Chapter One
Discerning
Our Informationism* In 1978, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn delivered the 327th commencement
address at Harvard University. Titled "A World Split Apart," his
speech focused on the growing moral vacuum in Western civilization.
In spite of our "abundance of information, or maybe partly because of
it," he said, "the West has great difficulty in finding its bearings amid
contemporary events." The rising racket of information repeatedly
breaks our concentration. We claim to be truth seekers, he argued, but
instead we follow simplistic "formulas." We wrongly assume that the
overall condition of the world is improving because of our wealth of
technology and information. We forget that "truth seldom is sweet; it is
almost invariably bitter."
Although we celebrate the arrival of the information society, we have
not fully faced its implications. Along with information come misinformation
and disinformation. Rumor and hearsay abound. Opinions
fly through digital networks. Deceitful persons and institutions spread
half-truths. While we understandably revel in the apparent power of
information technologies to collect and disseminate information, we
also ought to question the quality of such information. Does it help us
to grasp the condition of our personal lives and social institutions? Is it
trivial or significant, helpful or harmful, relevant or meaningless? How
can we discern the real value of the growing caches of database information
culled by specialists, collated and analyzed via computers, and
distributed through high-speed networks?
The plethora of available information makes us ever more dependent
on experts who supposedly can interpret it for us. We need help, so we
turn to popular guides for "dummies" and "idiots." Bookstores are selling
millions of books designed to give laypersons a modicum of insight
into professions, technical skills, avocations, history, and even religion
and sexuality. Two publishers have released over one thousand titles for
dummies and idiots. Such volumes are popular, suggests the author ofPhilosophy for Dummies, because people "have less access to the experts,
who are locked up on college campuses." Maybe so, but perhaps we are
so overwhelmed by information and so underwhelmed by our own
knowledge that we all feel like insecure dummies. "We all have bits of
the `idiot' in us," says the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Self
Esteem. To overcome our insecurities, we reach for information produced
by apparent non-dummies. Adrift in a sea of information, yet hoping
to arrive safely on the shore of success, we paddle around using the
techniques outlined in self-help books.
Living in the age of cyberspace, we have faith in the processes of collecting
and distributing information. Words such as "data," "knowledge,"
and "information" connote social progress and personal enlightenment.
We revere technologies such as computers and the World Wide
Web that will supposedly transform data into information and information
into knowledge. Mary E. Boone argues that the computer "may
enable the next big leap in the evolution of human intellect" and "dramatically
extend the memory of our species and our ability to work with
ideas." She calls computers "supplements of the mind." Everywhere we
look, in news reports and public television documentaries, experts are
extolling the benefits of information technologies for social progress.
We are succumbing to informationism: a non-discerning, vacuous
faith in the collection and dissemination of information as a route to
social progress and personal happiness. We are particularly hopeful
that more efficient and powerful messaging systems will improve the
quality of our lives. As presently constituted, however, information technologies
limit our abilities to perceive our moral condition and dampen
our capacity to be virtuous people. In a society steeped in informationism,
disciplined human activities that require time, patience, and perseverance
are anathema. Self-help solutions, themselves usually technological
practices, replace moral disciplines. Instrumental habits-practices
that might be efficient and effective but are not necessarily good-eclipse
virtuous practices. Acting like machines rather than humans, we do what
is immediately convenient and efficacious, not necessarily what is right
and good. The exigencies of technique tend to override our ability to
employ other means and to seek truly good ends. As a quasi-religion, informationism
preaches the is over the ought, observation over intimacy, andmeasurement over meaning.
The first section of this chapter explores informationism's emphasis
on the is over the ought. Informationism places the highest value on
contemporary culture, current events, and immediate action. In cyber-culture,
we are increasingly obsessed with documenting the present
rather than understanding the human condition, particularly our moral
situation. Uninterested in the hard work of nurturing virtuous character,
we hope for technological solutions to our moral problems. We more
or less accept our informational world the way it is and then proceed to
make it even more that way.
The second section examines how our informational practices position
us as impersonal observers of the world rather than intimate participants
in the world. The glut of information at our disposal creates
the illusion that we understand our predicament. We become promiscuous
knowers, flitting from one bit of information to another, with no
fidelity to an overarching worldview. In search of informational knowing,
humans have long objectified knowledge and collected it in libraries,
and now in databases. Ironically, as we gain more access to such objectified
information, we lose our own capacity to know. We depend more
and more on supposed experts to give us knowledge, while distrusting
our own intimate connections to the world around us. Although we selfishly
gain more knowledge about the world, we lose the more intimate
knowledge of the world. We become informational voyeurs of life rather
than responsible participants in the knowing of our own cultures and
communities. "Surfing" is an apt word for our condition because it connotes
living on the surface of reality.
The third section discusses our high-tech penchant for measurement
over meaning. Information technologies foster statistical ways of perceiving
and systematic modes of imagining. Under their influence, we
see the world in terms of cybernetic systems composed of measurable
causes and effects. The resulting cyber-worldview is a closed system that
elevates the value of control over moral responsibility. Manipulating
information to cause particular "outcomes" becomes more important
than being virtuous persons or contributing to a good society.
This chapter concludes with a brief critique of this quasi-religious
informationism. Information technologies themselves will never enable
us to become more responsible persons or communities. People are
more than atoms in cyber-systems. Culture is more than a formal organization.
And human action is intrinsically a matter of making moral
as well as informational decisions. The more we imagine our lives and
our societies as informational systems, the more likely it is that we will
manipulate and control human beings as mere cogs in digital networks.
Informationism lacks both the means to acquire moral wisdom and the
good ends that should frame our desires. It is a morally bankrupt faith
in our own ability to engineer the Promised Land.
