| Felix Stalder on Mon, 3 Aug 1998 21:06:20 +0200 (MET DST) |
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| <nettime> Technology and Human Responsibility |
[This is one of the best newletters that deal critically with technology
and its social aspects. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of "The Future
Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst". Felix]
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #75 Copyright 1998 Bridge Communications July 30, 1998
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Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com)
On the Web: http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
CONTENTS:
*** Editor's Note
*** Quotes and Provocations
Following up
Is Genetic Engineering `Natural'?
The Internet and Competition
Multitasking Ourselves to Death
Brief Notes
Departments
*** Correspondence
Vaclav Havel and Computer Language (Charles Bell)
Don't Malign Complexity (Alex Rice)
Marilyn Monroe and Our Virtuality (Bryce Muir)
*** Announcements and Resources
An Environmental and Health Newsletter
*** Who Said That?
*** About this newsletter
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What People Are Saying about NETFUTURE
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I've spent many years trying to get a slow-moving,
tradition-bound institution to appreciate some of the possibilities
of technology in adult education, and as a result, my first
reaction to NETFUTURE was one of mingled alarm and anger.
These feelings changed as I read more of your work and began
to appreciate the logic of your concerns. Since then
I've come to regard NETFUTURE as a kind of ethical touchstone.
It has helped me reflect on the consequences of the educational
programs I create and also on the effects of technology
on the quality of my own life.
(For the identity of the speaker,
see "Who Said That?" below.)
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*** Editor's Note (25 lines)
Again this year I'll be taking August off. The next issue of NETFUTURE,
due out after Labor Day, will include another installment of Langdon
Winner's Tech Knowledge Revue.
It's becoming fairly clear that, by about the turn of the year, I'll need
to find financial support for NETFUTURE if the newsletter is to continue.
Among the alternatives: (1) I could ask for voluntary donations, although
I have no idea what level of income that would bring. (2) I could seek
grant money from somewhere. (If you are a knowledgeable grant-seeker and
might be interested in working with NETFUTURE, let me hear from you.) (3)
The newsletter could affiliate with a compatible organization on mutually
beneficial terms. (4) I could increase my speaking commitments,
conceivably raising enough funds that way to underwrite the newsletter.
That fourth option is already part of what makes NETFUTURE possible. If
you are in a position to help arrange a speaking engagement, by all means
get in touch. (My current speaking calendar and related information is
available at http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/personal/schedule.html.) I'm
also open to other ideas.
Have a technology-redeeming summer!
SLT
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*** Quotes and Provocations (473 lines)
Following up
------------
** In NF #46 ("Child, Teacher, World: Three Elements of Education") I told
the story of a boy and his father who, walking along a trail in the
mountains, came upon a rattlesnake. The two of them savored this
creature's beautiful and fearsome qualities and then went on their way.
Later, the boy remarked that "this has been the best day of my life" -- a
reaction you will not likely hear in response to the most exotic wildlife
on a video screen.
Now a friend of mine, Stephen Edelglass, has sent me a letter containing
this paragraph:
On Monday I took my grandson on a hike to the top of West Mountain.
This is the mountain just west of Bear Mountain. It is a long ridge
with many rocky ledges providing dramatic views of the Hudson to the
North and South, and of the Ramapos to the West. We saw lots of
wildlife: vultures and hawks soaring below us, a doe that watched us as
we watched her, and a very large snake that formed a hood when it
lifted its head and faced us. (The hood disappeared when the snake put
its head down and moved along the ground.) But most dramatic was the
rattlesnake a few feet from us that Ian noticed when we got up from our
lunch. It was the largest rattler I have ever seen, somewhere between
three and four feet long, three inches in diameter, and nine or ten
rattles. We watched, both of us thrilled, for a long time. After we
climbed back down, and while walking along the valley trail, Ian said
to me, "This has been the best day of my life!" I was dumbfounded at
hearing exactly the words of Barry Angell's son that you quoted in your
book.
** In NF #70 ("Why is the Moon Getting Farther Away?") I talked about
feeding birds from my hand. Then I asked, "What would it cost us to wire,
say, every third-grade class to a few birds? Just chickadee feed".
