Date: Mon, 2 May 1994 23:49:32 -0400 (EDT) To: pnews@world.std.com Subject: INFO EXPLOSION

Date: Mon, 2 May 1994 23:49:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: PNEWS 
To: pnews@world.std.com
Subject: INFO EXPLOSION or CHAOS?

[****PNEWS CONFERENCES*****]

[Here is an interesting statement about the choas we call 
the "information explosion." To quote Henry David Thoreau: "All 
our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end."  HR] 
 
From: TELECOM Moderator 
Subject: Informing Ourselves to Death

Awhile back, I sent out a transcript of a speech made by Vice-President
Gore discussing the 'superhighway' concept going around these days. A
response was received from Bill Pfeiffer, passing along an interesting
alternative viewpoint to that of the White House, and I thought you
would be interested in seeing it.

PAT

   From: rrb@deja-vu.aiss.uiuc.edu (Bill Pfeiffer)
   Subject: Rebuttle (of sorts) to Gore's Speech
   Date: Tue, 18 Jan 1994 18:12:41 -0600 (CST)

Dear TELECOM:

Here is a file of a speech by Neil Postman who has a slightly
different perspective on the Information Superhighway.

Bill Pfeiffer   Editor AIRWAVES RADIO JOURNAL (info@airwaves.chi.il.us)

Source:  Neil Postman, German Informatics Society, 11 Oct 90, Stuttgart

Following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics
Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in
Stuttgart, sponsored by IBM-Germany.

                       INFORMING OURSELVES TO DEATH
                       ____________________________
                             by Neil Postman

The great English playwright and social philosopher George 
Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies 
against the common folk.  He meant that those who belong to elite 
trades -physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists - protect 
their special status by creating vocabularies that are 
incomprehensible to the general public.  This process prevents 
outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing and why 
- and protects the insiders from close examination and criticism.  
Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of technical 
gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see. 

Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, 
for I consider myself a professional teacher and appreciate 
technical gobbledegook as much as anyone.  But I do not object if 
occasionally someone who does not know the secrets of my trade is 
allowed entry to the inner halls to express an untutored point of 
view.  Such a person may sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, 
even better, see something in a way that the professionals have 
overlooked. 

I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for 
just such a purpose.  I do not know very much more about computer 
technology than the average person - which isn't very much.  I 
have little understanding of what excites a computer programmer 
or scientist, and in examining the descriptions of the 
presentations at this conference, I found each one more 
mysterious than the next.  So, I clearly qualify as an outsider. 

But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but 
an outsider who has a point of view that might be useful to the 
insiders. And that is why I accepted the invitation to speak. I 
believe I know something about what technologies do to culture, 
and I know even more about what technologies undo in a culture. 
In fact, I might say, at the start, that what a technology undoes 
is a subject that computer experts apparently know very little 
about. I have heard many experts in computer technology speak 
about the advantages that computers will bring. With one 
exception - namely, Joseph Weizenbaum - I have never heard anyone 
speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of 
computer technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder 
if the profession is hiding something important. That is to say, 
what seems to be lacking among computer experts is a sense of 
technological modesty. 

After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows 
that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: 
Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in 
equal measure.  A new technology sometimes creates more than it 
destroys.  Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates.  But it 
is never one-sided. 

The invention of the printing press is an excellent example.  
Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it 
destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.  
Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist 
form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but 
transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in 
superstition.  Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-
state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a 
murderous emotion. 

Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to 
favor some groups of people and harms other groups. School 
teachers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made 
obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the 
automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing 
press. Technological change, in other words, always results in 
winners and losers. 

In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing 
that the computer has increased the power of large-scale 
organizations like military establishments or airline companies 
or banks or tax collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that 
the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in 
physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has 
computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To 
steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile 
mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of 
the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people 
have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful 
institutions.  They are more easily tracked and controlled; they 
are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly 
mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often 
reduced to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk 
mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and 
political organizations. The schools teach their children to 
operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are 
more valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing happens to 
the losers that they need, which is why they are losers. 

It is to be expected that the winners - for example, most of the 
speakers at this conference - will encourage the losers to be 
enthusiastic about computer technology.  That is the way of 
winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal 
computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, 
keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping 
lists.  They also tell them that they can vote at home, shop at 
home, get all the information they wish at home, and thus make 
community life unnecessary.  They tell them that their lives will 
be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from 
whose point of view or what might be the costs of such 
efficiency. 

Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with 
the wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal 
relevance to the quality of the losers' lives but which are 
nonetheless impressive.  Eventually, the losers succumb, in part 
because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the 
masters of a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The 
masters, of course, come to believe this as well.  The result is 
that certain questions do not arise, such as, to whom will the 
computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and 
freedom will be reduced? 

Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned 
conspiracy, as if the winners know all too well what is being won 
and what lost. But this is not quite how it happens, for the 
winners do not always know what they are doing, and where it will 
all lead. The Benedictine monks who invented the mechanical clock 
in the 12th and 13th centuries believed that such a clock would 
provide a precise regularity to the seven periods of devotion 
they were required to observe during the course of the day.  As a 
matter of fact, it did. But what the monks did not realize is 
that the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the 
hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of 
men. And so, by the middle of the 14th century, the clock had 
moved outside the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and 
precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. 
The mechanical clock made possible the idea of regular 
production, regular working hours, and a standardized product. 
Without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible. 
And so, here is a great paradox: the clock was invented by men 
who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; and it 
ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to 
devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology 
always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, 
at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will 
lose. 

I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann 
Gutenberg was by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have 
been horrified to hear Martin Luther, the accursed heretic, 
declare that printing is "God's highest act of grace, whereby the 
business of the Gospel is driven forward." Gutenberg thought his 
invention would advance the cause of the Holy Roman See, whereas 
in fact, it turned out to bring a revolution which destroyed the 
monopoly of the Church. 

We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the 
masters of computer technology think they are doing for us which 
they and we may have reason to regret? I believe there is, and it 
is suggested by the title of my talk, "Informing Ourselves to 
Death".  In the time remaining, I will try to explain what is 
dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust you will be 
open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I can 
begin to get at this by telling you of a small experiment I have 
been conducting, on and off, for the past several years. There 
are some people who describe the experiment as an exercise in 
deceit and exploitation but I will rely on your sense of humor to 
pull me through. 

Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a 
colleague who appears not to be in possession of a copy of {The 
New York Times}. "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. 
If the colleague says yes, there is no experiment that day. But 
if the answer is no, the experiment can proceed. "You ought to 
look at Page 23," I say. "There's a fascinating article about a 
study done at Harvard University."  "Really? What's it about?" is 
the usual reply. My choices at this point are limited only by my 
imagination. But I might say something like this: "Well, they did 
this study to find out what foods are best to eat for losing 
weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by 
chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the best approach. 
It seems that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs - 
encomial dioxin - that actually uses up calories at an incredible 
rate." 

Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are 
known to be health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to 
know about this," I say. "The neuro-physiologists at the 
University of Stuttgart have uncovered a connection between 
jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than 1200 
people over a period of five years, and found that as the number 
of hours people jogged increased, there was a corresponding 
decrease in their intelligence. They don't know exactly why but 
there it is." 

I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the 
experiment: to report something that is quite ridiculous - one 
might say, beyond belief. Let me tell you, then, some of my 
results: Unless this is the second or third time I've tried this 
on the same person, most people will believe or at least not 
disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they say: "Really? 
Is that possible?" Sometimes they do a doubletake, and reply, 
"Where'd you say that study was done?" And sometimes they say, 
"You know, I've heard something like that." 

Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these 
results, one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years 
ago when he said, there is no idea so stupid that you can't find 
a professor who will believe it. This is more of an accusation 
than an explanation but in any case I have tried this experiment 
on non-professors and get roughly the same results. Another 
possible conclusion is one expressed by George Orwell - also 
about 50 years ago -when he remarked that the average person 
today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle 
Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of 
their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the 
authority of our science, no matter what. 

But I think there is still another and more important conclusion 
to be drawn, related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right 
angle to it. I am referring to the fact that the world in which 
we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is 
almost no fact-whether actual or imagined - that will surprise us 
for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent 
picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an 
unacceptable contradiction.  We believe because there is no 
reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, 
metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world 
that, for the most part, makes no sense to us. Not even technical 
sense. I don't mean to try my experiment on this audience, 
especially after having told you about it, but if I informed you 
that the seats you are presently occupying were actually made by 
a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark herring, on 
what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know - indeed, for 
all I know - the skin of a Bismark herring could have made the 
seats on which you sit. And if I could get an industrial chemist 
to confirm this fact by describing some incomprehensible process 
by which it was done, you would probably tell someone tomorrow 
that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring. 

Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with 
an analogy: If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started 
turning the cards over, one by one, you would have a pretty good 
idea of what their order is. After you had gone from the ace of 
spades through the nine of spades, you would expect a ten of 
spades to come up next. And if a three of diamonds showed up 
instead, you would be surprised and wonder what kind of deck of 
cards this is. But if I gave you a deck that had been shuffled 
twenty times, and then asked you to turn the cards over, you 
would not expect any card in particular - a three of diamonds 
would be just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for 
assuming a given order, you would have no reason to react with 
disbelief or even surprise to whatever card turns up. 

The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual 
order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and 
therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise. 

