THE HUMANITIES IN THE INFORMATION AGE: EDUCATING

FOR VIRTUOUS OR VIRTUAL REALITY?

by Douglas E. Oakman

Religion Department

The computer sitting on my desk prompts many elements in the following discussion. With a word processor, I can quickly produce memos, syllabi, exams. I have the capability to incorporate Hebrew and Greek into professional papers. A BASIC program can quickly crunch the grades of an entire class and spit out averages and final grades within a matter of seconds. I am able to produce customized map exercises for classes. I can build several kinds of databases that organize information and represent it through powerful indexes. Through these, large amounts of scholarly information are found and manipulated quickly and effectively. I can log into a number of local library catalogs and search their holdings. Furthermore, I communicate across the globe through Bitnet. Pacific Lutheran University soon will have interactive communications capabilities through the Internet, which is being called by some a "virtual community." The Internet can make possible a host of interactive learning experiences that one might dub the virtual classroom.

All of these capabilities seem desirable. They enable me to do what used to be time-consuming things in short order. Time is freed for class preparation, students, and (regrettably) committee work. Electronic communication even allows daily contact with professional colleagues far away.

These desiderata notwithstanding, people in the humanities might want to be asking time-honored questions of the liberal arts: Is it truly good? In what ways? Will the wondrous capabilities of the Information Age mark a new era of humanity and humaneness? Or are there serious threats to what the humanistic disciplines have been concerned with at their best?

The thesis of this essay is simply put: Information technology can only be good when "embedded" within human concerns and ends; when humans become embedded within technology, spiritual death and communal chaos will follow.⁽¹⁾

Such ideas are not dramatically new. Science fiction has been trying for some time to envision the role of computers and robots in the future of human beings.⁽²⁾ The reservations in these contemporary cultural expressions point the way toward wisdom. Our technological future will neither be all good nor all bad--if we keep the human dimension in mind.

Opportunities of the Information Age

The coming Information Age will mark an evolutionary step, if not a revolution, for higher education. It will: 1) Enrich the content of courses by making information more readily and rapidly available in the classroom or between class participants, 2) open up collaborative possibilities of teaching and learning through interactive networking, and 3) broaden the scope of the classroom by making possible virtual classrooms--learning environments beyond the space of the traditional classroom walls.⁽³⁾

Computer technology promises to enrich classrooms by providing powerful synthetic capabilities for any given class. Multimedia presentations will provide powerful ways of helping students visualize or hear what they are learning. Harvard University's "Perseus," for example, is a multimedia database and front-end software package that permits the professor of classics rapidly to display on an overhead projector information from ancient texts, line drawings of ancient architecture, maps, and so on. The package allows the playing of the ancient modes during a discussion of Greek music. A burgeoning market for such "courseware" packages will soon make it possible for faculty to incorporate a variety of visual and sonic capabilities into their stale lectures. Between class times, instructor and students might share course materials, questions, or thoughts by posting them on a class-related electronic bulletin board. The opportunity here is for a significantly enriched classroom experience and enhanced interaction between participants.

A number of colleagues here at Pacific Lutheran University are interested in augmenting collaborative learning through computers. Students are envisioned working in a special classroom on a network of linked computers (a Local Area Network or LAN). Writing instructors then might "look over the shoulders" of students electronically and make timely interventions as they write. Local networking also promises gains in active learning as students begin to respond to the writing efforts of peers. The Center for Teaching and Learning here at Pacific Lutheran University has several videos that document experiments with collaborative learning networks. The results seem to demonstrate increased student interest and teacher effectiveness.

Perhaps the most radical development for the future of higher education is represented by the Internet. With the vast global network of university, government, and corporate computers operating in real-time through this Interactive Network, a new age of information flow almost everywhere almost instantaneously is about to dawn. The implications for work in the classroom have yet to be fully understood. However, a number of possibilities seem realistically possible. Suppose, for instance, a language instructor makes assignments that require students to carry on an electronic correspondence not only with other students in the class but also with interlocutors halfway across the globe. The local classroom becomes a node in a global classroom.

Again, all of these capabilities seem desirable. They will enhance and enrich the learning and teaching that have heretofore operated under a number of constraints. Their desirability seems contingent on the assumption that they will help us to do better and more effectively what humanities teachers have always done. Here is where a critique must start: Does not this new world order of information, both in its operative metaphors and in its structures, pose threats to what has been of central concern to the humanities?