As it happens, I've just received a promotional copy of *Birds & Blooms*
magazine (Collector's Edition #15) with a delightful little story about
how John Leeser introduces fifth graders to the joys of bird feeding. I
wish you could see the pictures: a girl holds a camera with telephoto
lens up to her eye while a chickadee, clutching the bottom rim of the
lens, peers in; another girl reads a birder's guide with a chickadee
perched atop the book; and a boy strains his eyes upward as a downy
woodpecker attacks a glob of suet placed on his knit cap.
You have only to look at these pictures to see that these kids' lives are
being changed in a healthy direction. Which is more than I can say about
the following item....
** In that same NETFUTURE article I mentioned the boy who, when taken to
an aquarium, asked, "Is this virtual reality or real reality?" Then in NF
#74 ("Complex, Emergent, Self-organizing Nonsense") I reported my
discovery of the Boston Virtual FishTank -- a new public aquarium whose
fish, powered by computer graphics, are spared such problems as water
pollution and delinquent caretakers.
Now NETFUTURE reader Steve Baumgarten alerts me to a Japanese product
being sold for display in hotels, restaurants, and corporate lobbies.
It's a small aquarium consisting of a thin water tank with a video monitor
behind it. Using laser disks and high-definition video technology, the
system displays images of fish on the monitor. The water (with bubbles
percolating through it) gives a 3-D effect. As Reuters put it,
Busy people who love to keep colorful fish but often forget to feed
them or clean out their containers can now find the answer to their pet
problem.
If fish aren't your thing, you'll soon be able to try a "dogbot". Sony
engineers have developed
a robotic dog, complete with 64-bit central processing unit, 8
megabytes of memory, and a supersensitive camera "eye" that enables it
to obey motion commands -- if you stick your hand out, Dogbot will sit.
The robot is reconfigurable, so that the owner can swap out limbs or
even the head, and each module is "intelligent" -- equipped with its
own motor and control chip. (Edupage, from *Business Week*, July 20,
1998)
The head of the research lab expects the dogbot to find a market among
children sometime around the year 2000.
** In an article about high-tech agricultural products ("Garbling the
Seeds of the Future", NF #74) I cited the difficulty we will have in
keeping genetically engineered and conventional crops separate. Now I've
heard that an organic farmer in England has sued a neighboring farmer,
arguing that his neighbor's engineered crop will cross-pollinate with his
own, ruining his organic certification. The judge threw the case out,
apparently arguing that a degree of contamination is unavoidable and
therefore must be accepted. (I don't have a source for this story, other
than that it is said to have appeared in the *Guardian*. If you have
further information, I'd like to hear it.)
Is Genetic Engineering `Natural'?
---------------------------------
In response to a N.Y. *Times* article on genetically engineered foods,
Carl B. Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization,
wrote a letter to the editor. He objected to the claim by critics that
"what they do is `natural' while modern biology is not". After all,
Archaeologists have documented twelve thousand years of agriculture
throughout which farmers have genetically altered crops by selecting
certain seeds from one harvest and using them to plant the next, a
process that has led to enormous changes in the crops we grow and the
food we eat. It is only in the past thirty years that we have become
able to do it through biotechnology at high levels of predictability,
precision and safety.
One often hears this line of thought. The first problem with it is that
it invites us to remain uncritical about technical developments during
those 12,000 years. In this sense, the argument simply assumes what it
sets out to prove, which is that we have every reason to remain uncritical
about modern technical developments.
The alternative is to realize that all manipulation of living organisms
has implications for human health, for the balance of the world, and for
the organisms themselves. Anyone undertaking the manipulation shoulders
grave responsibilities, and we should not assume without detailed
investigation that these responsibilities have always been well exercised
in the past.
The second problem lies in Feldbaum's gross refusal to make the obvious
distinctions. In traditional breeding, the integrity of the organisms
themselves, their functional wholeness, placed limits upon what could be
done -- limits you could fairly call "natural". To take a contemporary
example: you could not cross a strawberry with a cold-water fish in order
to obtain strawberries with "anti-freeze" genes.
The problem now is that we can break through these limits, but we have not
replaced the safeguard they represented. Such a safeguard can only come
from our own intimate, respectful understanding of the organism as a whole
and its interactions with its environment. But this sort of holistic
knowledge is exactly what the genetic engineers are not much interested
in.
