Written in 2001, this essay may seem dated in some respects. The author believes that its plea for thoughtful consideration of the place of computers in education and in human life remains valid.
I – To the Winter Palace
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to unimproved ends.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere….In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species.”
– Richard Preston, The Hot Zone
I begin writing this on Bastille Day, perhaps an appropriate anniversary for considering computer viruses and the virus of computers.
While many of the odd chaps who create computer viruses seem bent merely on demonstrating their prowess, like long-ago math whizzes who wore slide-rule tie clips and didn’t hesitate to whip them into action, some creators seem to be more revolutionary: they aim to bring the system down.
In either case, the viruses they create seek to convince the computer they enter that they are a legitimate part of its mind: nothing to worry about, sir – just need to drop in and make a minor adjustment. The minor adjustment the serious viruses aim to make, of course, happens to be the obliteration of the computer’s very self.
Lately the viruses are devoting greater attention to the power of self-replication – a significant power for any self-respecting virus. What started as a sort of Yippie phenomenon – let’s all get high and scream “Off the Pigs” in front of the Dean’s office – may be aspiring toward the Winter Palace.
If you use a networked computer to do some of your work, these viruses manifest themselves as the kind of petty irritation that adolescents are amused to perpetrate upon adults. So far, the adults have dealt with them accordingly, hiring Vice-Principal McAfee to swat them down and Officer Krupke to arrest the more serious offenders who go so far as to drop cherry bombs in the digital commodes. And progress whizzes on down the great highway.
Yet the adolescents are undeterred; dozens of viruses are born each week. Do they somehow mirror the digital organism they attack?
II – Ebola
“Let the school administrator announce that he has ordered computers for eight hundred illiterate sophomores, and lo, they have become educated.”
– Lewis Lapham, Imperial Masquerade
The Ebola virus enters the body and essentially devours its innards until no distinction between organs remains, blood flows everywhere, and the host perishes choking up his own insides. Not to put too fine a point on it.
The message the virus brings to the body is this: Only I and my kind deserve to live. Auslanders, join our cause or die! Our victory is certain! Join us!
I think about this message when I listen to my fellow instructional administrators talk. They say, We must join the virus faster! More convincingly! How can we subdue resistance? How can we make the virus more efficient? How can we make it work in our behalf? How can we get these recalcitrant employees to embrace the virus?
Occasionally, I ask them for instruction. How is it, I ask, that this virus is improving the intelligence, the skills, the humanity of our students? Or of ourselves, for that matter? They look at me when I ask these questions as if I were a Martian. I have the sensation that I speak from inside a four-inch-thick glass box, like the one that surrounded Eichmann at his trial. Except that my box has no microphone inside it, nor is the glass bulletproof. My lips move, but there is no translator, and even if there were one, the jurors all have their pinkies stuffed in their ear holes. Their fear and hatred penetrate the glass.
III – Tools
“Simply by turning to a computer when confronted with a problem, you limit your ability to recognize other solutions. When the only tool you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
– Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway
I use computers. Got one at work. I type on it (great typewriter), I keep records in it (great file cabinet, if not reliable over the long run), I converse with my fellow workers through it (much preferable to the telephone for doing business). I think the computer is a good tool for those purposes. I could live without it, though I’d be unhappy if I had to go back to liquid paper every time I made a typing error.
But if the Big Virus struck, and the whole network went down, vomiting bits and bytes all over the landscape, I could continue to do what I do for a living. A tool isn’t a job. Anyone who can’t tell the difference doesn’t know much about the job.
My father was a superior craftsman and, lacking patience or empathy, a poor teacher. He did manage to teach me to handle a paint brush and both rip and cross-cut saws. I can paint a window without bothering with masking tape, and cut a straight line through any plank you want, to this day. Those are skills at my command any time they’re needed, and they depend only on my being able to find the right brush or tool. They don’t depend on my ability to locate a source of energy, a power cord long enough to reach a socket, or six hundred dollars with which to buy a bench saw.
