Everything Bad is Good for You

The article:  “Everything Bad is Good for You” brought up some interesting points about the adoption of technology.  One is that it is the established technology that is deemed good until the new technology can prove its worth.  Print and written communication has been around for millennia and has proven its worth for generations.  It has been modified and changed to accommodate new materials and methods but has largely remained unchanged.

The point of the article was if another form of communication were first, paper would have to prove itself.  As humans had we discovered electronics and computers first, would electronic media be the defacto standard to be challenged by the newcomer.  (Of course how would we document and organize information about our electronic discoveries so we could improve technology?  But I digress.)  In terms of ICT adoption, a case could be made either way. 

The piecemeal approach to ICT and its tools leaves people hunting around for little bits here and there and has to be put together by the individual who becomes his own expert based on his own experiences.  And since everyone travels the path differently even though they get all the pieces have a different experience.  In this way one can argue that educational goals, even though met by each student can have vastly different cognitive impacts.

If perhaps all the information were presented in one place in a sequential manner, let’s say – a book, then every student and teacher could be clear that they are understanding in the same way as expected.   A so called expert would be the one to put together this book and understands all the ins and outs of the subjects matter and also how others should understand the subject matter.

ICT provides a great way for everyone to be experts by allowing them to put together pieces into a cohesive whole – to synthesize information to form an understanding.  Synthesis, according to one our educational founding experts, Benjamin Bloom, is a higher level thinking that is preceded by knowledge, comprehension and analysis.  Of course because we are graduate students, it is very likely that we do have enough understanding to take the lower level thinking as being adequate for our discussions.  However, I doubt most teenagers can fully grasp what they are discussing or writing in this cut and paste world.

This pseudo-understanding leads to a world of pseudo-experts who have all the pieces, can put them together, come to a conclusion but have no solid understanding of their topic to begin with.  Synthesis without comprehension is baseless literally because there is no foundation to support the higher level deductions or conclusions.

True understanding and true expertise leads to advances in society.  Experts and structured knowledge like in books and libraries concentrate knowledge and power.  This creates a hierarchical society based on those who know and those that don’t.  Those that know lead and those that don’t follow.  It is therefore the development of true expertise and the concentration of knowledge that gave rise to the modern world.  Ergo the book is the physical representation of our western civilization.

Now let’s turn the table and say the internet existed before the book.  Everyone would have access to all the bits (no pun intended) of information out there.  Everyone also has the opportunity to put the information together any way they want.  Since knowledge is power, power would be distributed and in thousands and thousands of places.  Everyone could draw slightly different conclusions and deductions about the information and fight amongst each other for the true interpretation of the information.  (Come to think about it, this is sort of how modern religions got started, but that is another story – or is it?)

Would any true consensus develop over time?  Would there be any experts or in-depth expertise about anything?  No structured knowledge means no structured power.  Without centralized power you would have nothing short of anarchy.

That’s right – I’m saying that if the internet were developed before books there would be no modern civilization as we know it.  In fact it is practically illogical to think you could have an internet without books before it because how could you possibly develop something as complex as the internet without expert knowledge and a knowledge hierarchy in place for many many years to develop the technology to begin with.  And you simply could not have an infrastructure put in place when there may thousands of differing viewpoints as to how to construct such a distributed system.

Is any system of communication bad or good?  Every system has its positives and negatives and certain aspects have been adopted and dropped over time.  We don’t write on cave walls anymore, although you can still get some top notch reading on a bathroom stall.  We don’t write with stone tablets, however we still inscribe headstones. 

Some of you may still remember the BBS system as our internet of the past or still have a 300 baud modem that hooks up to your Commadore 64.  We use chat rooms and DSL modems to get our tech fix now and it has become increasingly easy to use.

As ICT became easier, faster and cheaper, there seemed to develop competition between the old literacy and the new literacy.  I think what we are battling with still is – is it a completely new way of communicating that will supplant literacy or is it just a new form of literacy that will enhance traditional reading and learning?

Dusty haired librarians lament the disappearance of books from their shelves and curse the arrival of more and more of the noisy boxes in their spaces.  Twitchy eyed geeks wallow in the pixel glow of their screens as they google their way through torrents of information.

What the librarians may fail to grasp, is that their beloved books have not disappeared; they are just not on paper anymore.  Just like writing on cave walls, stone, leaves, papyrus and scrolls, the medium may be disappearing, but the information is still there.

What is going to happen to ICT in the next 50 years then?  Is ICT going to supplant literacy entirely and become a new monster entity of some sort?  Is it going to be a sibling to literacy, different but equal?  Or is literacy going to supplant ICT eventually, using ICT as merely a tool for literacy?

I really couldn’t tell you.  I’m just a pseudo-expert putting together pieces of the puzzle in this ICT course.  If you want I could help you get a hold of the guy who wrote some stirring poetry about a man from Nantucket in the men’s room.  I’m sure he’s got that and a whole lot more on his Facebook site.