Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 16, 1994 TAG: 9408270006
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARSHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He used the master's magic to get broomsticks to do his job, carrying water. It worked - but he couldn't stop the brooms. A flood resulted, and disaster threatened. The angry master returned just in time to save the day. Mickey Mouse was the Sorcerer's Apprentice in "Fantasia." I remember it vividly.
We don't have sorcerer's apprentices these days - at least not by that name. But try this possible substitute for the 1990s: technopoly.
This new popular buzzword (the title of Neil Postman's latest book) restates the ancient axiom of Socrates - that the unexamined life is not worth living. Technopoly suggests that the unexamined technology is not worth having.
This fear of rampant and unchecked technology goes all the way back to the Luddites, 17th-century English followers of Ned Ludd who smashed spinning jennies to protect the handicrafts and cottage industries. In our own century, it surfaced in books like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932) and George Orwell's "1984" (1948). More recently, writers like Lewis Mumford, Christopher Lasch and Ivan Illich have sent out warning signals. In "The True and Onlv Heaven: Progress and Its Critics," Lasch implies that there may have been some truth in John Randolph's definition of progress as a "luscious lie."
No one can deny that technology has done incredible things for us, in this era of silicon chips, space walks, AWACs, medical miracles and virtual reality. The whole world is wired for the latest on O. J. Simpson. The question is, what has all this done to us? How much of the highly touted Information Revolution is built on ad hypes, media distortion, TV ratings and patriotic chauvinism?
Bill Gibson spent two years watching and analyzing 2,000 hours of TV tape - a single day's offering on a cable system with 120 channels. We all knew what he would find: the same thing, the same reruns, the same plots over and over and over. Television, he concluded, is indeed a drug - not an hallucinogen, offering new perceptions, but one guaranteed to repeat itself day after day. Only a rare program breaks through television's claustrophobic and centrifugal force. Now we are told we might end up with 500 channels!
But technopoly has leveled its biggest guns at the computer. It does many things (processing, sorting, and storing information) extremely well. There are other things (thinking, feeling, creating ideas) that it can't do at all. Mankind's noblest ideas (justice, equality, compassion) are not computable. When disaster strikes, don't expect your computer to cry.
Yet many people - including those in positions of knowledge and power - do insist on humanizing and empowering the computer to "lead the way." To them, computers have "brains," possessing "intelligence." They even personalize the machine to the point of buying clothing for it. A computer in our building wears a business suit for meetings. John Pfeiffer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has written a book calling the computer "The Thinking Machine," and John Kemeny has forecast a "symbiotic evolution" of the human and computer species. We are hearing claims that computers are not only smarter but more durable than us; that they might become the dominant species of "life" on planet Earth.
Think of the implications. Homo sapiens, which nature evolved in 2 millions years, and Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed gave their lives to redeem, will be doomed to oblivion by IBM and MacIntosh. Data data everywhere and not a chance to think.
Part of the problem is linguistic. Computer people are developing a language of their own, unlike any of the human languages. I always thought German was a hard language (Mark Twain called a German passage "chloroform on paper") until I tried to read a computer manual. Shades of Orwell's doublethink! Once you learn one "system," the model or indeed the whole system changes: enforced obsolescence.
How does it happen, Lasch asks, that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all? How much of what we see today is scientific, and how much is hard-sell? Things aren't "scientific" just because we put on a white coat (TV's solution) or publish yet another manual full of acronyms and pretty pictures. We become "scientific" by practicing a set of canons of thought that require a disciplined use of language which is accessible to everyone. "The ascent of humanity," Neil Postman notes, "has rested largely on that."
Meanwhile, pray that your computer doesn't reject discs, erase months of work, or get a virus. If calamity strikes, there is no way for you to fix it. Off to the professional repair service. In due time (and at considerable expense), it will come back. Perhaps there will be a message attached, like one outside my office: "INTERNALLY TERMINATED. System 700.1 Tune-Up At Ease 1.0"
I don't know what this means, but I know I'm not at ease. I am not prepared to surrender my language and my culture to technology. Much of this new technology is essential to our survival, and we must all learn how to master it. I will not let it master me. The uncontrolled growth of technology, and puffed up illusions of progress, destroy the vital sources of our humanity.
Marshall Fishwick is professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech.
by CNB