Those skills are not as simple as a master of them makes them look. They involve many of the multiple intelligences Howard Gardner talks about. You have to understand how paint works its way to the tips of the brush hairs, and which kinds of hair will do the best job of instructing the paint to go where you want it. You have to understand surfaces of all sorts. You have to understand the relations between your vision and point of view and your hand, and between your hand and your tool. You have to cultivate patience and timing, and know when to rest. To learn to paint out of a corner or properly rip a plank, you have to become an enlarged human being.
If you buy a professional masker and a spray gun because you’ve been told they’re the tools of the professional, if you buy a bench saw and a radial arm saw for the same reason, you pay for them not only with dollars, but with a reduction in the exercise of your human capacities.
It’s obvious that my argument about human capacity lost to the bench saw could as well be applied to the hand saw. Before hand saws, how did we cut wood into desirable shapes and lengths? If you pursue the question back far enough, you get to the place in history where we must have done those things with our hands and teeth, or else done without that precious little tusk cabinet in the corner of the cave. Is that what I’m recommending?
No. What I recommend is that we remember that the job comes before the tool; that no tool is good for every job; that all tools that become part of a culture offer gains in efficiency and productivity and losses in self-sufficiency and intelligence.
I once helped build a cabin on the side of a 10,500 foot mountain. The only power tool we used was a 10” circular saw powered by a small generator. We cut the trench for the foundation footing out of the granite mountain side with picks, sledges, and a big cold chisel named Steely Dan IV, in homage to William Burroughs. It was a fine experience, from which I learned much about the expandability of human endurance. I also learned that I would never willingly do it that way again, and when we went to build a second cabin, the generator had grown considerably, and the power tools were screaming above the growl of the backhoe.
Had we been entirely and purely devoted to self-sufficiency, we could have built that cabin entirely by hand. We’d still be working on it, of course, and would by now have diminished our ranks through falls, coronaries, homicides and other accidents incidental to a mad enterprise. Or we could have simply put up tee-pees and spared a lot of work and expense.
But the job was to build a cabin upon a steep mountainside, upon the deck of which we could sit in the evening and watch the shadows descend the mountainside across the valley, drinking gin and smoking dope and playing guitars until dinner had been cooked on the cast-iron wood stove and we could go to bed quiet and comfortable and unworried about the occasional bear. So we used a truck and a generator and an electric hand saw, the tools we needed to achieve the result we wanted within our youthful lifetimes.
The job comes before the tool.
The latest use of the computer network at my place of employment is the computerized calendar, a function of the e-mail package. It evidently allows you to know what you are supposed to be doing and where you’re supposed to be doing it. It also allows a raft of other people to enter obligations into your schedule anytime it occurs to them to do so, which I find irritating and unmannerly.
This description may be neither adequate nor fair-minded. I have thus far refused to so much as open this marvelous new tool, because I haven’t felt any need for it. I haven’t felt any need for it because I have my own calendar in my head, and it rarely fails me. I supplement my mental calendar with little scraps of paper that I stuff in my shirt pocket during the course of a day and read the next morning. That technology – memory, caring about the obligations I assume, and random notation – has been working just fine for the past thirty years. The first piece of advice Big Bill Tilden gave in his book on tennis was, “Never change a winning game.”
To learn to use “Calendar” would require a few hours of my time. To use it would require that I spend maybe a quarter hour of every working day. But I don’t see any need to waste that time, because I make every scene I’m supposed to make using my system. So do all the people I work with, except for a few. “Calendar” is a tool that takes more time to master and use than tools already universally available – memory, caring, writing reminders.
No tool is good for every job. Some tools are simply stupid, as needlessly complex as Rube Goldberg’s labor-saving inventions, though seldom as amusing.
I find it deeply objectionable that no problem existed before this “solution” was mandated. People missed meetings, to be sure. They missed them because they spaced them out, or because something more vital interceded, or because they got stuck in traffic, or because they didn’t want to make them and provided a colorful excuse to cover their absence. I never noticed an epidemic of absences, and I fail to see how an electronic digital computerized state of the art cutting edge calendar will in any way alter the behavior of the spacy, the truly responsible, the traffic becalmed, or the imaginatively recalcitrant.
