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November 2003: IT Education and Democratic PracticeDefinitions of key termsCommunication ¦ Cyberspace ¦ Digital Divide CommunicationCommunication is, essentially, the transmission of information. Indeed there is some justification for believing that information is given form by communication, and simply could not exist without it. It is only when inner beliefs, insights and the like are shared that they become information; and these beliefs and insights are invariably based on information previously communicated. Is communication something abstract, though? Or is it embodied in particular media (speech, print, television, the Internet) which constrain it in particular ways? The analysis of communication as an act is a vast field of study, the sub-disciplines of which include (but are not limited to) linguistics, semiotics and communications and media studies. Some authors, principally Jürgen Habermas, have gone so far as to place communication at the centre of their political and social theories. (Habermas is introduced in this month's feature essay, and we plan a more detailed discussion of his work in a later issue of the Tangentium.) We take the view that communication is not an abstract idea, but something which acts to transform the world. In that respect it is innately political. And as IT is a communications medium, it too has political implications. This general perspective will continue to inform the writing in this journal. CyberspaceThis term was first used in William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer, published in 1984. The novel described a future society in which "hackers" could disembody themselves and enter what was, in effect, a virtual analogue of the physical world. Data and systems were represented as objects and structures in a virtual "landscape", and could be manipulated as such. Gibson's novel became the definitive work of a genre quickly termed cyberpunk, characterised by virtual reality and other high-technology gimmicks, profligate brand names, and a pseudo-anarchic worldview in which lone hackers take on faceless corporations or conspiracies. Many films have attempted to capture this genre but few have managed it: the two most successful examples (neither of which comes directly from cyberpunk) are probably The Matrix and Blade Runner. There it might have rested were it not for John Perry Barlow, one of the most outspoken evangelists of the early Internet. He popularised Gibson's word as a term for the virtual "space" in which electronic communication took place. Where, he asked, does a telephone conversation occur? Not strictly at each end of the telephone connection, but somewhere inbetween; an intangible yet real "room" where the voices of the participants can both exist and communicate. With the Internet, cyberspace expands exponentially, becoming a space where not just two but a multitude of voices can speak and be heard simultaneously. Barlow went so far as to claim that this represented a new "territory" for the use of all humanity: as evinced by his Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, written in response to the US Government's aborted Communications Decency Act. Yet although the term "cyberspace" is now used uncritically, often as a synonym for "the Internet", it is still only vaguely defined in most cases. Nor should we forget that, essentially, it is a term from fiction, no more rigorous in its origins than, say, "Middle-Earth" or "Oz". Indeed, a neglected irony is that while cyber- has become a generic prefix meaning "related to computers or the Internet" - hence we have cybercommunity, cyberpolitics, cybersex and many more - the ultimate etymology of the term has nothing to do with computing. Gibson drew the term from Norbert Weiner's cybernetics, meaning the combining of human and machine. And Weiner in turn drew it from the Greek term kybernetes meaning "steersman", a relative of the Latin gubernator, from which "governed" and "governor" come. Does cyberspace free our minds: or control them? For more detail on the tensions and possibilities opened by the term "cyberspace", see the March 2004 issue of Tangentium. Digital DivideFew would argue that, almost regardless of what measure is used, the world is an unequal place. Incomes, life expectancy, levels of public health, literacy; none are distributed equally across the globe. There are also inequalities within as well as between nations - and in most cases, both are becoming wider. These observations apply regardless of whether certain ideologies consider inequalities justified or not. The information society has done littleso far to relieve these inequalities. Indeed, as already mentioned, in the last twenty to thirty years many measures of inequality have shown increases. It is not necessarily the case that these have been caused by the rapid uptake of IT; that is a complex question best left unanswered for now. However, one particular set of inequalities applies directly to our field of interest. Due to the nicely alliterative nature of the term, this is often termed the "digital divide". This refers to gross inequalities in access to information technology and the Internet. The "digital divide" is not uniform. There are different aspects to it. The divide is geographical; use of the Internet, web hosting, and IT research and development is dominated by North America, with Europe and Japan lagging behind, let alone the rest of the world. (Follow this link for some detailed statistics.) For related reasons, it is racial and gendered. Information technology is a marketable good, and therefore tends to concentrate in wealthier areas. The technology was also created mainly by white, well-educated Euro-American males (who have dominated most aspects of human society for some time now), and therefore tends to reflect the values and perceived needs of this group. None of this is meant to suggest some conspiracy theory, or that the technology has been maliciously used to maintain domination - but one should note that most inequalities tend to be self-perpetuating, and technology of any sort is often one tool in that perpetuation. Governments across the globe are mostly committed, on paper, to addressing "digital divides". Suggested remedies have not all been as crass as Newt Gingrich's call to provide "laptops to the unemployed of America" (reported in the International Herald Tribune, 7/1/95), although the UK government have in the past announced policies to improve access to IT for those on low incomes which are similar in tone, if more rational. Yet these symptomise the common - but wrong - view that the "digital divide" can be treated in isolation from all the other inequalities which beset the world. The belief is that simply by providing access to IT, everything will then be resolved; but this view takes no account of the much broader interplay of overt and covert domination which disempowers the majority of the world's people. And even if, at some point in the mid- to long-term, the majority of the population have access to some form of computing technology, will this merely be used to pipe advertising and "infotainment" to them in the passive manner of TV? The more subtle, but far stronger, "digital divide" becomes obvious when one considers what proportion of the population are actively involved in the creation of IT policy. That awkward question is far less addressed - but almost certainly far