Thursday, March 16, 2000

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Thomas S. Valovic Author Warns That the Digital Age Will Be No Utopia By SCOTT CARLSON For someone who calls himself a "technophile," Thomas S. Valovic has a down-to-earth perspective about technological advances. In 1991, while an editor at Telecommunications magazine, Mr. Valovic says he broke the story about the commercialization of the Internet. He has since watched the Internet rise from a little-known communications network to a potent force in the world economy. In a series of short essays in his new book, Digital Mythologies: The Hidden Complexities of the Internet (Rutgers University Press), Mr. Valovic examines the role of the Internet and technology in society, and their popularity in the press and in academe. Mr. Valovic is a research manager at International Data Corporation and an adjunct lecturer in scientific and technical communications at Northeastern University. Q. Can the Internet bring together different races or classes, or has it widened the gulf between those divisions? A. I don't think there's any question that the technology has been a major force in the "digital divide," which is a knowledge issue. Then again, knowledge is power, and it has also had a significant role in the economic divisions in our country. You don't hear that widely acknowledged. We need to take a hard look at that. You'll hear a lot of industry gurus saying that we need technology in every nook and cranny in our society, with the implication that we'll solve that problem. I don't know that this technological wave is going to penetrate beyond a certain level of our society. In that case, we're going to cast these inequities in stone -- the problem will just be exacerbated. Q. There's been a lot of talk about getting computers in the classroom. Is that emphasis misguided? Should that money go into the often-impoverished humanities department, for example? A. That's exactly the kind of thing we need to take a hard look at. When we talk about educational reform, all too often, the notion of computers in the classroom will come up, almost in a knee-jerk sense. Let's also keep in mind that there is a certain amount of corporate benefit taking place here -- the more computer corporations convince educators that this is the way, the more business they're going to get. What bothers me is that I don't hear this impulse coming from educators as much as I do from outside the educational community. There are resource issues: There are schools where the textbooks are badly outdated, and they aren't being replaced -- not because new textbooks don't exist, but because they're throwing the money into computer resources. I'd like to see a more balanced approach there, and more thinking about where computers will help and where they won't help. Q. Are children going to get a superficial education though computers? A. People worry about their kids using calculators in school -- that they'll atrophy their math skills. You can make an analogy between that and the Web in terms of our greater knowledge. It's very results-oriented. They will get the results faster, but they will have diminished their sense of process and method. You have the same danger with the Web -- since you can get everything on demand, you don't go through the rigorous process of research that scholars have gone through for years and years, and it's very important to keep an awareness of that sense of process. It's fundamental to education and fundamental to the liberal arts, and I would hate to see that diminished. In general, it's very unfortunate that we've moved away from the liberal arts as a foundation for liberal education, and the new utilitarianism has played a large role in that. We've made education more career-oriented. Up to a point, that's fine. Education should be relevant. But I've found an interesting phenomenon in the high-tech industry over the years. I've noticed that a lot of the best gurus and high-tech researchers tend to have liberal-arts degrees. They haven't specialized. They've taken this wonderful education in language and the process of thinking, and they've used it the way it should be used -- to be flexible enough in their view of the world to follow this complex and rapidly evolving technology. That's what education should be about -- giving you the tools for thought and the arsenal to deal with technological change. Q. Has the booming computer industry driven the computer and career emphases in the classroom? A. That's a big part of it. The computer's role in making education more business-oriented is undeniable. It's unfortunate. William Irwin Thompson talks about the diminished independence of the university environment. He cites the 60's as the beginning of that erosion, when Kennedy pulled advisers out of Harvard. All of a sudden, you had this commingling between Cambridge and Washington, whereas before, the university held a very important role as the guardian of independent thought in a way that didn't stand in opposition to commerce, but provided a counterbalance to it. That erosion has continued over these many years, and we've lost something with the university not providing that role. Q. What about academics? Your book talks a little about the academic treatments of the Internet and the fact that they're too dazzled by the technology. A. Well, I can't really blame the universities in some respects. The technology was moving so rapidly from 1991 to 1996 that it was only those people who were tracking it on a day-to-day basis -- technology reporters and so on -- that really knew what was happening with it. Quite frankly, the universities were playing catch-up. There was a lag there. I cannot say that I'm conversant with all the work that is being done at the university level -- I'm going on what has surfaced in the public eye. Q. What is lacking in these popular scholarly accounts? A. I talk in the book about Nicholas Negroponte. I've read his book Being Digital. Here is a professor who is very well known at M.I.T. for his work in the Media Lab. Reading that book, I had to wonder, Is this real research? You have this melding -- there is a certain diminishment to the standards of research. I would expect a certain level of standards to be applied against any work that came out of as prestigious an organization as M.I.T. I don't object to a professor writing a popular book, per se. But by the same token, it almost appears to me to be a trend, and I would hope that we would see more rigor applied to some of the books out there. I find them too facile, too repetitive in terms of the conventional wisdom. Q. What's being repeated? A. A lot of it has to do with the boosterism of the Net: It will change our lives for the better, there's never a cloud on the horizon -- which is ridiculous. Of course there are going to be downsides, and if we aren't aware of them as a society, we're going to have a hard landing when all of this is reconciled down the line. There is kind of a rah-rah quality to the books. I just don't find the depth. To me, the depth comes from the Hegelian dialectic of thesis and antithesis. If you don't consider the negatives of something, you're not developing a real picture of it. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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