The solution, which will be no solution, preceded evidence of a problem and will cost the institution for which I work many lost hours of productive work – lost to more screwing around with computers. So there’s no gain in productivity – a loss, in fact – because the job didn’t come before the tool, the problem didn’t precede the solution. And, for the obedient souls who religiously consult “Calendar,” there’ll be a further loss in self-sufficiency, as their mental calendars atrophy.
I’m trying here to work toward an outline for a cost-benefit analysis of computers. It looks to me as if, before computerizing an activity heretofore undigitalized, we might want to ask:
Does the job require the use of this tool?
Will this tool do better than the tool we’re currently using?
Will its use to do this job actually improve the outcome?
Will what is lost in human capacity be less valuable than what is gained in “efficiency”?
The last question worries me the most.
IV – Calculation
“If Farmer A can plant 300 potatoes an hour, and Farmer B can plant potatoes fifty percent faster, and Farmer C can plant potatoes one third as fast as Farmer B, and 10,000 potatoes are to be planted to an acre, how many nine-hour days will it take Farmers A, B, and C, working simultaneously, to plant 25 acres?
Answer: I think I’ll blow my brains out.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, “Flowers on the Wall”
When I was a boy, and the snow through which I walked unshod for miles to school stood higher than this piddly powder they call snow today, I spent a number of years, five days a week, memorizing and reciting the multiplication tables through the 12’s. I don’t recall enjoying the experience. I’m quite certain, even through the haze of Golden Age nostalgia, that it seemed to me and all my peers a dead waste of our precious lives.
And how very wrong we were can be discovered daily by anyone seeking change for a five from the young product of modernized math behind the counter whose register has momentarily quit calculating. They didn’t name it a “counter” for nothing.
Another way to discover how wrong we were is to ask people to think about numbers. Hardly anyone under the age of 50 will even try. If those multiplication tables don’t reside in your hard-drive, boyo, then nothing that followed subtraction in your math “education” ever made much sense to you. Now did it? Fess up.
Tell you why I know that. About 90% of the people who take the math placement test at my community college can’t do fractions, can’t comprehend decimals, and are left utterly baffled by percentage problems. Why? Because all those lesser parts of one embody division, and division is the other face of multiplication. And they never learned the damn tables, so division never came clear to them. So they don’t know how to ask questions of numbers that will produce sensible answers, and they don’t recognize whether an answer is sensible or not, even if they arrive at one. When confronted with a statement involving numbers, their brains essentially shut down.
V – Questions
“It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Resistance and Submission
I answer the phone a lot at my work, and I sit at the front desk, to which people come seeking all sorts of information. The seekers represent a random cross section of American humanity. But they all have questions.
About a year and a half ago, I began to notice something peculiar, first on the phone, then with the people who came to ask me questions in person: they all said exactly the same thing first.
“I have a question,” they said.
For a couple of months, I played along.
“Yes,” I would say, “what would you like to know?”
“It’s about college,” they would say. Or, “It’s about classes.” Or, “It’s about financial aid.”
So far, I only knew that they had a question.
“What is it about college (classes, financial aid, etc.) that you would like to know?” I’d sweetly enquire, in my patient, customer-service tone. And then, having lost a good half minute from my rapidly dwindling store, I might hear an actual, answerable question.
After a few months, this new mode of query had become so invariable that my curiosity went to work on it, and I realized what was happening.
They thought I was an internet search engine.
They thought that asking questions meant that you entered a key word or two in the box, mouse-clicked “search” or “go get it,” and a menu of choices would magically appear before you, saying, in effect, “Is this what you had in mind? Or this? Or this?…” And then they could scroll down – except, of course, that I was supposed to be scrolling through these refinements of their initial questioning feeling – until something looked as if it might be worth another click of the mouse.
Once I’d figured that out, I started experimenting with silence.
“Hello? I have a question?”
Silence.
“It’s about college?”
Silence.
