♪[Jazz music]♪
So yeah, being one of the first
net culture or computers in society writers
was, strategically, a poor move for me.
And I'm living proof, though, you can still survive it,
if you can get through it somehow, by answering e-mail more slowly
It's funny,
I wrote some notes because I thought I should be responsible,
because you guys are real computer studies,
computer science people, as opposed to just,
you know,
your average, digitally illiterate audience.
So I don't really need to make the case - I probably don't -
on why learning something about digital technology is a smart thing,
because you guys have already made that choice.
But something that occurred to me on the way here, actually,
that you might not realize as young people
if you don't mind being called that
...is that it's very hard to get
an accurate sense of the biases of the digital media environment...
...when you've been raised inside it.
In other words, what I want to suggest to you is that
those of us who are old enough to have experienced and consciously experienced
the shift from a pre-digital media environment to a digital media environment
actually
understand something or sense something or experience something
about the biases of digital technology
that is relatively difficult for those of you who have been raised
with digital technology to get.
Right now this is the opposite argument I made through most of my career.
In 1995, I wrote a book called, Playing the Future, where I argued that,
"Don't worry, you grown ups!
Digital technology is coming and you feel overwhelmed.
But you guys are digital immigrants whereas kids are digital natives.
So you'll speak the language like an immigrant, they'll speak like a native.
You're always going to feel slightly out of place and unsure,
and every time you have a hypertext link,
you're gonna be a disoriented because we're not used to that,
whereas kids are going to experience that very naturally.
That what looks disjointed to us, will be a natural terrain for them.
And they will have command, don't worry, the kids are alright."
But as I've grown older, and as I've watched where cyberspace has gone,
and where our culture has gone, or hasn't,
I realize that some of my elders were actually more right about this than I was.
And in reading all the
finally catching up with who I was supposed to read,
when I was younger, McCluen and Ong, and all the great media theorists.
I would read about the digital or the media environments,
and this notion that McCluen had that,
if you ask a fish about water he wouldn't be able to tell you what it is, right?
Because the fish is swimming in the water. The fish not aware of the water.
If you ask someone who is raised in a television environment,
"Oh, what about the impact of television on you?"
You can't say it because you're living in it.
You're living in that media environment.
Likewise, those of us who are living in a digital media environment,
it's very difficult for us to parse its effect,
for us to feel what it is
for us to understand the difference between
what it is to be a human being
and what it is to be a digital being.
And
being able to parse it, though, being able to begin to look at that
What Norbert Weinert used to call,
"the human use of human beings."
He was one of the first people to talk about cybernetics
I think he invented the word, actually, back when, cybernetics.
Even though it got stolen.
He was really looking at as we develop a computer environment,
how will we recognize the difference
between humans and the machines that we're in?
How will we understand how to create a human,
or a humanity-encouraging, digital media environment?
Now the reason why I think this is important is because most of my peers
strongly disagree with this sentiment
Most of my peers, and call them the sort of,
the Negroponte, Kevin Kelley,
Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson,
all the way to Ray Kurzwhile on that spectrum, Clay Shirkey.
There's this sense, and I used to have some of it,
that is uncomfortably consonant with corporate capitalism.
But that's another story.
this sort of letter ripped sense about technology
That
human beings are merely one stage
in information's inevitable evolution towards greater states of complexity.
And they tell this very compelling story
about the beginning of time all the way through now.
That matter has been groping toward greater states of complexity.
That we had atoms became molecules and molecules became
sort of these weird pre-proto-life things which became cells
and now we have this whole life thing that happened.
And life got very complex through evolution
and we had people
And people built machines,
and machines are just sort of in that big blue, overtake humanity moment.
And when they do,
then machines, our computers, our networks will be the real host
for the evolution of information
and we human beings can tend to those machines
or, at best, upload our consciousness
and then they will continue that journey for us.
You know, and each one has a different metaphor for explaining it
You know, whether it's Kevin talking about
what technology wants, right? What technology wants,
like it really wants.
It's not bias towards something, but it wants something,
we've made this thing.
Just as God made people, people made technology,
and this child will go on wanting something.
Or Ray Kurzwhile who will talk about the singularity,
which I'm sure you've all read or heard about, even on,
if you find out about it in Vice Magazine or anything, at this point
The idea that technology reaches this point of,
not self-consciousness or self-awareness necessarily, but it just surpasses us
It becomes this thing and can keep going.
It's a...
for me it's a discomforting view of humanity
but it's also, I would argue, an incorrect one, you know?
It's one that is...
it's one that is the result of living unconsciously in a digital media environment
It's one where you let the digital media environment dictate
what you are and how you think about the world
rather than maintaining some sense of humanity in that.
So, what's interesting to me
as I look at the history of computing, which now we have
and as we look at computers in society, which is a real thing.
I mean, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, when we taught courses like this,
it was futurism.
Computers in Society was a course in,
"What's it gonna be like someday when people have e-mail?"
I mean, there were times, and I'm sure you were in those conversations
when people like me used to go to a cocktail party
or go to a publisher, or explain to a magazine editor.
Someday people are going to have their own computers
They are gonna send messages to eachother using little text editors
using, you know, word processors,
and they would literally laugh us out of the room.
They did not, it seemed so outrageous, that - Or they'd walk around
No, you're not gonna have to implant chips in people,
they're gonna walk around with phones that are gonna track them everywhere they go
they're gonna do this voluntarily
They're gonna give all their information . No one believed us.
But, of course that happened.
But, the thing to me that's interesting about computer history,
if we're gonna follow it from the history of humanity
rather than the history of technology, right?
Let's not worry about paper tape to punch cards to tape to discs
to hard drives to RAM.
Let's not worry about machine evolution.
But you look at the difference in people, right?
If we look at history as the human story rather than the story of stuff
then the interesting thing becomes
the big switch, I think, is the shift from a pre-literate to a literate society.
When we look at the impact of the printing press.
Do we talk about it in terms of
"Oh, look! These rooms filled up with books!"
No, that's not the part that's interesting.
The part that is interesting is people learned to read
and then when they learned to read,
they had personal interpretations of the Bible, right?
We had a Protestant Reformation with people rebelling against the Church
We had the idea of "one man, one vote"
because everyone has their own perspective.
It coincided with prospective painting.
It coincided with central banking.
And all of these other, very...
analogous
human inventions that were all about people having individual perspectives,
"one man, one vote" it led to the Enlightenment
and all this other stuff consumerism,
Industrial Era and everything else.
When we look at digital technology I think we have to look at it that way.
In other words, what is the difference between
a pre-literate digital society and a post-literate digital society?
You know, I'm over arguing for digital literacy.
I think digital literacy is inevitable, you know?
I feel like I'm making that - when I... it's my main talk that I do.
It's like "Programmer be programmed!"
And I wrote this book, Programmer Be Programmed.
We have to learn to program. If you don't learn how to program,
you're just swimming blindly in a sea of information.
Kids don't understand the biases of the technologies they use.
If you ask a kid what Facebook's for,
he'll say Facebook's here to help him make friends.
But we all know Facebook is really not here
it's really here to monetize the social graft and all that.