Name : Howard Rheingold Time : 14:00 - 15:00 (Balie Theatre) Subject: Net Criticism Date : Sunday 21 January 1996 |
| Technology Criticism, Ethics And You Even enthusiasts -- especially enthusiasts -- ought to skeptically examine the objects of our enthusiasms. I've been waiting for a wave of anti-Internet books. From the look of the first wave, recently arrived, I hope the second wave is better. Clifford Stoll's first book, the best-selling, The Cuckoo's Egg, is a first-person account of the detection, stalking, and capture of a KGB-sponsored computer-cracker. Cuckoo's Egg moves forward because it is a gripping story of intellectual detective work. And the book carries an important ethical message concerning the way we use technology. Computer networks, Stoll eloquently points out, are built on trust. If too many people crack too many computers, and too many people begin to mistrust the medium, global, many-to-many communication will lose its value. Stoll's current effort, Silicon Snake Oil, is again autobiographical, but this time there is no story, just a theme: Computer and online enthusiasts should turn off their computers and get a life. Certainly he's right, for some people. Stoll raises important questions about the way many people abuse their enthusiasm for the cyber-life, and his plea to unplug is one worth making. But certainly, we should look at inflated claims of technologicalutopia with a skeptical eye, but unless one is gifted with omnisci=ence,I don't see what qualifiwhen Stoll begins to resort to sweeping generalizations that could cause people some harm, he loses me. For the Alzheimer's and AIDS caregivers who find online support, the infirm, disabled, elderly, or just plain frightened people who rarely leave their apartments after dark, the Net is a lifeline. Certainly, we should look at inflated claims of technological utopia with a skeptical eye, but unless one is gifted with omniscience, I don't see what qualifies any mortal to judge the quality of another person's life. I sometimes despair when I find it hard to get my 20-year-old friend Justin, an intelligent and informed and deeply wired guy, to read entire books. My underlying suspicions that online media arechanging the way we think set me up to become enthralled by TheGutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts' romantic description of the rich virtual realities that enthusiastic book-readers create in our heads, and which are now threatened by the neo-barbarism of words on screens. Yes, words on screens are different from words on paper, and I agree, reading words in a traditional book is a different kind of experience. But there are reasons, not all of them evil, why the Internet is the fastest-growing new communication medium in history. My enthusiasm for Birkerts' paeans to the glories of book-reading fades when it becomes clear that the author doesn't understand the technology he is criticizing. Birkerts' perhaps justifiable revulsion with and rejection of reading words on screens makes him blind to the attractions and some of the strengths of the technology he rejects. Resisting The Virtual Life, edited by James Brook and Iaian A. Boal (1995, City Lights Books), is an anthology focusing on the political analysis of new communications technologies. Not all the contributors hit the mark, and you have to adjust for each author's political biases, as always, but this anthology does something Stoll and Birkerts fail to do. Zeroing in on the hard realities of political power behind the scenes of the mass-media spectacle, the authors get at some of the questions that we citizens ought to be asking ourselves now. Is the "rhetoric of the technological sublime" blinding enthusiasts to the dark side of communication technology? Is the price of progress ultimately going to be a kind of enslavement to the mechanical world we've created? Are the technologies we now embrace likely to lead to the loss of privacy, increasing government or commercial control of our thoughts and bodies, constraints on our freedom of expression and choice? If you embrace the virtual life, don't do it mindlessly; read what the best critics have to say. For clarity of vision and communication, Lewis Mumford's 1967 classic, The Myth of The Machine is still the place to start. Resisting The Virtual Life updates the technological background. I'm still waiting for someone to get the big picture on the ways our machines are remolding our minds.
Howard Rheingold |