more important than the relatively trivial issue of who can use IT. InformationChambers' English Dictionary equates "information" with both "knowledge" and "data", but these are different things, and in this division lie all the problems with the term. The problems are exacerbated by what is known as the mathematical theory of communication, first proposed by CM Shannon in 1948 (note the link requires Adobe Acrobat and is a relatively large file). Shannon saw information as purely a quantity, in other words, a certain amount of bits (binary digits). This theory is of great importance to the engineering issues surrounding the transmission of these bits, and thereby, the construction and smooth functioning of telecommunications networks on which the Internet and IT depend. But to reduce information to a quantity is to risk obscuring all considerations regarding the quality of that information. From this perspective it is possible to consider "&hHH)) -wei3*JMMM^^^ 7823K,Bm" as little different to "Love thy neighbour as thyself", as both require twenty-nine bytes of information to transmit. Yet the value of the latter is infinitely more profound than the former. Information technology has clearly led to vast increases in humanity's ability to produce, store and transmit bits. But it is very doubtful whether it will directly lead to increases in our ability to produce truly valuable knowledge, morality and ethical advances of the sort epitomised by the second 29 bytes; this is true whatever worldview one adheres to (Christian, Moslem, any other religion or indeed any agnostic or atheist system of values). Nor is it easy to discern just where information "resides". Some have suggested the existence of an intangible, but real sphere of the Earth called the "noösphere" or "lifeworld" into which humanity can reach for informational resources, which we use alongside physical resources (oil, food, land, technology) in order to act in the world. One should at least recognise that, like energy, information flows; it does not disperse itself fairly evenly throughout the available space, like a gas. It can gather in certain places. Its flow can be accidentally or deliberately blocked. Control over information can be asserted, in order to gain wealth or power. We find these arguments persuasive, and they will be discussed in more detail in a future issue of Tangentium. Information SocietyAs is so often the case in this field, this term is used frequently, but rarely defined with any rigour. In general it refers to a society in which information, rather than material goods, has become the chief economic, social and cultural motor. The implication is that it is the world’s richer economies, principally in North America, Europe, Japan and Australasia, who are making or have already made this transition: see, for instance, Daniel Bell (1976), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Penguin). The title of Bell's book captures well the feeling that the increasing importance of the processing of intangible information, coupled with the decline of traditional industries such as mining and manufacturing, is a historical inevitability; the next stage in the evolution of human civilisation after the industrial age. Most commentators agree on the general trends which characterise this transition, principally:
Despite this general agreement, however, there seems little consensus on how to measure the signifiers of this new society. Bearing in mind that these technologies must still be built, and people must still eat, it is also naive to claim that the information society has superseded industrial or even agricultural society, or that it will do so any time soon. Many millions of people still alive today have yet to make a telephone call, let alone get wired to the Net. The digital divide means that the citizens of this new world are far from equal. Inequality is just one problem that the information society will struggle to remove or even relieve. Citizens of supposed democracies still have great problems accessing information which their governments do not wish them to see, or which corporations have a financial interest in protecting. For all that the flow of resources around the information society has become more rapid, flexible and location independent, society possesses many of the same structures and problems that it always has. The information society’s future will be shaped by technological and economic influences, but also on social, political and cultural factors which are rather less easy to predict or direct. Information Technology (IT)Computers have become the definitive information technology. But they are not the only one. In broad terms, IT should be considered as any technology which assists people in creating, analysing, storing and disseminating information. And one should also note that in its literal sense a "computer" is something which performs mathematical calculations; the first computer may well have been the abacus (a skilled abacist even today can make calculations more quickly than an average person with an electronic calculator). Computers were first designed to "number-crunch", not to exchange information. Even the Internet, in its earliest manifestation, was built mainly so that scientists in one place could access the brute computing power of machines in other institutions. It was only after the Internet was first built that people realised it was being used largely for electronic mail, file sharing and other forms of information exchange. (See Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's book, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.) As stated in the definition of information, humans have always drawn on this intangible resource to act in the world, and any technology which assists them in doing so has therefore been of value. No technology emerges in a vacuum. All technologies are at least partly shaped by social, political and economic concerns and themselves go on to provoke further changes. Control over access to a technology is often a key element of power and social engineering. The printing press, for example, was long considered a subversive technology, as it helped break the religious monopoly on the creation of texts and the dissemination of ("acceptable") forms of knowledge. Christopher Hill, in his history of the English Revolutions of the 17th century (The World Turned Upside Down) directly relates the spread of Protestantism to the use of the printing press, particularly during a relaxation of censorship in the middle years of the 1600s. It is sometimes said that computers (or indeed any technology) are "just tools". It is true that the raw hardware cannot be said to have values or beliefs. But the computer form of IT was developed for specific reasons, and its explosion since about 1970 was directly driven by the needs of large, corporate economic concerns (whether these be businesses or governments). In any competitive, capitalist environment, maintaining and improving one's "market share" are paramount concerns, and due to the economic importance of information, the efficiency gains IT made possible ensured its success. (This is not even to consider the huge industry that has sprung up around IT itself as a consumer good.) Those who would attempt to use IT for radical or grass-roots ends should remember this. IT, like so many other technologies, was not developed to break the status quo, but to preserve and enhance it. | |