Fire and Knowledge

Media may now be serving as a surrogate for reality, and a preferred one at that. At stadiums throughout the country, huge TV screens have been installed so that spectators can experience the game through TV because TV is better than being there, even when you are there. Conferences and other group meetings are videotaped so that participants may look at themselves to see what “really happened.” Tourists travel everywhere with still cameras so that they can document their vacations. In the end, the photographs are the reality of the experience.

—Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 84

The $100 laptop moves closer to reality

Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations….

In addition, Massachusetts is working with MIT on a plan to distribute the laptops to schoolchildren, Negroponte said.

“This is the most important thing I have ever done in my life,” Negroponte said on Wednesday during a presentation at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. “Reception has been incredible. The idea is simple. It’s an education project, not a laptop project. If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.”

Let me quote this part again: “It’s an education project, not a laptop project. If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.” That, my friends, might be the best example of “stupid talk” regarding computers and education I have read in a while.

The statement is wrong. The “$100 computer project” is not an education project. It is a computer project. What does education have to do with a $100 computer? Specifically, what does primary and secondary schools have to do with computers? The answers is “nothing.”

Technology is not the answer to education. It isn’t even a possible answer. It’s like saying a desk is the answer to education. What education needs is better teachers, better curriculum, less computers and video games, more reading and writing–to only name a few. To say that computers will help education is to ask the wrong questions and give the wrong answers.

I think it would be fitting to end with a quote by Neil Postman, from a speech entitled “Informing Ourselves to Death”:

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.

The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people — perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot.

Great Non-Fiction Gets Slimmed Down

With its snazzy new “Great Ideas” series released this month, Penguin Books hopes to provide an economical remedy for time-pressed readers in search of intellectual sustenance.

Each of the paperbacks costs $8.95 and offers readers a sampling of the world’s great non-fiction. For example, the Gibbon book is a slim 92-page selection called The Christians and the Fall of Rome. It presents Gibbon as sort of an intellectual tapas to be savored in one sitting. . . .

Originally released in Britain this year, the series has earned attention not only for the concept but also for its distinctive visual impact. Printed in rust-red and white, each cover is “debossed” (the printing is lowered into the paper), senior editor Caroline White says. And the typeface and look of each cover fits the historical period in which it was written.

via Justin Taylor

If we may take advertising to be the voice of commerce, then its history tells very clearly that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries those with products to sell . . . assumed that potential buyers were literate, rational, analytical. . . .

By the turn of the century, advertisers no longer assumed rationality on the part of their potential customers. Advertising became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory. Reason had to move itself to other arenas. . . .

By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser’s claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald’s commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assumptions. It is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people selling, buying, and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

–Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death, (pp. 58, 60, 127-8)

• BBC’s Top 100 Best-Loved Novels
• Top 40 Most Important Works in the World
• The 50 Most Cited Works

I don’t normally ask questions to my readers, but humor me: what are your favorite books?

‘Whatever It Takes’

Of the $100 billion that may be spent on New Orleans, let’s be serious. We love Louisiana and feel for Louisiana, but we all know what Louisiana is, a very human state with rather particular flaws. As Huey Long once said, “Some day Louisiana will have honest government, and they won’t like it.” We all know this, yes? Louisiana has many traditions, and one is a rich and unvaried culture of corruption. How much of the $100 billion coming its way is going to fall off the table? Half? OK, let’s not get carried away. More than half.

Town spending tends to be more effective than county spending. County spending tends–tends–to be more efficacious than state spending. State spending tends to be more constructive than federal spending. This is how life works. The area closest to where the buck came from is most likely to be more careful with the buck. This is part of the reason conservatives are so disturbed by the gushing federal spigot.

Kanye Was Right :: ColorOfChange.org

I tried to think of something witty and satirical for this, but just quoting it is funny (sad?) enough. Can people actually believe this? If so, we are in big trouble as a nation.

Politicians ignore poor Black folks because they can’t make big donations or deliver votes. And, to be real: a whole lot of “us” have tip-toed out of the hood and left them behind too, making our folk invisible even to us…..

This government NEVER would have left rich, white people to die.

The sad thing is, people who are signing this actually think there is truth in what they are saying.

What do we lose when we exchange email—or incessant cell phone chatter—for the writing and receiving of letters? We all know what we gain from email and cell phones—speed, transferability (ugly word, that), volume of data, and more. But what features of a good life do we forfeit in the process? As with all communicative technology, there is a trade-off between gains and losses.

Read the article for Doug Groothuis’s answer.