Wallowing in the Is While Forgetting the Ought
During the height of the so-called New Economy craze in 1999, as
media pundits declared greater efficiency and prosperity fueled by high-tech
innovation, the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition examined the
charitable giving practices of Internet companies. Given all the money
being made in the stock market, one would have expected flurries of
new philanthropy. Reporters discovered instead that high-tech firms
were among the least likely to participate in philanthropic causes, and
Internet companies were the worst of all. Amazon.com, with a market
capitalization of $28 billion, contributed little to charitable causes.
Yahoo! boasted a market capitalization of roughly $47 billion but indicated
on its Web site that the company "does not provide cash grants or
financial sponsorships." Although those kinds of organizations were
not interested in giving away money, their workers enjoyed spending it;
nightlife thrived in high-tech areas. One observer suggested that the
young owners of Internet companies did not yet understand the value
of investing in charities. "You have a lot of young people making a lot
of money who care more about themselves than helping others,"
explained one Internet CEO. Maybe so, but such an explanation misses
the broader ethos of cyberculture. High-tech endeavors are usually organized
around short-term goals and immediate practical needs, such as
achieving incremental product upgrades or securing the next round of
investment capital. Cyberculture is so focused on the here and now that
it implicitly rejects the human need for a long-term vision, let alone a
moral compass. In this milieu, charitable causes simply are irrelevant.
Lacking any clear "oughts," today's informationism is a religion of
quick decisions and instant deletes. Acting like processors of information,
we become info-religionists who carelessly transmit, receive, and
discard torrents of messages with little reflection. As the list of new email
messages comes up on our screens, we begin deleting the junk mail and
typing telegraphic responses to worthy recipients. We live in the digital
world of the now, instant everything. We seek immediate solutions to
even moral crises, as if Web sites and email petitions can change the
world. We fill our lives with temporary satisfactions, such as surfing the
Web, watching DVDs, or chatting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle.
Modern technologies provide us with a myriad of ways to "delete"
the moral life by focusing only on immediate, instrumental activities.
Preoccupied with the present, informationism focuses on "what is"
instead of "what ought to be." Cyberculture, for instance, obsessively
documents current events, from business transactions and consumer
profiles to personal schedules and news reports. Probably no culture
has ever been more enchanted with its ability to collect and publish contemporaneous
information, from the foods that Hollywood celebrities
prefer to the sexual practices of politicians. Cyberculture also chases
after the latest technological products, models, and upgrades-the endless
whirlwind of test products and "beta" technologies that promise us
immediate progress.
Ethics, the realm of moral obligations and standards of right conduct,
enters cyberculture primarily through moralistic campaigns that
faddishly capture the public imagination via news reports. We focus
briefly on such things as ensuring credit card security for online purchases,
protecting the privacy of children while they surf the Web, shielding
private medical records from corporate databases, or improving the
civility in online chat rooms. Terms such as "infogap," "technological
poverty," and "digital divide" come and go in the news, championed by
one or another consumer group or self-appointed watchdog association.
High school shootings momentarily prompt the nation to examine the
impact of violent video games on young people, but before long we are
back to business as usual, producing promotional Web sites for violent
movies based on the same video games.
Like ethical chameleons, we adapt our moral practices to the latest
technologies rather than summoning our technologies to follow a long-term
moral vision. Our desire to become skillful technologists increasingly
dictates our moral decisions. We rarely think about what it means
to be good and wise people; instead, we focus on whether we are technically
connected. We assume that by adopting novel technologies we
can solve the moral problems created by earlier ones. Supposedly,
encryption will ensure privacy. Web site "blocking" software at public
libraries will protect children from access to adult materials online. Our
romance with information technology leads us to assume that moral
issues are best solved technologically.
This emphasis on the technological now is a recipe for cultural chaos
as well as a license for self-interest. One-time Internet company CEO
Michael Wolff describes the boom time of the World Wide Web as a
frenzied era of moral confusion and nearly unbridled selfishness.
Caught in the escalating game of buying and selling unproven companies,
many inventors, investors, and executives hoped eventually to make
it big on public stock offerings. The frenzy of the moment overtook any
reasonable standards of conduct. Billions of dollars changed hands,
thanks to the machinery of Wall Street, the bravado of venture capitalists,
the spreadsheets of creative accountants, and the elliptical tales of
self-promotional CEOs. As Wolff recalls, dot-com wannabees were playing
with abstract data and overblown financial predictions. Hindsight
now shows that dot-com mania swamped any long-term sense of moral
responsibility.
Journalistic reporting is the primary mode of "knowing" in informationism.
Information technologies are particularly efficient at collecting
and disseminating current fads. Cyberspace makes it enormously
easy and inexpensive to make and distribute endless copies of up-to-date
documents. It also leads to dynamic online content that changes
by the day, hour, and even minute. Cyberspace turns us all into reporters
who daily compose telegraphic messages online for friends, relatives,
and anonymous others. Instant messaging becomes a means of reporting
to friends the minutiae of our lives. Theodore Roszak argues that
information itself has "taken on the quality of that impalpable, invisible,
but plaudit-winning silk from which the emperor's ethereal gown
was supposedly spun." One result is a "Breaking News Syndrome" in
which people become nervous and exhausted while chasing after the
latest reports about current events.
Informational reporting includes endless high-tech prognostications
that entertain us in the present more than they illuminate the future.
Late-breaking news stories about technological innovations sound like
popular science fiction. A flight magazine predicts that "shrinking technology
promises mobile professionals the world at their fingertips." It
quotes experts who say that by 2010, 40 percent of teens will own always-on,
wearable communications and computing technology. Dick Tracy
meets Star Wars.
Continues.
Continues.
