64%, and convictions increased by 71%. Obviously this is a major problem, but how should it be resolved? Can it be resolved?
Roughly 80% of Americans do their banking online, according to the banking consultancy Novantas, thinking it is safe. Not so, say tech security gurus. Hackers have developed what are called banking Trojans, software programs capable of filching identity information from financial institutions. Tens of thousands of these programs are constantly seeking to infiltrate the cybernetic security walls. The smaller the bank, the better the security, or at least the fewer the attacks. Nationwide banks are the most likely to succumb to these computerized Trojans.
NBC News reported that hackers can get into your laptop and use its camera to watch you do whatever it is you do in the room where you keep your laptop. How does that strike you?
Of Internet security experts, 61% say existing technologies don’t address the complete threat of hacking into corporate information. Among companies, 34% say they had at least one security breach in the past year. If that is true for corporations, how safe are you and I on our PCs at home? ID Analytics’ ID:A Labs claims there are 10,000 identity fraud rings operating in the US. They say there is a “belt of fraud” that is the most pronounced in the Southeast, and especially in South Carolina. I could give you many other such cheerful statistics, but I won’t.
How much pornography and other such material should be allowed online? It is a civil liberties issue. When an attempt was made to get many nations to sign on to a global treaty governing Internet decency, dozens of nations refused, on the grounds of freedom of speech. No one can deny that tragedies have occurred when young girls were lured into face-to-face meetings with Internet stalkers, but what can be done to prevent it? Are parents as careful as they should be? Are teenagers or children sufficiently responsible in how they use the Internet?
Most of this lecture has raised questions about Information Technology and the Internet, rather than to provide answers. As I said earlier, however, and as I shall now say again, there are many factors which seem to be of undeniable benefit. It is claimed that Facebook started the Arab Spring. If so, bravo, because changes are needed in the countries where the Arab Spring took root, however the issues are ultimately sorted out.
A young man named Ben Rattray started an organization called Change.org. By means of it, people can sign petitions for or against all kinds of issues. In less than five years, Change.org built a membership of 10 million people, three times as many as have Amnesty International or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). When Bank of America tried to impose a $5 monthly fee for debit card users, 300,000 people signed the Change.org petition against it, and the bank quickly backed down, as did other banks which planned to do the same thing. If many hands make light work, many names make things happen - - - or not.
There is a new technology called 3D printing. By means of it, three-dimensional objects are created by printing one layer on top of another, until the desired object is made. It is being used for hearing aids and aircraft parts, among other things. And it can be done anywhere: in an office, a small warehouse, or a village in the Australian Outback. The operator simply downloads the design, and turns on his special printer. Presto! – a new whizbang widget or whatever.
Nanotechnology relies on very small bits of matter. We might call it Tiny Technology. By it crockery is manufactured that is cleaned more quickly and easily, bandages are produced that help heal cuts, and engines are designed that run more efficiently.
In the manufacture of many products, the costs of labor are becoming negligible. High-tech machines do most of the work. Jobs for common laborers are lost, to be sure, but far more high-paying jobs for skilled workers are created. We need to improve the education of our students in science, math, and technology, but that can be done, if as a society we organize to do it. Another thing this means is that many of the jobs which have gone offshore to places like China or India will come back to the US, because new jobs in the new technology require educated and very able workers, and we can produce them right here.
Gordon Moore was the co-founder of Intel. It was he who decreed Moore’s Law, which says that computer chips double in power every 18 months. That increases productivity and efficiency. The rate seems to be slowing down, though, and that may mean there will soon be more jobs for lower-skilled workers. They are the ones who have been most adversely affected over the past thirty years or so. So maybe they will soon find work again.
The irrepressible Al Gore says that over the next five years the number of mobile-only Internet users will increase 56-fold, and the information-flow over Smartphones will increase 47-fold. How you come up with such highly specific figures is beyond me. You need computers to determine it; that’s all I can figure out.