In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the 
average person in the Middle Ages. The belief system of the 
Middle Ages was rather like my brand-new deck of cards. There 
existed an ordered, comprehensible world-view, beginning with the 
idea that all knowledge and goodness come from God. What the 
priests had to say about the world was derived from the logic of 
their theology. There was nothing arbitrary about the things 
people were asked to believe, including the fact that the world 
itself was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the year 4004 B. C. 
That could be explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the 
satisfaction of anyone. So could the fact that 10,000 angels 
could dance on the head of a pin. It made quite good sense, if 
you believed that the Bible is the revealed word of God and that 
the universe is populated with angels. The medieval world was, to 
be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was not 
without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might not 
clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the 
grand and benevolent design, but they had no doubt that there was 
such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction 
from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at 
least coherent. 

The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should 
say, sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It 
is rather like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. There is 
no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as 
the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And 
therefore, in a sense, we are more naive than those of the Middle 
Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost 
anything. The skin of a Bismark herring makes about as much sense 
as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin. 

Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the 
wisdom of Cassius on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but 
almost literally in the stars. When Galileo turned his telescope 
toward the heavens, and allowed Kepler to look as well, they 
found no enchantment or authorization in the stars, only 
geometric patterns and equations. God, it seemed, was less of a 
moral philosopher than a master mathematician.  This discovery 
helped to give impetus to the development of physics but did 
nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it was 
possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the 
universe, and that God took a special interest in our affairs. 
Afterward, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure 
galaxy in a hidden corner of the universe, and we were left to 
wonder if God had any interest in us at all. The ordered, 
comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to unravel because 
people no longer saw in the stars the face of a friend. 

And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, 
as well. I refer to information. There was a time when 
information was a resource that helped human beings to solve 
specific and urgent problems of their environment. It is true 
enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of 
information but its very scarcity made it both important and 
usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th 
century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted 
an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, 
created what we now call an information explosion. Forty years 
after the invention of the press, there were printing machines in 
110 cities in six different countries; 50 years after, more than 
eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled 
with information that had previously not been available to the 
average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea 
that computer technology introduced the age of information. The 
printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it 
since. 

But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a 
deluge of chaos.  If I may take my own country as an example, 
here is what we are faced with: In America, there are 260,000 
billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video 
outlets for renting tapes; 362 million tv sets; and over 400 
million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles published every 
year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41 million 
photographs are taken, and just for the record, over 60 billion 
pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every 
year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th 
century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the 
din of information, until matters have reached such proportions 
today that for the average person, information no longer has any 
relation to the solution of problems. 

The tie between information and action has been severed. 
Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or 
used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to 
enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no 
one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted 
with information, drowning in information, have no control over 
it, don't know what to do with it. 

And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. 
First, as I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of 
ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and 
our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we 
come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know 
what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant 
to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and 
intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but 
increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our 
defenses against information glut have broken down; our 
information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to 
filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to 
use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS. 

Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we 
know, has a quality of universality, not only because its uses 
are almost infinitely various but also because computers are 
commonly integrated into the structure of other machines. 
Therefore it would be fatuous of me to warn against every 
conceivable use of a computer. But there is no denying that the 
most prominent uses of computers have to do with information. 
When people talk about "information sciences," they are talking 
about computers - how to store information, how to retrieve 
information, how to organize information. The computer is an 
answer to the questions, how can I get more information, faster, 
and in a more usable form? These would appear to be reasonable 
questions. But now I should like to put some other questions to 
you that seem to me more reasonable. Did Iraq invade Kuwait 
because of a lack of information? If a hideous war should ensue 
between Iraq and the U. S., will it happen because of a lack of 
information? If children die of starvation in Ethiopia, does it 
occur because of a lack of information? Does racism in South 
Africa exist because of a lack of information? If criminals roam 
the streets of New York City, do they do so because of a lack of 
information? 

Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your 
spouse are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, 
will it happen because of a lack of information? If your children 
misbehave and bring shame to your family, does it happen because 
of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a mental 
breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information? 

I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes 
us the most misery and pain - at both cultural and personal 
levels - has nothing to do with the sort of information  made 
accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot 
answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to 
make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot 
provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what 
questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of 
understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why 
decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. 
The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us 
from facing what we most needed to confront - spiritual 
emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past 
and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. 
It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with 
trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a technological 
messiah. 

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.  

Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are 
but improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe 
told us: "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a 
good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a 
few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The 
unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the 
prophet Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to 
do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?"  
And I can tell you - if I had the time (although you all know it 
well enough) - what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed, the 
Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: 
There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it 
has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking 
ourselves in technological glory. 

Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by
quoting the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the 
cartoonist, Walt Kelley.  I commend his words to all the 
technological utopians and messiahs present. "We have met the 
enemy," Pogo said, "and he is us." 

                         -------------------


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My sincere thanks to Bill for passing
along this article to us. It certainly does give us something to 
meditate upon as we travel down the 'information superhighway' so
highly touted by the present occupant of the White House and his
staff.   PAT]