Subject: IFETS-DISCUSS May topic of Communications Technology and Personal Identity
From: Leslie Henrickson (lhenrick@ucla.edu)
Date: Sun 30 Apr 2000 - 23:17:41 MEST
Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 14:17:41 -0700 From: Leslie Henrickson <lhenrick@ucla.edu> Subject: IFETS-DISCUSS May topic of Communications Technology and Personal Identity
List address to send message to everyone: ifets-discuss@LISTSERV.READADP.COM
Details of current discussion: http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss.html
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To List Members Interested in the May Topic: Communications Technology and
Personal Identity.
This is the first posting for the May discussion series on communications
technology and personal identity. The introduction below develops the
original abstract found at the website, as well as poses questions that may
motivate your response and generate dialogue. Please feel free to respond
to the questions posed or to raise more interesting but related topics that
concern you. Thanks for your participation. Please note that I have
included half a dozen URL's at the end that provide more information about
particular points that I raise and provide additional resources. Feel free
to post to the list any additional URL's that may be useful to other members.
Leslie Henrickson
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Communications Technology, Personal Identity and Sensory Input
The description posted on the website about this discussion opened with a
heuristic device that divided the history of time into three segments based
on the communications tools used by societies, and characterized those
periods by the sensory shifts that occurred on a personal and social level.
(http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss_may2000.html)
The present discussion is set to explore the nature of two ideas. One,
let's explore this heuristic as a useful guide to thinking about the
overall topic of sensory input, personal identity and communications
technology. Several authors use this broad-brush approach but what types of
particular evidence would shore up its usefulness and make is directly
relevant to a person's life. Is this heuristic device a useful device, i.e.
to what degree is it true? Under what circumstances does it hold? How can
we know what to measure or how to measure relevance? For example, is change
in attention span a useful indicator that some social shift has occurred
that began on an individual level? Two, a second topic is to examine the
relationship between personal identity, and the social and individual
effects due to computers as communications technology. Do we have a
cultural lag with our tools? Is this a bad thing? If so, according to whose
logic? It seems the speed and shear choice prohibits people from gaining
competency with their tools, to ever catch up to an advancing technology.
For example, if this is true then what impact does incompetence have on
personal identity and what aggregate social form does this take?
Moore's Law, a computer industry rule of thumb, reliably predicts that the
speed and power of computer performance will double every 18 months. The
shape and form of computers has changed as well. Yesterday's room filling
isolated VAX mainframe has been replaced by today's desktop
internet-connected PC. Tomorrow, wearable computers equipped with the
latest sensory devices that send and receive signals from the global
positioning system will replace these PC's in our homes and schools. (See
the MIT wearable computers URL below)
The rapidity of technological advancement staggers the imagination and
catches many people off-guard as they try to absorb the impact of learning
new technologies, new tools, new ways of knowing. Reactions toward new
technologies can elicit resistance and adoption. One aspect of the current
discussion may explore the character of resistance and adoption of
technology as it has to do with personal identity and social relations.
Perhaps key to such an analysis is the interplay between human senses and
technology as it may alter notions of personal identity and of social
worldviews. It's reasonable that one aspect to the mechanism of change and
its impact has to do with the human/computer interface and the logic behind
using technology. Is this so? Under what circumstances is this so? For
example, does using a computer for computational purposes only have the
same affect as using a computer for communication purposes? Why would this
be so? If so, is the difference important? Anecdotally, I recently
interviewed some high school students who were being required to use a
programmable calculator for their mathematics classes. Some students
expressed ambivalence about the change. They expressed excitement at
gaining competence in using a sophisticated tool, but felt a lack of
competence with the underlying math that they had known in a different way,
losing touch with what they had known.
