November 1995
Beginner
502 pages
11h 11m
English
Content preview from The Future Does Not Compute
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Net-based Learning Communities
This is Chapter 12 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
Entering a classroom, the sixth-grade girl sits down at her terminal and composes an email message to her “Net pal” in India. The two of them are comparing notes about efforts to save endangered species in their separate localities, as part of a class project. Their messages, discharged across the Internet, reach their destinations within minutes. Each child's excitement about making contact is palpable.
In later years, these children may even chance to meet, and their email exchanges will have prepared them to accept each other on equal terms, rather than to be put off by cultural barriers.
An attractive picture? I once thought so. But even assuming this sort of thing to be one of the bright promises of the Net, I doubt we will see its broad realization any time soon. Why? Because the promise is being overwhelmed by sentimentality, uncritical futurism, and the worship of technology. We're seeing an unhealthy romanticization of the Net.
The world is disappearing from the child
Allow me a brief flanking movement here. It's now routine for social critics to bemoan ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.