Feldbaum betrays his own lack of interest when he lauds the "high levels
of predictability, precision and safety" in biotechnolgy. Yes, the
engineers often have a pretty good idea about which new proteins will
arise from the introduction of new genes -- and this is often all they
care about. But understanding what will happen when those proteins enter
the ecology of the organism as a whole is, by all sober accounts, so far
from being understood in any rigorous way, or even approached, as to make
Feldbaum's claim of precision a ghastly joke. (See "Next: Pigs That Fly?"
in NF #72, and "The Trouble with Genetic Engineering" in NF #31.)
Our ignorance about the integral functioning of organisms is matched only
by our ignorance about the integral functioning of ecosystems. But we do
know something about the cascade of unpredicted effects when we introduce
a non-native species, or remove a native one, or disturb a watershed, or
subject a region to the noise of jet airplanes. We crudely poke at the
same, boundless tangle of interrelationships when we introduce transgenic
organisms. As Andrew Kimbrell puts it:
Here you are creating millions of novel organisms, organisms that the
Earth has never seen, and then releasing them into the environment.
They are exactly analogous to exotic organisms like kudzu vine or those
responsible for chestnut blight or Dutch elm disease. Any time you
introduce an exotic organism into a new environment you are throwing
the ecological dice .... Many of us have spent much of our working
lives addressing the terrible ecological problems created by chemical
pollution. [But] chemical pollution, however horrible, does dilute
over time, and it can often be contained. However, once you release an
organism into the environment it cannot be recalled or contained. It
will not dilute but rather will reproduce, disseminate, and mutate. It
is unstoppable. (*Turning Away from Technology*, edited by Stephanie
Mills, Sierra Club Books, 1997, p. 79)
A case in point: Corn genetically engineered to produce the B.t. toxin
interacts with other organisms beside the target pests. A study reported
in *Environmental Entomology* (vol. 27, no. 2, Apr. 1998, pp. 480-87)
found that beneficial predators (green lacewing larvae) feeding on insects
that eat the corn plants suffer higher mortality rates. This means that
the transgenic corn could help to undermine "integrated pest management",
which makes use of beneficial insects and has had widespread success with
many crops. In addition, there is the likelihood of rapid development of
resistance among pests exposed to large tracts of transgenic, B.t. corn.
The Internet and Competition
----------------------------
One wonders how long certain misbegotten platitudes regarding the Internet
will retain their status as conventional wisdom. One of these has to do
with how the Net fundamentally alters competitive relations. As a PR
Newswire headline recently put it:
Internet, the Great Equalizer, Levels the Playing Field for U.S. Small
Businesses.
John Graham, president of a marketing services and consulting firm,
elaborates:
The Internet has leveled every playing field. Because of the Internet,
every individual has the potential for becoming a publisher, operating
a business or communicating worldwide. This staggering concept is only
beginning to penetrate our understanding....
Today, anyone can interact or do business with anyone, anywhere. The
Internet gives both individuals and companies unlimited opportunities
to do business universally. (*Houston Business Journal*, May 4, 1998)
There is a major confusion here. The Internet may be encouraging a
globalization of business, but this is not the same thing as leveling the
playing field. The telephone and postal systems already gave everyone
"equal access" to global markets, but such technical and theoretical
access tells us little about the commercial, social, historical, legal,
political, and cultural matrix the entrepreneur must negotiate in order to
achieve success.
This fact was recently underscored when three online brokerage houses --
DLJDirect, E*Trade Securities, and Waterhouse Securities -- agreed to pay
America Online $25 million each for links in the AOL financial services
area. According to J. William Gurley in a recent "Above the Crowd
Dispatch", the deal (which is good for two years) has "profoundly shaken"
many Internet retailers. As they are now discovering,
It's sad but unquestionably true that the physical distribution network
of yesterday has been replaced by a new virtual distribution system
that is as expensive and difficult to navigate as its predecessor.
Opening a commerce-enabled Web site without a portal partner is similar
to opening a retail store in the desert. Sure, it's cheap, but does
anybody stop there?
One wonders how all those shaken retailers thought that thousands of
online businesses were simultaneously going to connect with the new,
"universal" marketplace. Does putting the telephone book's yellow pages
online magically enable the consumer to avoid the selection process and
attend to all businesses in the world at once?
The fallacy here also shows itself in the belief that "the Net gives
political organizations and activist groups a powerful advantage".
