FOUND DIALOGUE
__ Every now and then, from among the millions of conversations taking place on the Net, you overhear a voice so precise and germane that it demands more than the usual listserv skimming. This dialogue between a 38-year-old Indian grad student in the US and a 19-year-old math student in Argentina was adapted from NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility (www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture), an electronic newsletter edited by Steve Talbott. __
Dear Marcelo,
My field is instructional technology, mostly computers in K-12 education. The most common image in my field is this: the camera, behind and above the computer, focusing on the face of a child or two enveloped in an almost ethereal glow as they gaze on the monitor. The teachers stand behind them, beaming with pride as their prodigies contemplate and "learn" from their "cognitive partner." It reminds me of a scene in a Hindu temple: As the priest offers your prayers and worldly gifts to the idol in the dark sanctum to the sound of bells and mantras and to the smell of jasmine, followers bow and pray most publicly with a reverence that matches our belief and faith in the power of computers.
The computer robs you of your critical-thinking ability. I am convinced that young people have to learn that skill from a community of real - not virtual - people.
I was born and raised in India. There is no image that is crystal clear, no truth that is indisputable, no face that is totally beautiful (except my mother's), and no detail that is completely descriptive of the social milieu I grew up in. It was a tangled mass of chaos, too complex and bewildering for a child - but I learned much from that.
I learned from the warm Hindu home that I grew up in and the strong sibling bonds it nurtured; from the Catholic school with the strict nuns; from my Muslim, Sikh, and Parsee friends; and from the contradictions in my culture and in myself. I learned from long summers of not having much to do. Every month, on Full Moon's Day, we sat on our terraces with a crowd of friends and family, eating special dishes prepared for that occasion. Then we would stretch out on colorful jamukalams and gaze at the sky as my dad pointed out the constellations.
It was at home, too, that I learned that real community is ridden with conflict, with the urgency of having to face and confront. When the chaos and contradictions got too much for me, I had only nature to run to, not a bright TV or computer monitor. The guava, mango, and lemon trees in our backyard were my playmates.
The Net gives you hope that there's a place where everyone is equal. But I am convinced it simply bypasses our differences and drugs us into thinking that there can be a world without racism, sexism, bigotry, and oppression. When you need a haircut, you have to get off that highway to the cybermall and find your way out into the real world. And when the hairdresser charges $17 for your white friend's haircut and $28 for yours so you won't come back (this has happened to me), how is the Net going to soothe your anger and hurt?
As a young adult, I had nothing but resentment for the culture in which I was raised. My first experiences in the US soothed those angry tremors - no living at the mercy of bureaucracy, no lines, no bribes, no "Eve teasing," no dust, no controlling patriarchs, no fighting the traffic for hours, no human waste on the sidewalks, no beggar children to remind you of the pain and embarrassment of hunger, no voluptuous movie stars and dogma-spewing politicians seducing those poor of currency, imagination, and values. But a real understanding of the world comes only from a human context, not some technology-mediated half-reality.
There is nothing global about the spiritual intimacy between two beings. It is local, contextual, and real. It cannot be captured in bits.
Ten years before he died, Tolstoy wrote: "I think of all the people I have loved, yet none can offer me the sympathy I need ... if only I could be little again and snuggle up to my mother as I imagine her ... she is my highest image of love, not cold, divine love, but earthly, warm, motherly ... it is that for which my battered, weary soul is longing."
His mother died before he was 2 years old.
All best,
Muktha
Dear Muktha,
I've enjoyed and learned from your intelligent writing; your arguments even forced me to accept that the Net can be a corrosive cultural force, against my previous opinions. But, with all due respect, so what?
I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even though it is a state capital and my family is relatively well off, there are many cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net. Not only knowledge and information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent noncontemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's, and Shaw's), non-Hispano-American poetry, Enlightenment values, art (and, OK, pornography too).
Although mostly intellectual, those things have, as you pointed out, corroded my "native" culture to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know ezine, the Linux scene, and Discordian-like humor and philosophy. I still have friends, my girlfriend, and my family here. But I don't think I share my culture with them anymore. (Not that this started with the Net; I began reading Asimov at age 6, coding at age 7, et cetera, but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making me conscious of it.)
I have meaningful goals. I want a peaceful, prosperous world, where physical well-being is a right and checking the govs and corps the global hobby. I want to state and answer as many good questions as I can, about everything, everywhere. I want space colonies and exploration. I want informed democracies. I want the religious and nationalistic fanatics universally mocked. I want to live for centuries, healthy, sexy, and working. I want access to every book ever written, every poem, and every painting. I want to do six impossible things before breakfast. (Any more detail about myself would be too personal, too nasty, or too intermittent to publish.) None of these goals come from the traditional, socially cohesive, and personal-contact-oriented culture around me. The motto of my country is "Get a job, any job, and don't get caught."
I developed these goals before going online, but the Net helped me discover people who share my dreams. I use in my sig a Latin phrase - Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto; it means, "I am a man: Nothing human is foreign to me" (or something like that - my Latin amounts to nihil, and my English is one of the WaReZ I got from the Net). I'm still struggling with who I am and what is this place. The Net has helped me find out.
It has social and psychological side effects, true, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status in the world. I like this culture more than my "native" one, for sheer depth, meaning, and beauty. And values, too. It verges on pathetic, but while my school was trying to teach me traditionalism, conservatism, and respect for authority (no matter how wrong), I was learning curiosity; respect for differences; admiration of talent well used; hatred of war, injustice and stupidity; and emotional and intellectual honesty. Where from? From Star Trek, the hacker mythology (the traditional one - Minsky, Papert, Knuth, von Neumann - not the current criminal clowns), and good sci-fi. Maybe I'm just working through my post-adolescent angst - I am 19, after all. But how could I swap a culture that cheers intelligence, curiosity, debate, humor, and weirdness for a culture that enforces traditionalism, media manipulation, and plain nonthinking? Sure, not all of the Net's material is any good, but the mere existence of some good is enough.
Again, I want to thank you for your essay because it was through reading it that I finally understood how the Net is culturally corrosive. But what you seem to find negative is exactly what I love about it. A lot of young people would love the chance to choose, even engineer, their own culture. The Net simply gives us a huge amount of raw material to do that with.
Warm regards,
Marcelo
