By Michael Day
(in the Silver Anniversary Anthology: Celebrating 25 years of the South Dakota Humanities Council edited by Thomas Gasque. Brookings, South Dakota: Souoth Dakota Humanites Council, 1997. 59-69.)
An obvious question seems to come up every time I propose discussion of the uses of technology, particularly the Internet, for furthering the spread of the humanities in South Dakota and across the world. Aren't we talking about opposites here? Isn't technology, and particularly the Internet, DEHUMANIZING, in that it replaces multichanneled human interaction with machines and wires? Granted, science fiction stories with the theme of technological innovation destroying human spirit, emotion, and aesthetic abound. One such tale is Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 Player Piano, with its theme of wasted human lives in a future techno-utopia. And most of us will never forget George Orwell's 1949 1984, with its specter of a prison-like life under the panoptic gaze of Big Brother. More recently, novels such as William Gibson's 1984 Neuromancer and Bruce Sterling's 1988 Islands in the Net warn us of a future cyberspace inhabited by con-men, spies, and huge political takeover plots.
The 1990s have brought us a growing number of nonfiction cautionary treatises about the Internet and cyberspace, among them Neil Postman's Technopoly, Mark Slouka's War of the Worlds, and Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Superhighway. The message of these books, though reached via a variety of arguments, is similar: our move into cyberspace may be dangerous for society, since it creates Internet addicts, limits channels of communication, and opens the door to a disembodied existence where ethical values do not apply.
It is true that the Internet poses an enormous challenge to society, but hiding from it will not make it go away. Nor, I will argue, can responsible educators and parents attempt to shut the door on cyberspace to our children and students. Too much is at stake; information about every possible subject is migrating on-line faster than we can imagine, and the Internet now provides a gateway to wider and wider libraries and museums of music, literature, art and other human endeavors.
Granted, the current textual basis of Internet communication limits the channels, such as gesture, facial expression, body language, and tone of voice, with which we can interact with others. However, textual communication such as Email has caused a resurgence of emphasis on the power of the written word, resulting in what I call the New Electronic Epistolary Movement. Among the literate, letter-writing was once a primary vehicle for communicating thoughts and ideas; the intellectual circle of Samuel Johnson is a good example. Now, families and friends are finding that the ease of using Email makes it possible for them to communicate more frequently and at greater length.
Further, the most adventurous electronic pioneers have found ways to make interactive worlds on Internet-connected computers, in which they create environments described solely in text. Once the playgrounds only of role-playing gamers, more and more of these environments, known as Multiple User Dimensions (MUDs), are inhabited by artists and wordsmiths who like poets make use of the power of words to evoke imagination. Here they can collaborate on real world or cyberspace projects, all the while combining practical communication with the aesthetic of the well-turned phrase or the most evocative textual description.
The future, or course, will bring more media into the equation, including the sound, graphics, and video already becoming available on the World Wide Web, making possible the same sharing of aesthetic consciousness with more channels for communication. It will be as easy to see an artistic masterwork or hear a musical composition on line as it will be to play it on a CD player. Further, humanities scholars will be able to share multimedia projects, as well as collaborate by means of interactive video with sound.
One of the greatest benefits of the Internet will be in the area of humanities education. Students of writing, creative writing, and literature will be able to work within the text-only realm of Email and MUDs, communicating and collaborating not only with their own classes, but with classes and experts anywhere on earth. Many schools already use Email for interschool discussion and collaboration, and a few have already made those projects real-time with MUDs. In one imaginative project, Leslie Harris's students at Susquehannah University built a textual version of Dante's Inferno on a MUD called Diversity University. Not only did they describe environments and sensations, they also created interactive characters who, when asked, could explain their roles in the literary work.
The World Wide Web offers a unique new medium for humanities scholars. Not only can they receive texts, graphics, video, and sound from a variety of sources for their research, they can also become publishers and producers of information for the potential audiences of their web pages. Artists, writers, musicians, and those working in virtually any medium can publicize their work on multimedia web sites, creating a kind of virtual portfolio which prospective buyers, clients, and employers can browse. Or, in the formative stages, students can put draft or "in-progress" versions of work on the web, and request comment from their peers anywhere in the world.
No one would argue that much of the material on the web is amateurish, or that navigating through that material can be difficult. Now that making web pages is so easy and access is becoming widespread, everyone seems to be jumping onto the web, and the results are less than impressive. Yet teachers of media will recognize that in the jumble and cacophony that is the current state of the World Wide Web we have the makings of the teachable moment, when students ask "Just what IS a good, interesting, usable web page?" In answering this question with students, we can open up useful dialogue about aesthetics, design, useability, rhetorical purpose and audience -- concerns which, I would argue, are central to our understanding of media and of human endeavors in general.
Not only does the using the Internet open up questions related to the quality and design of web pages, it also forces us to reconsider an essential question of research, the issue of the reliability of sources. Just because someone said it on an Internet discussion group, or posted it on a web page, does that make a claim any more reliable than one made in street gossip or tabloid journalism? With Internet sources, we can ask students to face the age-old question of authority and reliability: just how do Internet sources earn credibility from audiences? In order to become better researchers, and in order to improve their own authority, students need to explore and discuss these questions with reference to Internet sources.