Advantage over whom -- the thousands of other groups on the Net who also
have an advantage? Unsurprisingly, this sort of claim has arisen most
insistently among the pioneering online organizations in each field. The
few early adopters of technology *may* have an advantage over their
unconnected peers; in the end, however, they're all just playing the same
game, except that the pressure for fast reaction, novelty, and ceaseless
technical upgrading is now raised several notches.
You could call the fallacy at work in all this the "formalist's fallacy".
One thing the Net does do is to extend the range of formal connection
possibilities. But our ability to capitalize on formal possibility is
limited by our powers of attention, and it is not at all clear that the
individual human being today can attend to more people or discussions or
political issues or news than he could yesterday. We can, as always,
trade depth of attention for a more superficial breadth -- something the
Net seems to encourage. And we can let software select what we will
attend to. But as for our powers of attention themselves, there is every
evidence that the electronic media are doing more to distract and diminish
them than to strengthen them. (See following item.)
Multitasking Ourselves to Death
-------------------------------
The N.Y. *Times* (July 23, 1998) ran a story about the "travails of
multitasking", which began with this personal sketch:
It's hard for Michael Redd to say just when doing one thing at a time
became so deeply dissatisfying. His ratings with customers have
certainly soared since he started responding to their email as soon as
it chimes in, no matter if he is on the phone or eating lunch or poring
over a spreadsheet on some other screen.
But his fondness for multitasking is not limited to the workplace. Mr.
Redd ... is happiest when his attention is most divided, like on a
recent weekend afternoon when he watched a movie on television while
talking to his sister and writing on his laptop. During commercial
breaks, he flipped through his CD jukebox with a remote control,
searching for a song whose name he had forgotten.
"I need to be able to do many things at once all the time", Mr. Redd
said. "This may sound strange, but it makes me feel better."
And the article ended with this:
For Jai Mani, an eleven-year-old in Manhattan ... the urge to multitask
is like "a craving for food". When he gets home from rollerblading
camp, he wants to do three things. "Instead of listening to music for
thirty minutes, watching TV for thirty minutes and checking your email
for thirty minutes, you can do them all at the same time", said Jai,
who has been known to watch television and keep an eye on his computer
game in the high-gloss reflection of the piano while having a lesson.
"It's just easier that way."
We also hear about a database designer who "insists he can scan Internet
groups `subconsciously' while he talks to friends on the phone". An
academic opines that "you can't expand time, so what you try to do is
deepen time by doing more things in the same period". Meanwhile, the
article's author, Amy Harmon, observes that
The tasks we find ourselves attending to, however, briefly, are often
determined by what pops up on our screen.
As expected, the idea also surfaces that young people raised on MTV may be
better than the rest of us at filtering and processing huge amounts of
information from different sources. In fact, a bank executive is quoted
as saying we had better feed this insatiable capacity or else we will
"stifle" these go-getters. He considers their new capacities a "real sea
change".
Finally,
Many multitaskers describe a sense of well-being that comes from the
variety of tasks they are performing and the control they feel they
exercise over which one comes first.
Having used only multitasking computers since I first set my hands on a
keyboard in 1980, I, too, know this particular satisfaction. It is only
during the past few years that I have, with any seriousness, asked myself
what sort of toll I pay for an "interrupt-driven" style of consciousness.
I don't think I have yet gotten to the heart of the matter, but I *am*
quite sure that the crucial issues are generally overlooked.
If there is a single theme of NETFUTURE, it is the need for us to maintain
a wakeful relation to technology. Assaults upon our attention are
decisively important because our consciously directed attention is the
only point at which we are fully awake. Attending to something is what it
*means* to be awake to it. And we can only attend in this sense to one
thing at a time.
It is true that we can do many things at once. We can talk, drive a car,
breathe, and digest food all at the same time. But our waking *attention*
is single and indivisible. We may be able to switch it rapidly from one
thing to another, but at any given instant it is consumed by one thing
alone. (There are many ways you can verify this. One is to look at an
ambiguous figure, such as a line drawing of a cube. You will find that
you cannot see both orientations of the cube at the same time, despite the
fact that both are "there" waiting for you to attend to them.)
The person who watches television while talking on the phone is missing a
good part of the program and a good part of the conversation. Everything
may be taken in sensorially, but only one thing at a time is attended to.
