♪[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.
And then arguing, the Chinese are gonna come and take our military
and the Iranians are gonna take our banking and we gotta take something
any argument I can to try to have schools teach basic digital literacy in elementary schools
junior schools and high schools, so that we're not stupid. which we are
And it's like arguing, you imagine when they invented text
Oh we're gonna have to learn 22 letters which is 22 letter alphabet at the time
we're gonna have to learn these letters in order to read
Well, let the rabbis read, let the kings read, but the people don't
have to read, do we, we regular people. yes.
it's like people are so confused on this angle
but we will win this part war. just as people learned how to use e-mail
and people decided to use phones people will eventually, we will teach kids
how to use digital technology they won't be completely blind
the misperception now is that learning how to program is kind of like
becoming an auto mechanic it's like "well I can drive a car"
"why do I need to know how it actually works"
We're not talking about the difference between an allround mechanic and a driver
we're talking about the difference between a driver and a passenger
a programmer is the user of the machine
If you don't understand the code you're not using the machine
You are the used You are maybe the customer but you're not the producer
And that's where you get to the real biases of the digital age
which are easy for those of us who are around before that to get
The bias of the digital age, of the digital era is toward production
That's why it's digital where do we even get the word digits from
Digits are the fingers. They were ten fingers. Digital
This is digital media. This is media that is constructivist
It's media that you make stuff with
The media before digital was all receive only
It was all... they were no Do you still read write-only
read only files. Is that still existing? Oh good
For me, when I understood what digital was was the first time
when I was asked to save a file on the Princeton mainframe computer
And you had to save a file
this is before we used papertape to save your program
when you actually could save to a disc
And it asked me "is this gonna be a read-only file?"
Is this gonna be a restricted file or read-only file or a read/write file?
And all of a sudden I went "Oh my god"
You mean all of this time they could have been saving this stuff as read/write
And I looked back at the media that I had been exposed to
I mean, I was a Brady bunch kid and television was a read-only medium
television and radio, all the broadcast medium, all the book, everything I got
these were read-only media
and now I was stepping into a world where we had read/write media
Where everything that was put out there if it wasn't being made changeable by me
Then it was a conscious choice of the author to restrict that changeability
but the bias was towards me being able to copy that file and change it
Or not even copy it, just change the file that was already there
And that kind of flipped it around that's when I realized
"Oh my gosh. if this really works If digital technology really happens
Then it will be as big a change on human society as text itself
It's gonna be that big a flip And text was a big flip
When we got text when we got the 22 letter alphabet
We got contracts, we got accountability We got the judeo-christian religion
We got linear time
We got cause and effect ultimately
Text allowed us to put something down and leave and someone else could read it
it changed...
if you think about the difference between an oral civilization
where other people have to be in the room with you to get something
and a text civilization where you can leave it, go and then someone else finds it
all of a sudden everything is different
This shift that we are undergoing now is as big as that
and what happens is a - certainly the last 600 years
but probably the last 2000 years of emphasis towards
sort of a top-down control of not just civilizations
but organizations, families and pretty much every thing
and religion's changes to a bottom-up, peer-to-peer conncected
not just sensibility but organizational structure
And it doesn't seem like a big deal if you are in it
It seems like a very if you lived in a world that couldn't imagine it
The only way people were able to imagine
Something like the digital reality before we had digital reality
were psychedelics people. those were the people
It was Ken Kesey and the merry pranksters and Timothy Leary and those guys
getting people to drop acid so they could see
"Oh I get it, it's all connected"
People would go off to Tibet and hang out with a Lama and learn Buddhism
And go "Oh it's all one, every thing is one"
But it didn't seem real. It was like that was some weird spiritual other thing
It is if you to look at your computer history
It's why psychedelics people were hired by
Sun, Northrop and Intel
In the early mid eighties
Because they were the only people who were capable of programming
They were the only people who were really
them and children were the only one who could grasp
this kind of bizarre hallucinatory reality
but it was that different
And it is why so much of the psychedelic bandwagon, including Stewart Brand
who was kind of the publicist for the Merry Pranksters, Ken Keseys
it was a big 1960s thing called the Merry Pranksters
Which was a kind of... It was propaganda for
the acid enlightenment of that period
He became Stewart Brand of the Global Business Network
It's Stewart Brand who started or co-started the well for
The first online bulletin board and really told the counter culture
It is okay, what led to the homebrew computer club and apple computers
which was, again, a psychedelic invention
These were two Reed College acidheads [who] came up with it on a bong stained carpet
of their dorm room