Prophecy and the Internet seem to go together these days, especially as the countdown to the new millennium has begun. There is talk, not all of it playful, of cyberorganisms freefloating out there in cyberspace, selforganizing intelligence, distributed, collaborative, metahuman.
Over fifteen years ago, I wrote an article called "The Electronic Noosphere." Noosphere is a term coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to describe a thinking layer of the earth. As human population covers the earth and converges upon itself and as human thought reflects upon common ideas and problems, Teilhard believed something (or someone) was coalescing and iridescing in the blackness of space - a global intelligence, perhaps an eternal yet emerging God. Teilhard died in 1955, before the personal computer or the Internet came on the scene. But back in 1980, I was enthused with the idea that electronic communication, particularly the computer, might create this encircling stratum of mind that Teilhard wrote about.
In part, that is already the case. We send our voices and images around the planet almost instantaneously, speeding up understanding and misunderstanding. We even beam our messages and memorabilia into the galaxy: "We are/were here!" Moreover, increasing numbers of us spend several hours a day facing a PC monitor; emailing to Kenya or Paraguay; viewing digital images from the Sistine Chapel or Mars Pathfinder; downloading freesofar software, like Linux, from Web sites all over the world; or conferencing in real time with a colleague on a distant continent, sharing whiteboard, interactive software, and sometimes Netphone conversation.
A few years ago, a line of jewelry, called dreamcatchers, became popular in the United States. Behind the design was a Native American legend. The story supposedly varies among the tribal nations but often it involves a spiritual leader who has a vision. In the vision, a teacher and trickster, as teachers sometimes are, appears as a spider. He weaves a web with a hole in the center. This awesome arachnid then tells the spiritual leader to use the web to help his people attain their goals, realize their ideas, dreams, and visions. If all goes well, good dreams will be caught in the web and bad dreams will fall through its hole in the center.
Through the Internet, the teachers and tricksters among us have spun our own technological dreamcatcher: the World Wide Web. Contrary to design, some very bad dreams have been caught within the Web. Pornography. Stalking. Lies. Ignorance. Greed. Bigotry. Cults. Hollowness. But it has captured good dreams as well. And none better than the dream that this technology might lessen the gap between rich and poor by bringing information over the walls of politics and commerce, institutions and nations.
One term that has been adapted for this new synergism between situated learners and networked computers is "open learning community". In this context, the term implies that learners are no longer confined by space and time; that we learn from and with each other; and that our community of knowledge has expanded to global dimensions.
In some cultural contexts, the term might take on a different interpretation. We must always mind our words because they wriggle under all attempts to fasten them to meaning. Ask in outlying areas of Rwanda or Zambia, for example, about an "open learning community" and someone might tell you that it has been part of the African landscape for years. For a variety of reasons (tradition, lack of money, civil war, relocation of refugees), it is still possible to see African children receiving their education under shade trees in open spaces and living, not conceptualizing, community.
For some of the more affluent nations of the earth, however, the spin on "open learning community" is decidedly technological. In England, the United States, Australia, and other countries, we have moved from debates on open education in the 1960's to the implementation of distance education, lifelong learning programs, computermediated education, and electronic access to global information-and most of this brought about by new technologies, particularly the PC and the Internet.
Still, peeking out from behind the equally new educational theories and scholarly definitions is an interesting bit of mischief. At least in the United States, this desire for openness and community has grown out of a society of individuals largely raised in singlefamily houses, entertained by livingroom television, educated in structured classrooms, and graduated to corporate cubicles. An "open learning community" in Africa, without all the computer technology, might easily be more "open" and more "communal", in a deeply human sense, than an "open learning community" in the United States, supported by a firstclass university and its computer network. As it turns out, many Americans want openness and community that is also private and secure. Corporate intranets routinely put up firewalls, while government and financial institutions are looking for better encryption formulas to restrict Internet access.