What is happening when you manage to "do both things at once" is that you
listen for a moment to the conversation and then, redirecting your
attention, you pull from memory the last few phrases heard from the
television. And while you are attending to your memories, you are no
longer listening to your conversation partner *or* the television. You
may alternate in this way with more or less success, but never without
sacrificing the creative potentials of a profound and sustained attention.
So why does all this matter? Because the point where we exercise our
attention is the point where we manifest our highest capacities. It is
the only point where we can gain mastery over technology (or anything
else) and the only point where we can deepen understanding. Moreover, if
we are not masters of our own attention, we are tools of our surroundings
and of our own subconscious.
You can assess your powers of attention easily enough. Simply see how
long you can hold your attention upon a single topic -- say, a common
physical object -- exploring its form and function, its materials and
manufacture, its history, and so on. You will not be unusual if, despite
your most intense efforts, your mind wanders within the first thirty
seconds. Which means your own mind is out of control. If you want a
thorough lesson in humility, try the exercise for ten minutes. Unless you
are an extremely rare individual, you (like I) will be forced to admit
that your sovereign wakefulness is discouragingly dim. In other words,
not much of our governing mental activity is something we do, as opposed
to something that happens to us.
To shift your attention rapidly from one thing to another, as prompted by
your environment -- an insistent questioning tone in your caller's voice,
or a bit of spectacular violence on the television screen -- this is not
the epitome of "executive efficiency", despite claims to the contrary. It
is more like the abandonment of yourself -- and therefore also of the
other person (in this case, the telephone caller).
I am not saying that the many things we "do" beside paying attention are
worthless. It's a good thing the pianist does *not* have to attend to the
movement of his fingers while he is interpreting a sonata. But we need to
recognize that the things we do not attend to gain a certain automatic
character. They are redeemed as fully human only when they are caught up
in a higher attention and made to serve it, as when the pianist's
technique serves his current striving for expression. Remove that higher
attention, and what is left -- whether it is the movement of fingers on a
piano keyboard or on a computer keyboard -- is probably not worth anyone's
time.
I realize that these issues are not likely to grip the public's
imagination. But this, I guess, is very much as it should be. The
important issues today must not grip us, because the vital thing is that
we should rouse ourselves to grip them. This requires an initiative on
our part -- a self-mastery and a strengthening of our powers of willful
attention -- so that we can wrestle with matters of our own choosing
despite the continual coercions coming from without.
If, on the other hand, our attention becomes wholly entrained by the
mechanisms we have set in motion around us -- for example, by "what pops
up on the screen" -- then we will have disappeared into those mechanisms.
This will be true despite our exhilarated feelings of being "in control"
as we shift our attention with executive authority from one interrupt to
another within an overall context we have become incapable of questioning.
Brief Notes
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A few items culled from the recent press:
** Glenn Pascall, writing in the Seattle *Times* (July 5, 1998), picks up
on one of the most significant ironies of modern business:
Many Fortune 500 companies that have the worst records of worker
exploitation -- treating human beings as variable and expendable inputs
to the production process -- are enthusiastic buyers of human-potential
inputs provided by consultants.
What is wrong with this picture: "We care about you because we've found
that caring about you improves our bottom line"?
** Genetic engineers could, if they wished, put the taste of vanilla into
almost any food crop simply by inserting the right gene. Maria Zimmerman,
an official with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says
We looked into this carefully. If we start making fake vanilla we will
destroy the lives of thousands of farmers in Madagascar. We would ruin
the island's economy. So we aren't moving forward with that. (N.Y.
*Times* online, July 20, 1998)
In "Is Genetic Engineering `Natural'?" (see above) I mentioned two levels
of ecological concern where genetic engineers scarcely have a clue: the
"ecology" of the individual organism, and the ecology of the larger
biosphere. Zimmerman's comment about vanilla reminds us of a third,
*social* sphere of concern. It may only be as a result of the inevitable
disturbances in *this* sphere that we finally brake the blind momentum of
the engineers (if we ever do).
** Phil Agre fears that, because of wholesale privacy fears, the Internet
will "sink into the same swamp as 900 telephone numbers". The most
commonly proposed solution, he says, will not work:
The whole idea of self-regulation never made much sense; it presupposes
that the great majority of firms are motivated to join a trade
association, and that this trade association's staff members are
motivated to overcome their inherent conflict of interest by penalizing
their own employers by enforcing codes of conduct when privacy
violations occur. This scenario was already implausible in the old
economy with its dominance by large, stable firms. It is even less
plausible in the new digital economy, where new technology permits
small firms to create impressive Web storefronts for no capital and
companies come and go at the flick of a switch.