“It’s about, like, my bill?”
Silence.
Silence is a great power, and most such conversations would revert to a human level after 4 or 5 silences, and my interlocutors would get the info they wanted, and I’d be no more enraged than I always am.
Out of sheer exasperation, people used to teach their children how to ask useful, precise questions. Then television came along, and the kids were plunked down on Sesame Street, where every question came supplied with an immediate answer – except, of course, for any questions the little shavers in front of the tube might have that the script writers hadn’t considered important. Then the Internet arrived, and everyone from the outhouse to the White House assured us that all the answers were in there; you just had to point and click until you homed in on the answer you sought. Therefore, you didn’t need to learn how to ask questions.
If you don’t know how to ask questions, you don’t know how to learn anything beyond whatever was beaten into you before you could talk and whatever people with access to the various transmitting media want you to know. If you don’t know how to ask questions, you’re cannon fodder. Or another grateful Wal Mart customer, secure in the belief that you’ve seen the world, for how could there be anything not contained within that gigantic maze of an emporium? It’s just a matter of pointing your cart ahead of you and following its clicking wheels down one aisle and up the next until the latest desiderata magically appears. The pain of thought needn’t plague you.
VI – Faces
“All the papers in Andalucia devoted special supplements to his death, which had been expected for some days. Men and boys bought full-length colored pictures of him to remember him by, and lost the picture they had of him in their memories by looking at the lithographs.”
– Ernest Hemingway, “Banal Story”
An actual face gets dirt on it,and twists itself into all sorts of shapes that reveal what’s going on within its owner. Watching an actual face is like watching a piece of country: the weather passes through it, changing it; the light illuminates its best features one moment, obscures them the next. After a long time watching a particular piece of country – a meadow, a grove of trees, a bend in a stream, a face – you have burned into your brain your perception. It’s not a photograph. It’s much more. It’s your memory.
The Internet and e-mail subtract the face. Every moment spent sitting in front of a tube is one less moment spent perceiving the face of another. Does this matter?
“Not only humans have faces,” writes James Hillman in The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life. “We do not own them all. . . . Ancient Egyptians imagined the sky as a vast face with the sun and the moon as eyes. The Navajos say something is always watching us.
“If we no longer imagine that ‘objects stare back, then the things around us spark no ethical challenge, make no appeal. They are not partners in dialogue, with whom an I-Thou relationship exists. Once the soul of the world loses its face, we see things rather than images. Things ask no more of us than to be owned and used, becoming possessions.”
As I copied this passage, I was seeing the face of the student who gave it to me, a face oval and relaxed around eyes that look at whatever comes before them, a face that engages in no Miss America gymnastics to appear winning, gay or lovely – and so is lovely as the faces of children are – but lovelier for the depth of experience within those steadily looking eyes.
Had this student been one of twenty or thirty or a hundred students “on line,” known to me only through her disembodied words – eloquent as in her case they are – and had she recommended to me, on line, the magazine in which Hillman’s remarks appeared, I doubt I’d have read them. People are all the time trying to get me to read things, and I hardly ever welcome or honor their suggestions. I’m always working on my own reading program, which is generally obsessive or frivolous or both. But when this student handed me this magazine, I read it. I knew her, I knew she knew me, at depths that made me receive the magazine as a gift, a tribute, a challenge, a suggestion – I didn’t know which, but I knew it would be real, because I knew this person as I never would have if I hadn’t spent enough time looking in her face to know the somebody who was home there.
VII – Images of Faces
“Because he can walk into a dark room, and every bulb in that room can be burned out, and there’s no matches, and believe me, you will feel that room light up when that face of his gets inside it.”
– Lou Clayton on Jimmy Durante, Gene Fowler, Schnozzola
Some might suggest that it’s already possible for me to see that student and for her to see me, through the miracle of the digital fiber optic cutting edge Telescreen of the future.
To which I say that a face in front of a camera isn’t a face; it’s a performance. Need I elaborate? Consider every photograph of yourself you’ve ever seen.