Yes, technology can expand and enhance the transmission of information. It is a mistake, though, to conclude that information itself is equivalent to communication or that exchanging information is equivalent to community. Communication and community require personal resonance. They must evoke a response from within.
It is ironic that today, in the United States, we will often ignore the teachers right around us and go seeking teachers on the Web. We may not talk to members of our family or our neighbors, but we spend hours chatting anonymously to strangers on the Web. Those who look to us for answers should realize we have much to learn about our technology and ourselves. In the future an anthropologist from New Guinea or Mali may study our virtual communities and theorize about their complex relationships and meanings.
That said, if the Internet is to expand to literally bring the world online, where will the additional power come from? Some are looking to the heavens. There is already a project to put almost 300 loworbiting satellites overhead by the year 2002. The money for this new "Internet in the sky" is coming from big players, like Bill Gates at Microsoft. Another company wants to put up almost as many satellites to support worldwide access for cellular phone users. Reportedly, there was an atomic physicist, of Einstein vintage, who walked around in snowshoes, so afraid had he become of falling through the spaces of matter. The mental model of the atom had become real for him. The world might appear solid, but he knew there was looming emptiness everywhere. Today he would likely don a crash helmet, keenly aware that showers of megabytes were falling from the sky.
Even with all the shining satellites in place, where will the money for more Net terminals, more host computers, more software licenses, and more connect time come from, particularly in the developing world? And how many more connections can the Internet sustain?
The Internet is growing so rapidly that no matter what statistics we throw out today, they will be wrong tomorrow. The number of current users, however, does not even make up one per cent of the world's population. It made the news last year when one network expert predicted the Internet would go out like a supernova and collapse upon itself. At this point, we simply cannot predict the stability of this expanding electronic universe.
In developing countries the issue, however, is not simply how to get on the Internet. It is how to best use the Internet. And there are wonderful possibilities there. There is health information and advice, for example, for doctors and medical personnel who are remote from medical centers and hospitals in developing countries. There are resources like the MIT Media Lab that showcase some of the latest research on artificial intelligence and multimedia. Obviously, this will appeal most to those already plugged in to the new thinking, language, and body skills that a technology brings about. We do not simply create a new technology. Technology creates a new us.
To be a player and not just a consumer on the Internet, the costs are much higher. Typically a large business will spend over US$100,000 a year to acquire, design, and use a Web site. Who will pay for these costs in developing countries? Even in developing countries, of course, there is profit to be made and corporations that compete internationally. The large corporations and universities of Johannesburg or Lima will cruise the superhighway along with their counterparts in Munich or Hong Kong. But what of local communities, particularly those that are silenced and cloaked by poverty or ethnicity, by religion or gender? Will government taxes or international funding pay the bill for Web sites on which such communities can put what they choose - their cultural history; political issues that require attention and action as a community; marketing and promotional information for local businesses or events; tutorials and Web space where young persons can learn to express themselves in these new media?
There are experiments with such Web sites today, such as Indigenet, an initiative of the Aboriginal Research Institute at the University of New South Australia. Funded by research groups, this site is meant to benefit university researchers, as well as the aboriginal community. When someone else pays the bill, there are always questions of whose values, policies, and agendas are foremost. All of us need this reminder. As the Internet becomes more and more a source of commerce and profit, it will be increasingly regulated by governments and redesigned for corporations. Everyone who uses it will feel the impact.
In embracing new technologies, such as the Internet, local communities within developing countries may first want to understand what it is that makes them a community; what it is they value, share, depend upon, aspire to; what it is they can offer; what it is they are unwilling to sell or exchange or lose. This understanding will empower them. Ultimately, the real power comes from within the individual and from within the community. It does not come from a satellite or a network, a PC or a software package.
Wisdom tells us that it is often harder to see the present than to predict the future. But for present or future, the technological signs are clear. Whether you are in Manhattan or Mogadishu, "the world as you know it is passing away". And it always was!
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