96.31 FUTURE / TECHNOLOGY

Thinking about the Web

Articles about the evolution of the World Wide Web and plans for virtual universities have appeared in several of the publications we monitor. The most thoughtful analysis (with a focus on the Web) appears in a series of front page stories in the Washington Post ("The Web: Where Its @", June30 through July 3,1996). The Post series suggests massive technological change is on the way, approaching with the speed and impact of a tidal wave. Some good may result, but there can also be serious, unintended consequences associated with further disconnecting ourselves from the natural world, especially personal interaction in real communities. Those consequences could mean that virtual universities, like experiments with high-rise public housing in the 1960s, will prove to be costly failures -testaments to the danger of building new institutions without reflecting upon the strengths and limitations of human nature.

Reflections and observations on the Post series

The World Wide Web has grown with remarkable speed. The Post reports that the Web was conceived just five years ago in a lab in Switzerland, when computer scientist Tim Bemer-Lee "devised a novel way for computers to share information." That Berner-Lee's idea could have evolved into a tool used by millions of people in so short a time suggests that the potential uses of the Web remain beyond our current understanding.

The role of expertise and editors is rapidly being undermined, at least for the moment. The young may find it especially difficult to distinguish knowledge from opinion, and insight from gossip. Information will be readily available, but thoughtful assessment and integration of information may be lost in a cacophony of competing voices.

Routine use of the Internet, over time, may influence the way people think. The Post noted, for example, that "[b]ooks are generally organized in what learning psychologists call a linear pattern-if you read page one you'll understand page two, which will make sense of page three." However, according to one technology expert, the Web "encourages you to read along until the middle of a paragraph and then -zunk!~ land in a completely different universe." There may be advantages to this style, especially for seeing new connections between topics, but it does not seem conducive to disciplined thinking.

The way we share information molds our social institutions and ways of understanding the world. Gathering around a campfire to tell a story creates the feeling of a community grounded in the mysteries of nature, magnified by the unique features ~incIuding scent and touch~ of a particular place. This special connection between community, mystery, story-telling, and nature is a human attribute (extending to the remote past), which the printing press, television and now the Internet have almost completely displaced.

In the distant future, the Internet and its progeny may even change what it means to be human. The Post reports that the future evolution of technology may include representations of people interacting on-line, followed by personal interaction "through direct interface with the brain." Such a network, far more than at present, would represent an aggregate "mind"-radically different from the individual mind-and existing in an artificial world of its own creation.

Concerns about the virtual university

Recent articles in the 8oston Globe ("Virtual campuses are decades away~at least", July 14, 1996, p.44) and the Bellingham [Washington] Herald ("Western Governors open door to 'virtual university' ", June 30,1996, p.1) differ about when virtual universities may be created, but both express the view that millions of students will eventually complete college degrees through the Internet. Indeed, the Bellingham Herald reported that the new "Western Governors University" has just received preliminary startup funding, eventually to exceed $8 million. A "virtual catalog" should be available next year, as specified in planning documents available at http://www.westgov.org/smart/vu/vu.html.

The flurry of news about virtual universities (including pilot programs in Maine, North Dakota, and New York) prompted an expression of editorial concern by The Washington Post ("'A No-Campus Campus", July 11, 1996, p. A4):

Is a University still a university if it doesn't have a campus? A group of western governors Intends to test the proposition …

Universities provide something solid, a degree, to consumers who want it, but they also think of them-selves as communities … [I]t's … a serious adjustment to imagine a university in which everybody, whether student, faculty or trustee stands at the arm's-length relationship of a customer.

A huge assortment of financial and practical pressures en university management of actual campuses make the no-campus campus a tantalizing dream. On the other hand, ordinary pen-and-paper correspondence schools have existed for a long time because of similar pressures. and somehow the vast majority of would-be students continue to prefer the real thing. The virtues of the Virtual University may yet trump the familiar virtues of the other kind, but it will take more than plugging in a modem.