Examining Some Hidden Metaphors of the Information Age

Several implicit metaphors in this discussion cry out for examination: What does it mean to be facing "information"? Should we speak of "processing" it? What does a computer "terminal" represent? How should we think of "virtual" classrooms? The frequency of machine-words here carries very real implications for the education of human beings.

Classical education stressed the cultural shaping or disposing of human beings toward humane concerns. Cicero well illustrates one basic meaning of the Latin word informare: The poet Archias was educated in the liberal arts, "by which the lifetime of a child ought to be disposed [informari] toward humanity" (Pro Archia 4). While classical education did not always produce wonderful humans, its conceptions of education included notions of overarching human purpose and value.

By contrast, current conceptions of the Information Age we are entering foresee voluminous data available for "access," without any explicit notion as to what end or purpose these serve. The Information Age brings the possibility of searching library holdings or instant access to stock market reports, but it also provides access to digitized pornographic images and represents a dramatic expansion of possibilities for mass culture (e.g. shopping at home). Human beings will be shaped, but how?

Other metaphors in the discussion push an analogy between human thinking and machine operations. Is higher education at its best an instruction in "processing" information? Should this be the way we conceive of our educational tasks? If students are connected to "terminals," does this mean their neural "circuitry" is about to be short-circuited and that their education is about to become a form of spiritual death? The very real impacts of a technologizing of education need serious and sustained consideration--while thinking is still possible. Information technology presents serious structural implications for the education of human beings that call for profound evaluation.

The Structural Dangers of the Information Age

A recent article in the Puget Sound Computer User, reviewing a Unix software program for exploring the Internet, offers an image for the potential impact of the Internet:

There is one major drawback to this program: You can blow more time on it than with a game of solitaire. It's like eating peanuts: Once you start, it's almost impossible to stop.⁽⁴⁾

The intimations of a lifestyle oriented to information junkyism or information voyeurism give one pause. Will access to mere information provide a better education? Or will it amount to an addiction to data stimulation, not to say a monumental waste of money and time? Will computers as potent means for accessing a globe's worth of shapeless information provide an appropriate education, or will they become idolatrous ends in themselves?

The Television Age, which has introduced significant problems for humanities education, provides a critical touchstone for the dangers latent in the Information Age. Viewers of TVs have had "access to information" for over forty years. Many are concluding that the images coming across the screen are not particularly helpful to kids.⁽⁵⁾ Most K-12 students watch far more TV, and spend more time with video games, than they read books. This structuring of their reality has had a devastating impact on how students learn, what they learn, and what they expect out of education. Illiteracy in a variety of forms faces every college instructor as a serious obstacle to learning and a serious threat to the goals of humanities education.

Christopher Lasch and other contemporary cultural critics have been worried about how mass culture shapes human consciousness. Lasch's observations are worth quoting here:

The critics of mass culture ... were on the track of something more ominous: the transformation of fame into celebrity; the replacement of events by images and pseudo-events; and the replacement of authoritative moral judgment by "inside-dopesterism," which appealed to the fear of being left behind by changing fashions, the need to know what insiders were saying, the hunger for the latest scandal or the latest medical breakthrough or the latest public opinion polls and market surveys.⁽⁶⁾

Interactive, computer-mediated instruction promises to counteract some aspects of the TV-induced, educational asthenia we face; however, computer terminals and electronically mediated information hold their own structural dangers for higher education.

Consider, for example, the impact of book-length texts and literacy on humanities education. Both classical and biblical civilizations were based upon these "technologies." Both civilizations have contributed to many of the basic things that we associate with higher education, especially the concern for human values and human community--for human ends generally. What is often overlooked in this discussion of technologies is the appropriateness of the book for the kind of education that humanities have been concerned with. The extended-text has encouraged the development of critical perspectives and over-arching structures of thought that have helped individuals and communities to understand and evaluate reality. Books have encouraged the notion of participation in valuable conversations over long periods of time with the long-term prospects for humankind in view. Furthermore, books have encouraged the development of active minds that could produce new books for new situations.⁽⁷⁾

Information junkyism or voyeurism represents the worst sort of passive, uncomprehending mind, oriented to short-term consciousness and individualistic preoccupations. There is the danger, as Jones' comment suggests, of sitting passively at terminals, reacting not at all or in precipitous ways to information that could very well be mis- or disinformation. That is what humanities educators do not want to encourage or to see as a result. There is the real danger that virtual communities and virtual classrooms have the power to produce virtual humans and virtual minds--incapable of relating meaningfully to others or meaningfully assessing what is good, true, beautiful.