And that brings us to the penultimate section of this lecture. What shall be the long-range effects of computers and the Internet on people all over the developed world? A great deal has been written about this, but probably little of it has appeared online. Nicholas Carr has written three books about this topic. By their titles, you can guess the nature of his main thrust: Does IT Matter? – Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. If they sound too lengthy or negative, you can read his article in The Atlantic Monthly, called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (July/August 2008; you could maybe find it online, by first clicking on “Google.”) In his third book, he says that young adults average more than 20 hours a week online, but only 49 minutes a week reading books, magazines, and newspapers. Again, where he gets those numbers I don’t know. But if they’re accurate, they’re astonishing --- and dismaying.
Don Campbell teaches journalism at Emory University in Atlanta. On the first day of his classes, he always asks new students this question: “What do you read, at least fairly regularly?” Years ago they would cite many newspaper or magazines. Now they are much more likely to say CNN.com, ESPN.com, or other such Internet websites. Recently a would-be journalist, when asked what she reads, honestly answered, “Nothing.” Can you imagine it: a journalism student who doesn’t read anything? In an editorial in USA Today, Prof. Campbell wrote, “My own interpretation is that, for the younger generation, the Internet has moved knowledge from the brain to the fingertips: Who needs to know about Impressionism or Charles Dickens or George Washington Carver or – hell – even George Washington? Why carry such information around in your head when Google will deliver it in seconds?”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is an enormously important question. There are more and more people who know less and less but who know where to find the answers whenever they feel they need to know something. They are not walking, talking repositories of knowledge; instead they are all thumbs; they are all fingers, ready to turn their Smartphones or computers into high-tech encyclopedias to Google whatever they want to find out. But the information thus derived escapes the cranial cavities of many of them as quickly as they Googled it.
For folks such as these, it is not the information as such which is gained by means of Information Technology that matters. Rather it is the technology itself that matters. But the technology doesn’t matter that much! Information Technology is not the issue; it is the information itself that matters, and what one does with it, and how it, the information, the potential knowledge, changes one’s life. Too many people have become information dilettantes, surfing Google or other websites in the vain belief that they are becoming educated by doing so. Anyone who thinks Wikipedia is always reliable in all it says has not read nearly enough hard-copy printed material. People can skim the surface of oodles of subjects, but until they read deeply about things, and take time to ruminate and cogitate and meditate upon them, they have not delved sufficiently deeply into the very stuff of human existence. Besides, there is much material on the Internet that is simply bloviated nonsense written by people who would be laughed out of serious editorial offices in newspaper, magazine, or book publishing houses.
Many people who read solely or largely on the Internet suffer from intellectual St. Vitus’ Dance. They leap from one thing to another at the click of a mouse, supposing that they are learning things. They may be - - - or they may merely be scrambling their ability to concentrate. There is something about looking at a screen which causes the eye and the mind inexorably to speed up. I don’t know why; psychologists and other researchers probably have answers.
But if you have a book or a magazine or a newspaper in your hands, you are more likely to stop to reflect on what you are reading. Reading hard-copy is cerebrally different from reading online, it seems to me. There is an indefinable but very real qualitative difference.
Albert Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, and moved to the USA, where he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana in Missoula. He recently published a book called Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology. In an interview in Christian Century Magazine, he said that technology is not just a tool. Instead, he called it “an inducement, and it’s so strong that for the most part people find themselves unable to refuse it. To proclaim it to be a neutral tool flies in the face of how people behave.”
Then Dr. Borgmann spoke positively about some forms of technology. “For instance, medical technology has given us freedom from many diseases, and gas and fuel technology give us warmth that furnaces make available.” (Parenthetically I would note that somebody from Missoula, Montana would be more likely to think about that than somebody from Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.) He continued: “Philosophers of technology tend not to celebrate such technological achievements because they get celebrated all the time. Philosophers point out the liabilities – what happens when technology moves beyond lifting genuine burdens and starts freeing us from burdens we should not want to be rid of.” (Parenthetically I would also note that The OLD Philosopher got to be the way he is because perhaps he is more likely to see liabilities than assets in many of the things we take for granted. There has always been a paucity of positive prophetic philosophers.)