You'll find the rest of Agre's brief but powerful commentary at
http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/1998/self-regulation.for.inte.html
** According to the *Chronicle of Higher Education* (Apr. 24, 1998,
online),
If you're a professor and you mention Microsoft programming tools in a
scholarly presentation -- in fact, even if you just use the tools --
Microsoft will send you a check for $200.
This has raised more than a few eyebrows. According to Bill Moninger, a
scientist who has taught courses on technology and ethics, any speaker who
fails to add, "I just got $200 for saying that" is acting unethically.
But George Whitson, a computer science professor, took the $200 and ran.
After all, he says, this is "more open and honest" than many other perks
that businesses offer receptive professors.
"Does anyone seriously think", he asks, "that a researcher would
compromise his integrity for $200".
Graciously, the author of the *Chronicle* piece, Lisa Guernsey, left the
question rhetorical. But even rhetorical questions can have their effect:
a late check of the "Academic Cooperative" website indicates that
Microsoft has discretely withdrawn its offer.
(Thanks to John Cusick for the Seattle *Times* article.)
SLT
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*** Correspondence (122 lines)
Vaclav Havel and Computer Language
----------------------------------
Response to: "How Technology Dumbs Down Language" (NF-73)
From: Charles Bell
As to the convergence of human and computer modes of speech, do you know
that Vaclav Havel wrote a play about this in the days when Vaclav Havel
wrote plays? (That was back in the bad old communist days when Havel was
often in jail and thus had time to think.) I think the play was called
`Potaidapee'. At any rate that was the name of the artificial language
that his barely fictional state wished to impose on its functionaries.
Potaidapee was clear, precise, devoid of ambiguities, subtleties and
presumably of the kind of imagination that can lead to revolutions. Quite
a useful language, and not only for communists.
On the other hand, if we consider only business and technical
communications (which will surely comprise the bulk of international
correspondence on the Net of the future), then `machine language' would be
a distinct improvement over most of the current product in these genres.
(This is not a joke. If you have seen how businesspeople and technicians
usually write, you will know what I mean. Clear, succinct and unambiguous
prose is wanted, is needed, and is rarely achieved. Let the managers feed
their letters into the machine. But the poets should still write their
haiku by hand.)
Charles
Don't Malign Complexity
-----------------------
Response to: "Complex, Emergent, Self-organizing Nonsense" (NF-74)
From: Alex Rice <alrice@swcp.com>
Stephen,
I have been a long-time subscriber and have just read your essay "Complex,
Emergent, Self-organizing Nonsense". Although it's food for thought, as
always, you are really not doing justice to the study of Complexity.
Why the example of virtual fish? Yes, flocking behavior is interesting
but why use that specific example to characterize the entire field? And
what relevance has kids shooting kids at school? Either you are making
cognitive leaps I simply cannot follow, or you are one of those post-
modern thinkers. You can keep your post-modernism, thank-you.
Regarding complexity and it's relevance for programmers, I highly
recommend John Holland's new book (1).
Holland has been working with digital computers since day one. If anyone
is qualified to comment on emergence and complexity, as it pertains to
digital computers, it is John Holland.
I would not dismiss gestalt psychology either. It's a perfectly
legitimate field of study. IMHO most computer programmers could greatly
benefit by studying cognitive psychology, including metaphor and
categorization. I think a lot of programmers would discover that what
they know as Object-Oriented programming and Design-Patterns are actually
domain that linguists and psychologists have been studying for a long
time. Furthermore, I was pleasantly surprised to see that one chapter in
Holland's book is about metaphor and creativity.
On other thing: let's not let the crystal-squeezers and new-agers ruin a
great field of scientific inquiry.
sincerely,
Alex Rice <alrice@swcp.com>
[1] title:Emergence
subtitle:From Chaos to Order
author:John H. Holland
isbn:0-201-14943-5
date:1998
publisher:Addison Wesley
pages:249
binding:hard
price:25.00
Marilyn Monroe and Our Virtuality
---------------------------------
Response to: "Complex, Emergent, Self-organizing Nonsense" (NF-74)
From: Bryce Muir <pegbryce@gwi.net>
> Of course, television, cinema, the Net -- and indeed all available media
> -- increasingly give us countenances that are the faces of nobody we
> need to reckon with.
