by Norman Bernard
New technologies have, in my opinion, given us unprecedented opportunities for the good. I am a beneficiary of them in my professional life. I could never even as a young adult have envisaged that I would give lessons in which the participants were on separate continents, to name just one remarkable instance. However, I have also become convinced both through reading and personal experience that every great technological advance is also an advance in human stupidity as we lose, often with incredible speed, skills that we had had since the days of the Sumerian kings and the Egyptian pharaohs. Questions about what is lost are every bit as important as speculation about future gains and such questions are much less likely to be attended to.
Plato on Writing
I cannot claim any originality for this last line of thought as it has been expressed since the beginnings of philosophy in the West. There is a famous passage in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus in which Thamus, king of a city in Upper Egypt, is in dialogue with the Egyptian god Thoth, the god of invention and the inventor of many things, including calculation, geometry, astronomy and writing. It is revealing that the god of writing was also considered to be the god of magic. As always, Plato uses Socrates as his mouthpiece and the latter is telling the story of the encounter between god and king to his friend Phaedrus. It is worth quoting at some length the king’s response to Thoth’s claim that his inventions deserved the widest possible circulation:
Thamus inquired into the use of each of them, and as Thoth went through them expressed approval or disapproval as he judged Thoth’s claims to be well or ill-founded. It would take too long to go through all that Thamus is reported to have said for and against each of Thoth’s inventions. But when it came to writing, Thoth declared, “Here is an accomplishment, my lord the king, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a receipt for both memory and wisdom.” To this Thamus replied, “Thoth, my paragon of invention, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm that will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction and be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom without real wisdom, they will be a burden to society.”
(Plato quotation taken from Neil Postman, Technopoly, Vintage Books, 1993: pp 3-4)
There is much to learn from this passage, including how risky the business of prediction is. Our mythical friend Thamus was undoubtedly correct about the loss in literate societies of the prodigious memories many of us used to have. It was not common but by no means unheard of for a Roman orator to be able to recite Virgil’s Aeneid from beginning to end, an epic poem which runs to about 340 pages in the translation on my shelves.
However, because we have had the benefit of experiencing writing for millennia now we know that he was hopelessly wrong in thinking that writing would be a burden and nothing but a burden. He failed to see among much else that print would eventually lower the cost of books so as to make knowledge much more democratically available, that without it there could never have arisen notions of standardization without which science would not have been possible, that by making the bible available to laymen millennia later religion would be transformed and so much else.
His failure to recognize all of this is entirely comprehensible because having intimate knowledge only of an overwhelmingly oral culture he could feel on his pulses only what would be lost and had as yet practically no experience of what the new technology might bring. We should therefore be cautious about predictions about the long-term products and effects of the digital revolution for the same reason.
Nonetheless, it is quite striking how many of the arguments against print in Plato’s Phaedrus are now used against computers. This is especially true of the argument that those who use writing will become forgetful of their own internal resources and also Thamus’ subsequent arguments that writing and texts are essentially passive and have none of the give and take of oral encounters and that texts cannot be productively questioned because all you get back are the same words you read in the first place.
In a classic book Orality and Literacy Walter Ong points out that in order to make his objections as effectively as he did Plato had to put them in writing. We are vulnerable in the same way, as those of us who wish to urge people to consider the potential dangers of computers and the digital revolution have to use our laptops to do so. Once the word has been technologized, as it was with the advent of writing, there is as Ong realizes no other way to criticize such developments without using the highest technological means available.
Technology can vastly enrich the human spirit but, as with writing, the fact that any given technology is a technology must be acknowledged and faced.
What we also need to face as honestly as Thamus is the possibility of technologically-induced loss. It is for this reason that he is not concerned with the specifics of what people will write: he is worried about the implications of the fact that they will write at all.
Technologically-Induced Deskilling
It is important to realise that the examples of technologically-induced deskilling given below, drawn from my own experiences, are not intended to minimise the gains calculators and computers have brought. Quite the contrary, I am absolutely convinced that we have gained far more than we have lost. In the introduction I mention how computers have enabled me to do things as a teacher in my maturity that were unimaginable in my youth. And far more than being just a mechanical aid to spare us drudgery, the processing power of computers has literally brought into being whole new areas of mathematics that would never have existed without them. In short, they have led to great intellectual advances.