Finally Albert Borgmann said something that is well worth pondering, and he definitely said it without pandering. “One more factor is very powerful in shielding technology from examination: liberal democratic individualism – the notion that the individual is to be the judge of what is the good life for him or her. In the abstract it sounds like a wonderful principle, and there’s a lot of important reality to it. But it makes it very difficult to generate a meaningful examination of our culture, which inevitably is a common and collective enterprise.”
Ultimately, Information Technology ought to be considered primarily in how it affects US, and not simply how it affects ME. Its collective considerations are far more important than its individual considerations, even though most of you will probably be wondering about how all this philosophical palaver touches your own personal life.
A year ago Time Magazine’s cover story (Feb. 21, 2011) was about something I had never heard of, called “The Singularity.” It began by giving the dictionary definition of singularity: “n: The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.” The story featured a technologist named Raymond Kurzweil. He has worked with computers his whole life, and he believes they are leading us to the singularity. The word singularity comes from astrophysics, and it refers to a point in space-time at which the rules or ordinary physics don’t apply. And example is a black hole, although black holes are just black holes to the vast majority of the folks on this planet; we haven’t a clue what they are.
Anyway, Raymond Kurzweil postulated that by 2045 computers, or more likely perhaps, a computer, a super-computer Cray or who knows what, will have surpassed all the collective brainpower of all humans then alive. Singularitarians are the people who share this belief. Prof. Kurzweil prognosticates that technology will be able to stop the aging process, and genetically to make everyone much smarter. Everyone will become physically immortal too, as an added bonus. There is much more to the long article than this, but you get the idea.
Well, maybe - - - but I doubt it. And in any case, I am moved to ask another question: Who is more culpable for the downside of technology: The people who collectively have created it, or the ones who, individually, have become addicted to it? Would we be better off, for example, if those who knew that nuclear weapons could be developed had not developed them? The answer is: Of course. But the response is also, If they hadn’t done it, really bad guys would have done it, and they would do it ASAP. Therefore it was intellectually and even ethically necessary that we did it, so that we had nukes before they had nukes, and our nukes kept them from using their nukes. Okay, perhaps. But how about computers?
Raymond Kurzweil says that the average cellphone is about a millionth the size of and a millionth the price of the computer he used at MIT forty years ago, and is a thousand times more powerful. No doubt that is true. But is it an unqualified Very Good Thing?
Not necessarily. It depends on how essential we believe a cellphone or its equivalent in other technology is to every man, woman, and child on the earth. Is it a tool, or is it the summation of the meaning of life? If it is the latter, ever, then I guess the singularity will already have come, and we may as well meekly surrender to whatever cockamamie results it shall create. If it is the former, which it is, as a species we will keep plugging along as we have up to now, doing the best we can with what we have. What we have in cyber technology is certainly extraordinary, but it is unlikely to usher in an entirely new epoch in the history of humanity.
I have presented the information in this lecture to you with a few similarities to how people who spend hours a day online receive their information --- by cerebral bombardment. But if you hear it, it is qualitatively different from reading it online. As time goes on, there will demands for national or international laws to govern the Internet more closely. I predict that some of those laws will be enacted, but most will fail.
I wanted to end with a particular quote, but I wasn’t absolutely positive of its wording, or where it came from. I Googled it, and got it instantaneously, which is far more quickly than that giant IBM computer in Stirling Hall at the University of Wisconsin would have told me 50+ years ago, except that it wouldn’t be bothered with having this tidbit stored in its enormous innards. It’s what Sgt. Phil Esterhaus used to say just as the police and detectives left the precinct every day on Hill Street Blues: “Let’s be careful out there.”