Further, we can extract a teachable moment from the first time our students complain "It's impossible to FIND anything on the Internet!" One of the most exacting criticisms of technology and especially the Internet comes from those who complain that it is centered on machines and organized for machine-like searching, not for normal humans to access what they need. This may be the area in which humanities scholars need to push hardest: the design of intuitive information systems and user interfaces that put people, not machines, first. We may find that some sort of combination of pragmatics and aesthetics is needed to make information most accessible to the greatest number of people.
One persistent criticism of Internet communication and collaboration needs to be addressed directly. This is the claim that since computers mediate communication, the resulting communication is less human and therefore less worthy than face-to-face communication. First, we must remember how much machines such as the telephone, radio, and television limit our communication, especially the latter two, since they are one-way media (with the notable exception of ham radio). Second, we need to ask some basic questions about community and camaraderie in cyberspace. How do humans decide whom to trust, with whom to bond, and with whom they prefer communicating? We often prefer those close to us physically, but what happens when those close to us physically do not share our interests and dreams? What happens when we find like-minded souls who are far from us in physical space, but near in interests and goals?
Many such souls are finding and building communities on the Internet. They communicate not only through Email discussion groups, but also through MUDs and their close cousins, MOOs. They conduct meetings, stay in contact day to day, and even celebrate such milestones as weddings and funerals on the Internet with their communities. Is their involvement in a virtual community any less real, any less human than what they do in their physical environment? Can and should we call them out-of-touch?
For students, the answer is fairly clear. Whether or not they decide to stay with virtual communities in their fields of interest after being introduced to them is a choice only they can make. We do know, however, that allowing students to communicate freely with professionals in their chosen fields can give them a head start on networking for jobs and on learning the ways in which professionals in their field communicate. For students in South Dakota, who may be fairly isolated from the main body of professionals in their fields, the Internet, with its many listserve and usenet discussion groups can provide the crucial experience of initiation into a profession or career, and provide the contacts they need to get a job.
I would not claim this outcome if not for the fact that so many of my students tell me that they made first contact with employers or collaborators through the Internet. Nor can I deny that I do much of my best work through my collaborations with the computers and writing community on the Internet. In fact, I often get more advice and do more planning for events and publications on Email and in a MUD than I do here in Rapid City in my physical environment.
I do not fault my local colleagues nor do I value their friendship and collegiality any less. The fact is, though, that we are a faculty hired to some degree for our areas of specialty, and those of us who wish to keep current in that area of specialty have to network with others in our chosen field. Can we expect less from our students? Should we?
Of course most of us understand the value of Internet in humanities distance education. We can already deliver text and one-way video to many sites across the state, and the future will bring us two-way video and more interactivity. Distance learners will be able not only to access the web for information, they will also be able to post their own work on web pages for classmates, teachers, and other audiences. The technology with which one creates web pages is becoming more user-friendly every month. There is no doubt but that we can and should use Internet technology, especially in view of the fast, broad bandwidth communications infrastructure proposed by Governor Janklow and President Clinton. With the proper equipment in place in sites connected to the Internet, this technology will allow access to education by the homebound, the sick, the disabled, those working full time jobs, and those otherwise unable to attend regular classes at schools.
However, no matter how compelling the virtual community and how seductive the web page or Internet discussion, virtual interactions, virtual communities, and cyberspace education should never take the place of real communities, real classrooms, and face-to-face discussions. Nothing can completely substitute for the multichanneled openness of humans physically engaged in meaningful dialogue, especially in the educational setting. Yet, for those who can't be present, and as an alternative channel for those who can, using the Internet does make sense for those involved in disseminating or teaching the humanities. But we should keep in mind that it is only one of the many channels available to us, and of course that those of us who can need to balance the virtual interactions with face-to-face interactions.
Overall, humanities education stands to gain from the Governor's and the President's initiatives to create robust networks connecting computer-equipped schools, businesses and households. But we have to recognize that all the new technology could go to waste unless teachers are trained to use it in educationally sound ways. We have only to remember how so much of the computer equipment donated in the 1970s and 1980s went to waste because many school systems and institutions had neither the budget nor the expertise to train faculty to use the sophisticated equipment. However, these days the software and interfaces are becoming more user-friendly (just look at the friendliness of software like Netscape, as compared with the old command-line interfaces Internet users once had to learn), and I think that with some encouragement and help, humanities teachers and scholars can and will learn to use the Internet for their teaching and research. Still, we should never forget the steepness of the learning curve many of us went through, and remember to budget plenty of time and resources to train the teachers to maximize this new statewide and national telecommunications network.
Teachers need to be trained not only to use the equipment, but to use it in pedagogically sound ways. Technology such as the Internet should not be used simply because it is there, but because it can further existing educational goals, such as allowing students to receive feedback from distant audiences, allowing students from vastly distant backgrounds to teach each other, or helping students find communities with whom they can discuss issues and learn communication conventions. In all cases, the pedagogical goals should determine whether and what technologies are used, not vice-versa.
Ultimately, our choices become more difficult in a pluralistic society facing ever more complex technologies. Of course, we do have the option not to enter the networked world because of the ethical questions posed at the beginning of this essay. But many of our students and colleagues will become involved, despite the warnings about addiction, dehumanization, and disinformation. Would it not be better if we humanists stay aware of and involved in the colonization of cyberspace? Further, if large corporations and government institutions are taking over the Internet, should we not try have a stake in the development of the Internet, in order to keep it ethical, human, available to all? We owe it to our students and colleagues to provide good examples of the activities most beneficial to humankind, those that build community, generate good ideas, and foster new kinds of communication.