I am focusing on the potential for de-skilling because this aspect of change is much more rarely spoken and thought about.
It is because it does raise this question that Plato’s fable is as relevant now as it ever was. Through his mouthpiece King Thamus Plato shows a clear understanding of something most of us do not think about, namely that no technology is neutral either in conception or application and that because of this it disables even as it enables.
Let us look at an example or two, all of which fall within my own experience or those of people I know or knew. For instance, I and a former colleague of mine have watched in horror as teenagers take out a calculator to divide or multiply by 10 in a way which suggests that any idea of what a decimal system is has been lost.
This kind of thing can repeat itself at higher levels of sophistication. During my university years I once ran across a former high school peer who had been in the same class as me. We saw precious little of each other as he was studying to be an electrical engineer. After asking each other how we were getting on and how our studies were progressing, he told me an interesting story about the most recent exam session.
I can remember how Texas Instruments, a kind of calculator, were all the rage in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not least because for people of my generation they were the first mechanical device of this kind we had ever seen. Engineering students especially were often to be seen with them in hand and they were allowed to use them in exams to speed up the drudgery of routine calculations. Well, one of Gavin’s classmates was unfortunate: his calculator malfunctioned during a physics exam. He was given logarithm tables and liberal extra time. However, my former classmate told me how things ended up in practice: this student failed. He had to walk out of the exam room because he could not work with the log tables he had been given so the extra time allotted to him was useless. All this of course lets us know that forgetfulness had set in and a logarithm was now something taken care of when one pushed a button and that all understanding had been displaced.
When travelling overseas as a child, I was often overawed by ancient buildings. Some of the stone blocks at the top of the Colosseum weigh 2 tons, double the weight of many a family car. How did they get 20 meters above the ground in a world where there was not so much as steam power, let alone cranes and computer-assisted design? I once asked a friend such a question to see if anyone might know what I could not possibly work out and was told that back then all but unlimited slave labour was available. I replied that slave labour was useless if you could not give your slaves suitable instructions on how to get those massive blocks high above ground level.
The more I think about it, I suspect that a humble Roman building site foreman might be of more use than the architecture faculties of Harvard, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge because he would simply know what to do and we would not.
In my own English Language teaching, I have found it fascinating to note how certain features of Early Modern English such as what are today non-standard contractions are finding their way back into tweets and SMS’s because of the constraints imposed by a 160 character limit to a message in the case of SMS’s specifically. Students, largely because of texting, display great ingenuity in exploiting sound/letter correspondences. I do not agree that digital media will have a destructive effect on spelling because such correspondences cannot be exploited if one does not even know they exist.
However, I frequently find vocabulary limitations in my students which hamper their ability to do textual analysis tasks greatly and, to a lesser degree, adapt their language to differences between texts, audiences and purposes. There is also a greatly diminished difficulty to deal with syntactic complexity on the part of many students. This becomes apparent in literature courses and also in the A Level English Language Change module where students have to come to grips with older texts from the 17th century onwards.
I have come to believe that the problem is not so much that students do not read but rather that some of what they read has atrophied their ability to deal with complex language, especially with regard to syntax.
In short, despite vast gains the losses are there too and we are barely aware of them. This line of thought makes me understand fully why a professor of applied mathematics, John Casti, permitted himself to speculate that we might genuinely be only one calamity away from reversion to the stone age.
Where Does This Leave Us?
The only honest answer I can give is that I don’t know. One thing is for certain though: we cannot afford blind trust. We need to ask whether the influx of digital media into the classroom is something to welcome without reservation. There can be no argument in my opinion about things like digital readers to ease the burden of dyslexics. But should computers be admitted as a matter of course for normal instruction from the outset? Is there not a case that—in the light of some of the real-life examples given above—they should only be introduced with caution at a late stage, only once students’ understanding has been certified by an ability to perform the relevant tasks manually?
Could we also not think about introducing courses into the curriculum about the history of technologies such as writing and use them to speculate about what lessons history might hold for thinking about the digital revolution? Getting students to think about the cultural and institutional arrangements that shape their lives even if it means swimming against the current can only be to the good.
To some extent all this will mean thinking about what education is supposed to be about and above all what is supposed to be for in the early 21st century. We cannot fly blind, and we cannot leave the results we get to the dictates of commerce alone.