Marshall McLuhan argues that the effects of electric technologies
alter our sensibilities in fundamental ways that affect our notions of
identity. He uses the terms "closed" and "open" systems, and "inner sense
ratio" to describe the phenomena. External tools, or mechanical tools, have
extended practically everything a person can do with her body: weapons
extend the reach of the arm, glasses extend the reach of the eye, and money
is a way of extending and storing labor. Each of these external tools are
closed systems within themselves incapable of "collective awareness". On
the contrary, our internal private senses are open systems that are
"endlessly translated into each other in that experience we call
consciousness." A ratio of interplay among the private senses, the inner
sense ratio, is the response of the body to environmental stimuli. With
the speed of electric communications technology, McLuhan argues that we
have effectively crossed the border between closed and open
systems. Crossing the border occurs both because of the speed and of the
connection to language and consciousness.
One of McLuhan's concerns is the transition that our senses undergo when
incorporating new tools into our everyday life. Communications technologies
shift the inner balance. The shift in sensibility has an effect on
individual identity. McLuhan argues that a change in the inner sense ratio
can have aggregate effects on a society. Aggregate effects are reflected
through changes in worldviews, conceptions of problems and in social
organization. Following McLuhan's logic, the process to understand changes
in social structure must start first with understanding the nature of the
inner sense ratio, how it changes and what effects obtain on an
individual's sense of identity.
The implications for educators are riveting. Education serves a multitude
of purposes: to enculturate populations to the norms and expected behaviors
of the home society, to develop critical thinking skills, to democratize a
population, and to prepare students for reliable employment, to name a few
purposes. Technology can play a critical role in all of these purposes; it
does not have to, but it can. Technology is not uniformly inert but does
affect users in discriminate ways. I am particularly interested in the
understanding the nature of resistance to and adoption of technology in the
classroom in relation to personal sensibilities and the perceived affect of
communications technology.
The discussion can address the affective interaction between human and
computer at the individual level of student, teacher, and administrator;
or, the relational level between students and teachers; or, the systems
level of school districts and administrations. What are the characteristics
at each level? What happens with young computer literate children and older
less computer literate teacher? What effect does this have on teaching
style? How is adoption of or resistance to technology imparted in
relational situations? This discussion is particularly suggestive toward
questions about what it means to be computer literate? If the technologies
change so rapidly, then don't notions of computer literacy change as well?
Currently, notions of computer literacy focus on software and keyboarding
competence. It wasn't always so. In the beginning were large mainframe
computers that required heavily trained scientists to use the tool. Now
with desktop computers computer power is presumably accessible to all.
Today, computer literacy is not like it was twenty years ago nor is
computer literacy is like book literacy. Tomorrow's computers will derive
their power from simulating more human like sensory awareness. See MIT
wearable computers URL below. What impact on our senses, our sense of
personal identity will occur? How will we impart to our youth, as
educators, the import of the technologies that we strap onto our bodies?
Computer literacy will become multiple types of literacies as we navigate
the world using our communications tools. See Kellner's website below.
These are the comments and questions that frame the current discussion.
Thank you for your participation and comments on this important topic. I
have listed several websites below that complement my introduction with
more thorough knowledge on particular points. For example, David Chandler
provides a broad-brush description of the heuristic tool of aural-visual
dichotomy that is informative. Two sides of the debate on the affective
nature of communications tools are at the website on Katherine Hayles book,
How We Became Posthuman; and, Eleanor Wynn's argument that there is little
effect. Douglas Kellner's website provides a wealth of information on a
variety of topics listed by authors of critical theory and critical
technology as they can relate to education. I provide MIT's wearable
computer website as a state of the art illustration of the future of
computers. Thanks and I look forward to our discussion.
Some very useful and accessible material related to this subject can be
found on the following links:
Katherine Hayles has written a book
Review/summary of Katherine Hayles book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
http://www.ctheory.com/r49.html
David Chandler's work provides a context for understanding the heuristic
dichotomy of Aural vs Visual societies:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral.html
David Chandler's work provides some background on technological determinism
and social structure:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/tdet01.html
Eleanor Wynn argues against the idea that computers affect cultural or
personal change:
Hyperbole over Cyberspace: Self-presentation & Social Boundaries in
Internet Home Pages and Discourse
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/articles/hyperbole.html
Douglas Kellner's excellent class website on Education, Technology and
Society. Many links to sites with information and articles on technology,
education, critical theory and society.
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/253WEBa.htm
MIT's wearable computer website
http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/
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