The pull of "real" communities

We've written on other occasions about the growing desire for revitalized community life in American society (see, e.g., SWR "College cities", week of September 25, 1995, p.400). Further evidence of the pull of "real" communities can be seen in the following press reports about the management decisions of three high-technology companies:

The desire for "face-to-face contact' at Prodigy.

On June 3, 1995 the New York Times reported that Prodigy Services Company was relocating its corporate headquarters from White Plains to "the emerging multimedia Mecca of lower Manhattan." Why? Because the company places "a premium on old-fashioned, face-to-face contact" ("Prodigy Plans a New Home for Its Service", p.21).

Having employees in one place at America Online.

On February 24, 1996 the Washington Post reported on AOL's decision to create a corporate head-quarters in Virginia. America Online spokeswoman Pam McGraw said "[w]e think it is important to have one facility and to have as many employees in one place as possible" ("AOL Planning Move ...", p. Cl).

The desire for personal "synergy" at Microsoft.

Ken Auletta, writing in the May 13,1996 New Yorker about Michael Kinsley's new on-line magazine ("The Reeducation of Michael Kinsley", p.58) reported that "[t]he Microsoft executives, despite their belief that geography was becoming irrelevant, told [Michael] Kinsley that, 'for synergy reasons,' he should edit the magazine on their campus, and not from Washington D.C. or New York."

Prodigy, AOL, and Microsoft are companies in the forefront of electronic communications. It can't be an accident that all of them place a high priority on direct personal interaction. A similar realization has occurred at another important institution: the American research university. On separate occasions we reported the following observations by the presidents at Harvard and Standard Universities. Read together, they highlight what seems to be a heightened emphasis on community building by both:

In his essay "The Future of Affirmative Action" (available on the Internet at http//www.harvard.edu/presidents_office), Harvard University president Neil L. Rudenstine wrote that:

{T]he basic conception of residential education has remained the strongest expression of an institution's commitment to educating the "whole person," rather than only the intellect. This idea was embodied in the foundation charters of many American colleges

As a result, a young person's character. integrity. industriousness, and other attributes [are] Important in admissions, as well as the life of the college and the larger community.

In "Come the Millennium, Where the University?", (Spring 1995 Stanford Observer), Stanford University president Gerhard Casper wrote that:

[T]he residential version of the American college may have no equal in challenging the familiar; in challenging prejudices, and values: in creating uncertainties; in bringing about new ways of relating to one another. Its emphasis on socialization and peer interaction, in the eyes of many, make the college environment, as distinguished from the college curriculum. a formative and formidable experience that is valued in its own right, independently of any academic purposes The right of passage is one reason, anthropologically speaking, Americans go to college. .(p.25).

Why "real" communities are important

The attraction of real communities can't be denied, even when advanced forms of communication are readily available. Some of the reasons may include:

The fullest human interaction requires personal contact. An article in the April 30, 1996 New York Times ("Illuminating How Bodies are Built for Sociability", p. C1) reported on recent research suggesting that human beings and other social animals have a nervous system that links emotion to vocal and facial expressions, as well as other physiological reactions. One reason for this phenomenon is the need to form bonds with others, especially offspring. The forming of such bonds is "hard work", according to researchers. It "requires a hormonal and neural substrate, and activation of circuitry every bit as intricate as the mechanisms controlling the body's ability to [fight or flee]". Our bodies evolved in a natural world filled with subtle forms of communication, including exohormones. The subtlety can be so great (and welcome) that-in the words of biologist and Pulitzer Prize winning writer Rene Dubos-"each person's smile at a particular moment constitutes a unique event in the history of mankind" (A God Within, Scribner's, New York, 1972, p.18). These "unique events" are simply not captured in their full richness and complexity by electronic communication, including the video communication now becoming available.