In actual human communication, we become ourselves only when we forget our faces because we’re focused on what’s being communicated, whether it’s getting across, how to get it across. And then the light within remodels the very skin and turns the receptor called the eye into a transmitter, the act of reception called listening into an act of transmission. Then words have sweat and musk and acid; then words can touch like fingertips, rake like nails, poke like old friends out of patience.
VIII – Receptors
“The lights must never go out.
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are. . . . ”
– W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
The great paradox in the “communications revolution” that began when we harnessed electricity is that the more “communications” we receive, the less we are able to receive them, or find time to do anything of value with the ones that do get through the glut.
An example: I teach a class in American music, a history of ragtime, blues and jazz. I taught this class for maybe three semesters before it dawned on me that hardly any of my students had any idea what instruments they were “hearing.” My first clue that I might be assuming too much was when I assumed that everyone knew the sound of a trumpet came when one student identified Bix Beiderbecke’s Mozartean solo on “Jazz Me Blues” as the work of Vic Spiderback. This engaged my curiosity, and I began asking students what instruments they were listening to. The horror, the horror. They couldn’t tell a flute from a glockenspiel. More to the point, they couldn’t tell a trombone from a clarinet.
These students had not only been exposed to more music than any humans in the history of the world, they’d heard every conceivable musical instrument in the world, and dozens not in the world, through the miracle of studio electronics. And not one out of a hundred had an idea in the world what instruments were producing a given set of sounds.
And a majority of these students thought of themselves as musicians – wrote songs, played in bands, all that. As I pondered their inability to hear, I thought suddenly of Horace Butler.
Horace was a bass player I’d known in a previous incarnation who played in a rhythm and blues show band. They had stacks of Marshall amps and speakers and put on a big show with choreography and lights and what not. Horace played in this band because he was a musician and the band worked enough to enable him to pay his rent and eat.
Horace played bass in the band wearing plastic ear plugs. He had figured out somewhere along the line that the cilia in the human ear can only be subjected to so many decibels before they begin to break, and that, once broken, they don’t regenerate and they aren’t replaced. So to defend his hearing, this musician had to reduce his ability to hear the music he was helping to produce.
In other words, to hear, you sometimes have to deafen yourself.
My students had all lived their lives as Horace was living his when I knew him, surrounded by insistent sound, rhythm, vibrating, throbbing flashes of light, sound, light, sound. Showtime, baby. That had been their reality throughout their lives: blasting lights; screaming sound waves. But they hadn’t had earplugs.
So they’d learned how to not listen. They’d learned how to not look. They’d learned to deaden their perceptions in self defense.
IX – Shutting Down
“You can’t get away from TV. It is everywhere. The hog is in the tunnel”
– Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine
Every time I enter the world of the Internet, I’m met by something that looks like the back page of a comic book from the days of my youth, only crasser. The top of the page has moving graphics directing me to look here, no, look there; the sides of the page are lined with little billboards far less witty than the old Burma Shave signs; the bottom of the screen always has yet another moving graphic urging me to some kind of expenditure of time or money.
I’m long trained to ignore all this Barnum stuff. I use the Internet for reasons of my own, and I don’t even notice the bells, gongs, dancing girls, pointed guns, slashing swords, slacking thighs or yearning lips that reach out to me as I march up the information highway toward my goal.
In other words, in order to abide using the Internet, I’ve learned to not see more. To not-see. More.
When Muzak arrived, bringing the Gift of Music into public establishments theretofore free of irrelevant aural stimuli, people began to learn to not listen. When television became ubiquitous in American homes, and then in public places, people had to learn to not-listen and not-see. This did not mean that they didn’t take anything in. It meant that they learned to take stuff in without being consciously aware of what they were taking in.
If you passively absorb the stimuli your environment provides, you have attained the spiritually advanced state of a rooted plant. If you learn to endure the bombardment of external stimuli by deadening your senses, you have progressed to the state of a rock. If you have learned to combine these two skills, you have reached the pinnacle of modern human consciousness exemplified by the citizens of 1984’s Oceania. You absorb the unavoidable stimuli provided by those who control the transmitters. You are unaware of any other random stimuli emanating from accidental sources, such as yourself or other people or birds or insects. Or, if briefly aware, you are programmed to tell yourself that such stimuli are beneath the notice of a citizen of such an advanced state as yours.