I just spent six weeks with Marilyn Monroe. At least with her images,
downloaded from the web. I found that carving a likeness of her face was
exceedingly difficult (while revealing her body was a piece of cake). She
had so many faces. A master of makeup, acting, and the pose, her face
mutated to suit the role.
At first I saw her expressions as fundamentally vapid, as though no one
was there behind the mask. Eventually I came to see Marilyn as a
universal mirror. We saw our own fantasies in her. She was everybody's
baby, and nobody's gal (as the Dan Bern lyric has it). This gift of
transparancy helped kill her, I suspect.
It wasn't until the last file strokes that a recognizable Marilyn came out
of the maple, and, then, her face had a surprisingly Afro-American
structure. Of course nobody looked at her face, which may help explain
its invisible quality. Did she become an icon precisely because the real
Marilyn was a blank slate? If so, how apt a goddess for a technomediated
age.
I propose, however, that such faces are precisely what we need reckon
with. The hollow personas it takes our projections to identify are the
universal characters that define the culture. The Bill Clintons.
Charismatic vapidity may have always been the politician's gift, of
course, but the media age casts a wider net for all us fish. It isn't
that nobody is there in virtual reality. It's that we are all there, in
our own heads.
Bryce
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*** Announcements and Resources (26 lines)
An Environmental and Health Newsletter
--------------------------------------
If you're not already familiar with *Rachel's Environment and Health
Weekly*, produced by the Environmental Research Foundation, you might want
to check it out. I suspect that many NETFUTURE readers will find it
useful. Peter Montague, the editor, has just completed a three-part
series on mad cow disease. Among other things, it cites research reports
showing that a significant percentage of "Alzheimer's" patients in this
country turned out, upon posthumous examination, to have Creutzfeld-Jakob
disease, a form of which is considered to be the human version of mad cow
disease. One of the Food and Drug Administration's main arguments that
mad cow disease has not affected humans in the U.S. is that Creutzfeld-
Jakob disease remains extremely rare. But these research reports suggest
there may now be tens or hundreds of thousands of cases.
The newsletter also cites evidence (gathered by Michael Hansen, a
scientist affiliated with the Consumers Union) that large numbers of
"downer" cows in this country -- those that simply lie down and die --
actually have a form of mad cow disease.
To subscribe, send the message "subscribe rachel-weekly your name" to
listserv@rachel.org.
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*** Who Said That? (22 lines)
Brad Cahoon is webmaster at the University of Georgia Center for
Continuing Education where, among other tasks, he designs and writes
distance education learning programs. An active speaker and writer on
issues relating to the Internet and education, he recently edited the
volume, *Adult Learning and the Internet* in the Jossey-Bass series on
"New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education". He and the book's
other authors maintain a web site relating to distance education at
http://www.gactr.uga.edu/internet/. You'll find a table of contents for
the book at http://www.jbp.com/binfo/ndace78t.html.
Amplifying his remarks quoted at the top of this newsletter, Cahoon says
that
In spite of the current faddishness of instructional technology, I have
had to push hard for its appropriate use against the inertia of my
educational bureaucracy. It is this inertia, and the resistance to
both innovation and reflection it represents, that I see as the real
problem -- not the use or non-use of instructional technology.
SLT
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*** About this newsletter (36 lines)
NETFUTURE is a newsletter and forwarding service dealing with technology
and human responsibility. It is hosted by the UDT Core Programme of the
International Federation of Library Associations. Postings occur roughly
once every week or two. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of "The
Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst".
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. You may
also redistribute individual articles in their entirety, provided the
NETFUTURE url and this paragraph are attached.
Current and past issues of NETFUTURE are available on the Web:
http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/
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http://ifla.inist.fr/VI/5/nf/ (mirror site)
To subscribe to NETFUTURE, send an email message like this:
To: listserv@infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca
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No Subject: line is needed. To unsubscribe, the second line shown above
should read instead:
signoff netfuture
Send comments or material for publication to:
Steve Talbott <stevet@oreilly.com>
If you have problems subscribing or unsubscribing, send mail to:
netfuture-request@infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca
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Les faits sont faits.
http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/~stalder
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