Values, duties and virtues are formed in communities. Aristotle's view that the ideal state should have no more than 10,000 people is occasionally cited to support arguments by a growing number of anthropologists, criminologists, and political scientists that small groups or communities are the cradle of the moral sense, as well as habits and virtues necessary for social life. For example, in his book The Moral Sense (Free Press, New York, 1993), James Q. Wilson observed that:

[H]umans cannot dispense with a sense of belonging to a small group. Familial and kin networks are the essential arenas in which sociability becomes sympathy and self-interest is transferred, by a pattern of reciprocal obligations, into duty and fair play (p.50).

Likewise, in what many regard as one of the important books of the decade (Democracy's Discontent, Harvard, Cambridge, 1996) Harvard government professor Michael J. Sandel wrote that:

The global media and markets that shape our lives beckon to us a world beyond boundaries and belonging. But the civic resources we need to master these forces . . . are still to be found in the places and stories memories and meanings, incidents and identities, that situate us in the world and give our lives their moral particularity. . . (p.349).

A "moral particularly" that "situates us in the world" probably won't be found in cyberspace. It requires the unique feeling of a physical place, where people struggle and associate together in the presence of obstacles that challenge them physically as well as mentally.

Relationship and community life provide access to a greater meaning. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber believed that human beings perceived some sense of an ultimate meaning only in relationship~what he called the "I-Thou" (as opposed to "I-It') relationship. In I and Thou (Scribner's, New York, 1958) he wrote that:

Spirit is not in the I, but between I and Thou. It is not like the blood that circulates in you, but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit, if he is able to respond to his Thou. He is able to, if he enters into relation with his whole being. Only in virtue of his power to enter into relation is he able to live in the spirit (p.39).

There is no doubt relationships can be formed in cyberspace. Yet few of these relationships are likely to entail "the whole being." Human beings have bodies, inexorably linked to the natural world. Sooner or later, for reasons we may not fully understand, we seek to be in the presence of each other. Furthermore, in the Christian tradition (and the traditions of most other religions) there is the view that being in the presence of a community of believers heightens the presence of spirit-like an antenna boosting a signal. The saying is familiar: "for where two or three are truly together, they are together in the name of God."

Keeping a connection with the natural world

The suggestion in the Washington Post series that the future of the Internet might include "direct interface" between human brains in an artificial world will seem chilling to most people. Unpalatable outcomes of that nature can't be foreclosed, however, as long as we follow blindly wherever new technology takes us, regardless of the social and philosophical implications. Rene Dubos offered a general warning in this regard when he wrote that "[[c]ivilizations commonly die from the excessive development of certain characteristics which had at first contributed to their success (Ibid., p.233). Characteristics of American culture have included a certain restlessness and rootlessness; a fondness for the "new and improved"; the desire to dominate and control nature, and a disinclination to contemplation. Most of those qualities may have helped produce the electronic revolution, but they are not well-suited to helping us understand where that revolution is going.

In his book Shadows of the Mind (Oxford,1 994), Oxford University Professor of Mathematics Roger Penrose (recipient of the Wolf Prize for Physics, shared with Stephen Hawking) saw a "unity" between our brains and the workings of nature:

[T]here are some, such as Newton or Einstein, or Mozart or Plato . . who seem to have more of [the] faculty of being able to "smell" out truth or beauty than is given to the rest of us. But a unity with the workings of Nature is potentially present within all of us, and is revealed in our very faculties of conscious comprehension and sensitivity, at whatever level they may be operating. Every one of our conscious brains is woven from subtle physical ingredients that somehow enable us to take advantage of the profound organization of our mathematically underpinned universe-so that we, in turn, are capable of some kind of direct access. through that Platonic quality of "understanding", to the very ways our universe behaves at many different levels . . . These are deep issues, and we are yet very far from explanations (p.420).

The human mind, as Penrose understands it, perceives and (to a degree) comprehends the natural order because it is part of the natural order. Until we have a better understanding of the connection between mind and Nature, it might be prudent to slow our relentless acceleration into the artificial world of cyberspace. That world may turn out to be a maze, where we lose ourselves entirely.

© 1996, SYNFAX, INC.