DocTIC

So one of the most interesting things about technology is that it redefines our language. It gives us different meanings of older words, and very often we're not quite as aware as we should be of how that process is working.

All technological change is what I call a Faustian bargain. It gives you something, but it also taketh away something. Now, in America -- and this is one of the reasons I thought I should write this book -- we tend to be extremely enthusiastic about technology, about what it is going to bring us, so that almost every American, in considering anything from lasers to computers to television, can tell you for a half hour or more what this new technology will do for us. But there are very few people who have ever considered what a new technology will undo.

Europeans look at this, and they ask themselves this question, which is a good question: "Is it possible for us to maximize the benefits of new technologies while minimizing some of the negative consequences? Can we, through education or political action or social policy, inhibit technology from destroying that which we wish to preserve?" That's a good question, and I don't know the answer to it and they don't know the answer to it, but they're asking it.

f you put television into America in 1946, by 1960 you don't have America just "plus television", but a new kind of America, so that our social relations are altered and our attitudes toward childhood are altered and our political system is altered and we get new meanings of old words and so on.

Western culture had about 300 years to adapt itself to the printing press. So we developed new forms of economic life, new political ideas, new notions about education -- all organized around the printing press. But in our own time, our situation is much more difficult to cope with because almost daily, it seems, new technologies come on the scene and our social institutions don't have time to assimilate them and reorganize themselves to accommodate the demands of the technology.

If we devote all of our resources and our psychic energies to making bigger and better machinery and designing better techniques, will we become less human in some sort of traditional way of defining that?

there's a tendency of people to think that new technology is additive, and I think new technologies are ecological. What I mean is, that if you put the printing press into Europe in the mid 15th century, you don't have 50 years later Europe plus the printing press. You have a new Europe because everything gets changed -- the political system, the religious system and so on.

I like to put this sort of hypothetical issue to people. Suppose it were 1906 and we knew what we know now about the automobile with a combustion engine and we were able to have a conversation about it, a national conversation, and someone listed for us all of the benefits of the automobile, which are many, and then all of the deficits, including that it would poison our air and choke our cities and create the suburbs -- some people would put on that side, but I might put on this side -- and then we said, "Let's discuss this and then we'll have a plebiscite. We now know what it will do, and we know what it will undo." I think most Americans would say, "Let's go ahead with it anyway." But someone is bound to say, "Let's go ahead with it, but is there anything we could do to reduce this list over here, to minimize the negative consequences?" Well, in 1906, if we had had such a conversation, even with limited knowledge, there probably were things we could have done to reduce the negative items on the list. When television came along, it would have been, in theory, possible to have the same conversation. "What are the benefits, what are the deficits? Let's talk about it and then let's see is there anything we can plan to do that would minimize the deficits?" Well, we didn't have such a conversation, and with the computers now, we're not having such a conversation. All we hear is what they will do for us. We don't hear what they will undo. So one of the purposes of a book like this was to see if it's possible to start such a conversation and make us more sophisticated in our approach to our new technologies and, for that matter, old technologies.

I think what most people would call Third World countries would be roughly what we might mean by a tool-using culture; that is, people whose symbolic world -- their politics, their religion, their education -- are not commanded and dominated by technology. They have tools. They invent tools, but they always invent their tools to solve problems in the physical world, but they do not let the tools control their social and symbolic lives.

Technocracy is a culture in which you have serious technology competing with a more traditional social and symbolic world.

I don't think that sociology, psychology and anthropology are sciences, and I try to make a distinction between science and those activities. In fact, I even think, Brian, economics really is a branch of moral theology and should be taught more in divinity schools than in universities. But it does disturb me that so many people have such faith in the subjects that are called social science and go to experts to find out how to raise children and how to fall in love and how to make friends, as if they believe that because these subjects are "sciences" -- in quotes here -- that they are getting verifiable, indisputable truths about the world. So I use social science as an example of really a technique that is part of the machinery of technopoly.

if you don't teach the history of what we once knew about biology or economics or even mathematics, then learning or information becomes a kind of consumer product. Facts become like something you're selling. I think what we want here is for the young to understand that what we think we know at any given time, first of all, is a product of what we once thought we knew. It comes from someplace and that in the future, it will itself change. So the idea is for a teacher to try to show the young that learning is an historical process and that anything that we think we know now will probably be modified in the future. History is wonderfully good for this. History is almost the best consciousness-raising subject that we have available for that.