I REALIZED FOR sure that something was wrong with our national conversation about technology late last spring when I slipped on some headphones in a radio studio at KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., and listened to the host introduce me in this way: “David Shenk is here with us this morning. He’s written a book called ‘Data Smog,’ which basically says that the Internet is a giant hoax.”        After I had picked my jaw up off the floor and reassembled it, I did my best to politely correct the host. In fact, I am very enthusiastic about the Internet, and about the information revolution. But there are important drawbacks to the proliferation in the speed and volume of information. And it’s going to be terribly important for everyone to come to grips with these unintended consequences of hyper-communication if we’re going to fully enjoy its benefits.        Unfortunately, my KPFA experience has been all too representative of the way people in the media react to any nuanced analysis of how technology affects culture. The latest example is the promotional campaign for the new “Circuits” section of The New York Times: Are you a technophile or a technophobe? It makes for a snappy line, but somehow misses the 99 percent of us who would be more accurately described as neither. Most of us approach technology with a mixture of appreciation and scepticism.        Part of the problem, perhaps, is that there’s no short-hand phrase for this more nuanced position. Millions of us have been living according to its tenets, but no one has bothered to formalize it.        This is what Andrew Shapiro and I were talking about over lunch last fall. Shapiro, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is writing an important book about how to protect the public interest in this age of hyper-autonomy.

The wonderful thing about information technology is that it transfers control from large organizations to individuals. But that’s also the problem with technology. Not everything is best left up to market incentives and local or individual control. Important aspects of our health, safety, justice and economic and political stability must be entrusted to public officials — public servants — who work to maintain larger social interests on our behalf.        Andrew and I decided that we should try to articulate this more balanced approach and give it a name. So we did: technorealism. With the help of Steven Johnson, the editor of Feed magazine, and nine other writers and critics, we drafted a set of principles that we hope will move the conversation forward: Technologies are not neutral.        A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias — that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don’t promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to consider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflect our values and aspirations. The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.        The Net is an extraordinary communications tool that provides a range of new opportunities for people, communities, businesses and government. Yet as cyberspace becomes more populated, it increasingly resembles society at large, in all its complexity. For every empowering or enlightening aspect of the wired life, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse or rather ordinary.

Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier.        Contrary to some claims, cyberspace is not formally a place or jurisdiction separate from Earth. While governments should respect the rules and customs that have arisen in cyberspace, and should not stifle this new world with inefficient regulation or censorship, it is foolish to say that the public has no sovereignty over what an errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does online. As the representative of the people and the guardian of democratic values, the state has the right and responsibility to help integrate cyberspace and conventional society.        Technology standards and privacy issues, for example, are too important to be entrusted to the marketplace alone. Competing software firms have little interest in preserving the open standards that are essential to a fully functioning interactive network. Markets encourage innovation, but they do not necessarily insure the public interest. Information is not knowledge.        All around us, information is moving faster and becoming cheaper to acquire, and the benefits are manifest. That said, the proliferation of data is also a serious challenge, requiring new measures of human discipline and skepticism. We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom. Regardless of how advanced our computers become, we should never use them as a substitute for our own basic cognitive skills of awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

Wiring the schools will not save them.        The problems with America’s public schools — disparate funding, social promotion, bloated class size, crumbling infrastructure, lack of standards-have almost nothing to do with technology. Simply wiring the schools will not save them, technorealists contend. Despite the rosy picture painted by Internet utopians, educational reform requires far more than infusions of hardware and software.        Consequently, no amount of technology will lead to the educational revolution prophesied by President Bill Clinton and others. The art of teaching cannot be replicated by computers, the Net, or by “distance learning.” These tools can, of course, augment an already high-quality educational experience. But to rely on them as any sort of panacea would be a costly mistake. Information wants to be protected.        It’s true that cyberspace and other recent developments are challenging our copyright laws and frameworks for protecting intellectual property. The answer, though, is not to scrap existing statutes and principles. Instead, we must update old laws and interpretations so that information receives roughly the same protection it did in the context of old media. The goal is the same: to give authors sufficient control over their work so that they have an incentive to create, while maintaining the right of the public to make fair use of that information. In neither context does information want “to be free.” Rather, it needs to be protected.

The public owns the airwaves; the public should benefit from their use.        The recent digital spectrum giveaway to broadcasters underscores the corrupt and inefficient misuse of public resources in the arena of technology. The citizenry should benefit and profit from the use of public frequencies, and should retain a portion of the spectrum for educational, cultural, and public access uses. We should demand more for private use of public property. Understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship.        In a world driven by the flow of information, the interfaces — and the underlying code — that make information visible are becoming enormously powerful social forces. Understanding their strengths and limitations, and even participating in the creation of better tools, should be an important part of being an involved citizen. These tools affect our lives as much as laws do, and we should subject them to a similar democratic scrutiny.

 

Feedback? Don't mail here, but do mail me.

front

local

mscl

music

news