David Porush
Telepresence and Telepathy: ABC2VR
David Porush, Co-founder and chairman
SpongeFish
[1] "He went to the window [of his hotel room in Istanbul]...There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country."
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Like many New Worlds not yet invented nor yet colonized, the Web is territory contested by all sorts of partisans, even on the boatride over. There we shall achieve new freedoms. There we shall create new societies founded on the principles of true human nature – generous, slavish, rational, materialistic. There we will correct all the ills our old social order bred.
As we speak, the web is rapidly re-negotiating and reorganizing the relations among minds, selves, others. Some writers have even supposed that virtual reality, of which the Web is a primitive instance, will deliver new transcendental forms.
Of all aspects of the future Web, the questions surrounding education on the Web receive the most vociferous debate, especially in academia and among academics, naturally enough. The Web presents a new place for us to get it right, and everyone has their own idea of “right.” Some even believe it is intrinsically wrong for us to use the Web for education. It supplants traditional warm-body classroom teaching and lecturing with means for automation of pedagogy, control, invasion of privacy, and de-individualization. Not least, the Web seems to ally naturally with commercial interests, which can corrupt and bend education to its mercenary goals.[1]
The SUNY Learning Network currently serves 100,000 students on 40 campuses of the State University of New York. SUNY is the U.S.’s largest comprehensive public university, with 64 campuses including research universities, four-year colleges, community colleges and technical colleges. It’s the happy job of my office, which is responsible for the SUNY Learning Network and other missions in academic technology, to identify, develop and deploy the best technologies that will broaden and enrich the core values and ideals of academia. This includes everything from the expansion of educational opportunities to a wider population of students to determining what sorts of pedagogies we should encourage in the online classroom. Given the complexity, sheer size, and diversity of the interests my office serves, it would be tempting to simply let a Darwinian environment thrive: provide resources, enforce some rules of engagement (e.g. policies for how to grant credit online) and let the games begin, and wait to see what creatures emerge from that jungle.
However, ideologies among us academics make demands on the shape of online learning and. On one end of the spectrum, there is a strong trend in the U.S. to pin learning to measurable, specifiable outcomes, a trend that shows up in K-12 education as legislated demands on outcomes to be produced by schools in the performance of their students in standardized testing. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a strong bias from within academia itself, especially in Schools of Education theory, towards a constructivist perspective. This bias often manifests itself as a call for the professor to give up his or her authority in favor of “learner-centrism” or the encouragement of self-guided communities of learners. Similarly, some administrators want online learning to create efficiencies, so that fewer faculty can teach more students. Other theorists suggest that asynchronous discussion postings should be the site of knowledge construction, while and dress up a strong aversion to testing of any sort in the guise of best practices.
The contest for the New World to be dominated by this or that fundamentalism or ideology or untested theory of pedagogy is expensive and distracting, especially if they end up narrowing and parochializing or balkanizing the range of learning that could occur with a little shared vision and coordination. Rather, in our planning for how learning will unfold in this medium, we should try to plot the trajectory of this medium against the arcs traced by other media. This tack should enable us to husband our public resources more responsibly and to provide a more viable, robust learning environment technology to serve a wider range of learning. Chuck Dzuiban at the University of Central Florida has recently noted that as we track the generations in their differential responses to online learning, the youngest cadres of students (The Next Gen vs. the X-Gen or Baby Boomers) are less satisfied by the technology environment we provide them, even though they seem to have more success learning on it.[2] In other words, the technology we old technocrats and e-learning professors are designing for them is boring them, even though they handle it with ease.
Bla blah in here transition What can we learn from new communications technologies and how they’ve shaped culture and cognition through the centuries that humans have been inventing them? This chapter will look at one lesson in particular that we can extrapolate from the history of the media.