But the time-honored role of the humanities, going back into the classical and biblical periods, has been to educate for virtue, not for virtual reality.⁽⁸⁾

The foregoing are not the only structural threats we have to worry about, however. Suppose all of the world's cultural information were put into computers, and all hard records were destroyed. Would this be a good idea? Such is one radical possibility posed by the Internet.

Could there come a time when the past could be completely overwritten? Even the computer world understands this elemental danger. To illustrate: One of the most dangerous things a computer programmer can do is to allow the possibility for code to be overwritten. For this reason, operating systems are isolated through hardware and software from operating applications. Conversely, the moral equivalents of the devil in computer world are "viruses" that infiltrate the system and then act to destroy not only code but hard data. Viruses, by the way, are thought to be written by "evil geniuses" who incorporate the technique of self-referencing code. Sin, it seems, is still a reality in the Eden of the Computer Age.

Ever since the Yahwist wrote about Eden and Hesiod about the Four Ages, liberally educated people have known that wisdom is respect for previous experience. Recall the version of the famous Santayana quote found at Jonestown: "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." There is a significant level of hype associated with the arrival of the Information Age, which we need to view quite skeptically. We would be unwise to buy into it all uncritically. Human Imagination depends upon Human Memory. The university is a repository of alternative visions. Like the rich genetic pool of the wilderness, the university retains the rich cultural pool of human experiences. Through them, higher education provides powerful models for understanding and evaluating REALITY. To overwrite our collective memories, to destroy our treasured models and values--would this not be an act of folly of unheard of proportions?

Conclusion

Computers are here to stay. We must assess critically what they bring. Insofar as the Information Age provides powerful means to good, true, and beautiful human ends, it can be welcomed. When it pushes inappropriate ends and displaces means that are more appropriate for inculcating the higher learning, serious questions need to be raised.

Luther once wrote, "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." With this paradoxical formulation, Luther spoke in his time about how human beings are genuinely freed through the Gospel for involvement in the real world when their freedom is conscientiously for others.

We might characterize our own situation in an emerging Age of Information in a similar way: People educated through the humanities should not fear computer entanglements precisely because they are free to raise questions of conscience and to think about the human consequences. Furthermore, people of virtue are capable of making critical judgments: The computer must remain a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all; otherwise, human beings can expect enslavement under the principalities and powers of a computerized technocracy.

One thing is absolutely certain about the period we are now entering: We will witness new forms of the very old human struggle between virtuous and virtual realities.

1. For the notion of "embeddedness" applied to market and society, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Rinehart & Co., 1944) 46, 57.

2. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke have imagined various robot/computer futures: I. Asimov, I, Robot (Doubleday, 1963 [1950]). Arthur C. Clarke's menacing "Hal" in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey is unforgettable. Michael Crichton in a number of books, e.g. The Terminal Man (Knopf, 1972) and Jurassic Park (Knopf, 1990), has attempted to warn humanity about the dangers of humans uncritically embracing technology. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator film series holds up for public scrutiny images both of renegade and of savior robots.

3. These three avenues have been suggested to me through discussions with the Computer Mediated Instruction Group here at Pacific Lutheran University. This group began meeting in 1992-1993, under the aegis of the Center for Teaching and Learning, to discuss faculty interests in computer applications to teaching.

4. Ray A. Jones, "The World in a Nutshell," Puget Sound Computer User (November 1993): 47.

5. National and state lawmakers recently have been debating legislation and talking with TV executives to restrict the violence shown on television: "Legislators grill TV executives in bid to curb youth violence," The News Tribune (Saturday, December 4, 1993) Local B1.

6. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Norton, 1991) 30. Lasch includes among his "critics of mass culture" members of the Frankfurt School, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe.

7. Since 1950 and the proliferation of pulp novels and paperbacks, books for mass "consumption" have contained more calories than protein.

8. Virtue, as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, has been seriously eroded in our chaotic and confused times: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). MacIntyre can make statements like: "the language--and therefore also to some large degree the practice--of morality today is in a state of grave disorder" (Ibid. 238). For Lasch, too, mass culture has played a role in undercutting the moral consensus upon which meaningful human communities can be based.