Getting “back to nature” via an unlikely path

Bill McKibben cautions readers in his work The Age of Missing Information that by wholeheartedly embracing new technologies we sacrifice the old – perhaps to more of a degree than we realize.

“ … we usually learn a new way of doing things at the expense of the old way. In this case we’ve traded away most of our physical sense of the world, and with it a whole category of information, of understanding” (p. 34), he writes. Neil Postman issued a similar caution just a few years earlier in his speech “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” “Technology giveth and technology taketh away,” he counsels.

McKibben specifically bemoans the loss of natural knowledge as we move further from the land. “ … we need to understand the two extremes. One is the target of our drift. The other an anchor that might tug us gently back, a source of information that once spoke clearly to us and now hardly even whispers” (p. 10).

This ebb and flow seems to be an unavoidable side effect of adopting new technology. McKibben muses on the subject as it relates to communication and our relationship to the natural world. Both are innately tied to human beings, and it may be that modern computer mediated communication can help re-establish the broken link between individuals and nature, if we care to listen.

The beginnings of our disconnect may have started as early as the development of the written word. As orality was intimately tied into the “human lifeworld” (1982, p. 42), those connections would begin to alter as writing, and later print, began to change the way humans look at the world. “Writing and print isolate,” notes Ong (p. 74). “There is no collective noun or concept for readers corresponding to ‘audience.’”

The idea of “audience” also conjures up the idea of community – how else could the stories of the oral culture survive without an audience to bear witness to the storyteller’s words?

Interestingly, the demise of community (notably decried in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam), may again be gathering strength with the rise of secondary orality, a concept presented by Ong in Orality and Literacy. “This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas” (1988, p.136).

Since Ong first coined the term in the 1980s, secondary orality has come into its own with the advent of Internet-based communications such as chat rooms or social networking. Just as the advent of writing brought about a change in communication, how we think about community has changed with the rise of online communities.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) has bloomed into a rich group of technologies that have created online communities and enriched offline communities. McKibben himself is no stranger to using new communications technologies to get the word out about his concerns. Founder of 350.org, an online activist group promoting the idea that carbon emissions be reduced to 350 parts per million (ppm), rather than the 450 ppm that big business interests and politicians find acceptable. He uses blogs, YouTube, and is even a member of Facebook. (For an example, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAR70RJkyK8)

When he asked in 1993 “Can we, blessed with technology but also with nature, get it right?” (p. 11), one may argue some 15 years later that there are signs of hope. Online groups passionate about the environment, as one example, are creating community and, bolstered by like-minded compatriots in cyberspace, then go back into their own local communities to share their ideals.

Environmentalist Rob Hopkins started the “transition” movement (the transition here is to use less of the Earth’s resources, especially energy) and the original transition town of Totnes, England. The transitionculture.org website posted the notice of a recent event that nicely presents how all these elements – community, secondary orality and CMC – can come together: “An Event in Totnes for Transition Oral History Buffs: How We Used To Live – Food, energy, skills, and elbow-grease: memories of a pre-oil Totnes.”  (http://transitionculture.org/2009/11/20/an-event-in-totnes-for-all-transition-oral-history-buffs/)

As we have drifted away from orality yet found our way to a secondary orality, it may be possible that we can re-establish our connection with the Earth by way of a once-unlikely conduit – the computer.

References

McKibben, B. (1993). Daybreak and 5:00 a.m. In The Age of Missing Information. Retrieved from COML 509 Course Resources.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Some Psychodynamics of Orality. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Retrieved from COML 509 Course Resources.

Ong, W. J. (1988). Print, Space and Closure. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routeledge. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=q6qIHSeGgGQC&lpg=PP1&dq=orality%20and%20literacy&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Postman, N. (1998, March). Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. Speech.

Reeder, B., Book Summary of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam. Retrieved from http://www.beyondintractability.org/booksummary/10670/

Behind on the bell curve

Author Seth Godin introduces the “idea diffusion curve” in his book Purple Cow (p. 6) . Geoff Moore came up with the curve (imagine a typical bell curve shape) to explain how technology products move through the population.

The tip of the curve starts with a small number of “innovators,” gently swelling to include the “early adopters.”  The bulk of the bell is for the “early-” and “late majority” respectively. “Laggards” make up the tail end of the curve.

A business acquaintance of mine recently referred to herself as having always been an early adopter (and perhaps more accurately an innovator). She was the first kid in her high school to have a laptop, and she’s continued in that innovator technological role ever since. Today, she is a successful businessperson who owns an online soap-making supply company (Brambleberry.com) and uses on of the newer CMC modes–Twitter–in her business. She reports this strategy is working, and she’s realizing revenue from her “tweets.”

I, on the other hand, would classify myself as a late majority or even laggard in some respects of technology. Case in point, my mother had to buy me my first cell phone and service plan. I was 32. My reluctance to take up this kind of technology was purely an economic decision. Pay for the phone and service–or go out to dinner once a month. I like to eat. I was an easy choice.

My job doesn’t require me to be very mobile, so there was no professional reason to have one. On the flip side, I was quick to jump on the high-speed Internet bandwagon as an early adopter as I viewed it an imperative for my job.

I typically make my technology choices–my haves and have nots as Neil Postman would term it–based on need and economics. If I deem that I really need a technology item, I’ll budget for it. If not, I’ll do without.

As a solidly middle-class American, if I am opting in or out of technology due to economics, how are citizen on a lower socio-economic rung able to access technology? (And when they do, are they bankrupting themselves?) Perhaps they see the trade off of NOT having technology as too great a loss.

Postman, in his Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change speech (1998), pinpoints the lack of equal distribution of technology as one of the considerations to keep in mind when looking at advancing technology. Technological changes produce winners and losers. A current example is the decline of the print edition of newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor was the first national paper to discontinue its daily print edition in favor of solely publishing online earlier this year. Out are the pressmen, in are the Web programmers.

Thurlow et al (2008) also devote considerable thought in Strand 2, Unit 1, to the haves and have nots of technology. One of their first considerations is that technological infrastructure (the communications “road” that connects us) is a privilege. A map of the world (zooknic.com) shows that only a few counties have more than 35 percent of their population online. A majority has 25 percent or fewer online, and the poorest countries, not surprisingly, have even fewer online.

As Thurlow et al note, online equity is most often associated with economics. (Although gender, ethnicity, and language, among others, also are discriminatory factors in CMC.) Some statistics from the Thurlow text (p. 87) to consider: Two-thirds of the U.S. population is online. For those “economically privileged” (households with $75,000 at least annual income) that number rises to 90 percent. Only a handful of those with household income under $15,000 annually are online.

The concept of a “digital divide”–haves and have nots–is a reality that must not be overlooked. Security challenges aside, how can online voting really work in rural communities where there may not even be fiber optic cable laid? How many more everyday tasks may become out of reach for those without the economic and technological means?

A real life example comes from my home state of Washington where a small community was in danger of losing its library. For many of the children, the library provides the only Internet access they have. The next closest library is 10 miles away–hardly an easy bike ride to go study, noted one speaking on a local newscast.

This technological divide is one that policy makers and educators should be mindful of, especially in the tough economic times when the income gap and unemployment rates continue to grow. Our future “innovators” may become “laggards” if the digital divide becomes wide enough.

References

Godin, S. (2002). Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable. New York: Portfolio.

Postman, N. (1998, March). Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. Speech.

Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., Tomic, A. (2008). Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet. Los Angeles: Sage.

Zook, M. (2008). Map: Internet Users Worldwide. Retrieved from www.zookinc.com on Nov. 8, 2009.