However, you are still, in fact, neither a plant whose roots might survive your lopping nor a rock impervious to all but time. You are a large, soft mammal whose survival depends on a once highly-developed repertoire of senses, a marvelous ability to move upright through the field of gravity, and an active, nearly paranoid interest in what’s going on in your immediate neighborhood.
All of which, the virus assures you, are tools no longer necessary in the Information Age.
Oh, no, the virus assures you – you need no longer fool with such gross activities as smelling, touching, listening, looking, wondering. WE CAN TAKE CARE OF IT. SIT BACK. CHILL. ABSORB. ABSORB ME. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE.
X – Not Ebola Again
“For the time being, however, the worship of the higher technology serves the cause of barbarism.”
– Lewis Lapham, Imperial Masquerade
When the hemorrhagic viruses first began probing human hosts, humans reacted pretty rationally. These babies are out to kill us all, said humans. We’d better study the way they work, we’d better find out how to contain them when they show up on Main Street, we’d better learn how to fight them. They don’t mean us no good.
Does a virus that deadens our senses and turns our brains to passive recorders of meaningless electronic impulses, that further reduces our contacts with other humans and with the natural world and encourages passive acceptance of the destruction of the environment upon which our survival depends mean us more good?
As I approach a conclusion, perhaps the mighty computer virus might go into sudden retreat. I don’t know why. Perhaps enough people will notice that the shining promises of the Information Age flacks are empty. That the electronic revolution has not reduced our slaughter of trees, but increased it. That the age of communications has resulted in ever-decreasing communication, because everyone shouting at once does not constitute communication – just Talk Soup and showers of meaningless Factoids. That the ready availability of “information” is of no use to those who haven’t the time or the training to sort, collate, compare, contrast and evaluate it, because they’re running too fast to make payments on the debt they’ve already accrued so that they’ll be able to further burden themselves when they buy the next cutting edge upgrade. That any amount of information is useless to you if you don’t know yourself, and therefore don’t know what you want to do with the information.
Or maybe we’re all just waiting for Smellovision and the Feelies to hit the market, our vision and hearing having been completely numbed, rendered incapable of further titillation.
Turning over our active, animal selves to the ministrations of media has not led us to fuller humanity; it has gone a long way toward reducing us to humanoid creatures who have no thoughts or feelings of their own, derived from unique, direct experience, but only faint, random, confused imprintings and aborted impulses. This does not constitute progress. It constitutes a terrible loss of our infant capacities to serve our planet as responsible stewards, and to serve ourselves and each other as wise and loving friends.
I have not so much failed as consciously refused to “document” many of the accusations I’ve made here. I don’t think they need documenting. Rather than asking for “expert” corroboration or “scientific” supporting data, I hope you’ll consult your own perceptions of how your life is, how your senses are operating, how your human relationships have changed since the beginning of the Information Age.
If nothing has ever satisfied you as deeply as cybersex, if a bunch of electrified dots that your brain assembles into the image of a cardinal sitting on a bare, black branch against a snowy field seems preferable to feeling the cold in order to see the cardinal (even if the dots don’t include the smell of the nearly frozen creek behind you or the splush your boots made breaking through its surface in the grey dawn, if, when you punch in the question, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” and the answer comes up “Burt Bacharach,” you feel confident that you’re good to go – why then, you’re not here, having long ago thrown this piece of anti-technological drivel into the trash.
If you’ve felt enough unease with our current situation to read this far, then perhaps you’ll agree with me that it’s time we began to clarify our perceptions of what needs defending and of who constitutes the enemy. Perhaps you’ll begin to think about the computer and the internet in terms of costs and benefits.
“Never change a losing game;” Big Bill Tilden wrote, but he didn’t stop there. The rest of the sentence was, “always change a losing game.”