Many modern electronic media seemed to promise a total transformation of society when they were new. Radio and television in their early days were surrounded by liberationist, redemptive, utopian, political and even transcendental claims.[3] Early cultural optimists predicted how those media were going to alter and heal how we work, play, live, communicate, and most poignantly, teach and learn. Yet, like its predecessors, the Web has almost completed its transformation into yet another – if extraordinarily global, instantaneous, and intimate – mall. The Web has fulfilled one of its destinies through eBay and Amazon.com: it has become the world’s bazaar, bordered by the world’s largest bordello. What began as a way to swap files of text and data has evolved into the most remarkable arena for commerce. Through the development of increasingly flexible ways to share sensory experiences (light, sound, motion) and money (PayPal, e-commerce security) the Web has become extraordinarily efficient for identifying and exciting individualized desires and then delivering the consumer to the very product that will gratify that desire almost instantaneously, taking secure payment along the way. It itches, it scratches. It is also, like the best of bazaars, a great place to roam, seeking or being surprised by new sensations, knowledge, and experiences.
But the web hasn’t been co-opted for commerce completely. Communications technologies do promote revolutions in cognition and culture, as history has shown and this chapter will explore. The bazaar will lure us out of the classroom every time. In some places and eras, progress will slip, as governments suppress or societies fail. But the ends for which we deploy different media proliferate and co-exist in parallel, and not necessarily to the exclusion of each other. At the same time, media tend to be almost infinitely expansible.[4] And those twin lessons are good to remember when we watch how our students and children thrive on the Web: they’re googling for a paper reference, chatting online, downloading a video, playing a song, burning a disc, composing a document, managing multiple identities on AIM, playing a hand of Texas Hold ‘Em at a table in a virtual casino.
The phonetic alphabet superceded but did not displace the communications devices that preceded it and which gave it birth, illustrating the principle that Older media persist and continue to live side by side. Oral cultures (rap), painting, pictograms, syllabic scripts, radio, television and telephone continue to survive robustly, within and around each other.
Phylogenetically, back when the brain was simple, its expressive function was almost non-existent. There was a neat Kantian fit between animal and environment: The rules of the world out there, its physics, were not challenged by the rules of the world in here; there was a nice match. But then through some urgency that it is just as easy to talk about metaphysically or teleologically as in terms of some deterministic chaotic evolution, the brain exploded, human-like hominids started walking upright about 35,000 years ago, looking forward, using tools, colonizing the world, creating new social structures. The brain, like some imperial culture exploding off a remote island, started projecting itself onto the world, terraforming the Earth in its own image and leaving in its wake a trail of non-bio-degradable tools and waste. The brain also started talking, depicting, enacting versions of its experience in cave paintings, ritual dances, gestures, and a grammar of grunts. It became self-conscious. It recognized a mismatch between the world out there and the world in here: Hey! The world persists; we die! Self-consciousness and the idea of death were born in one fatal stroke and we acted self-consciously to shape our environment to forestall that inevitability. We organized and communicated to live.
This powerful cybernetic loop among environment, culture, and brain that we recognize as uniquely human was initiated sometime between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago as a result of who-knows-which-butterfly flapping who-knows-what sort of wings. Frances Hellige describes the growth of this feedback loop initiated by the development of language as a "snowball effect": a cycle of ever-widening gyres that eventually co-creates everything between the poles of culture and the biology of the brain itself, including demonstrable changes in structure and size of different regions of the brain.[5]
In cybernetic terms, we call this a positive feedback loop. The brain sends information out into the environment, which feed newly intensified signals back into the brain system to destabilize the system anew, which in turn re-amplifies its message, like an over-sensitive microphone, and again re-broadcasts the message back onto the world. The universe screeches with the noise of the human brain fed back through it, a cyborg rock concert broadcast from our noisy Earth.
Neurophysiologists and cognitive scientists who study the alphabet note that its effects on the brain can even be seen in the lifetime development of individual people.[6] Evidence is emerging that the use of language in the world helps reshape the brain from womb to tomb. A whole new discipline of neural plasticity has emerged in the last two decades, showing that the brain is not the static, genetically-determined machine we once thought it to be. It's happening to us, today, right now. Studies of aphasics and dyslexics with brain injuries show that the brain changes physiologically and progressively after the injury, forging new connections, finding pathways around damages areas to accommodate functions. In other words, the brain under assault or given the prop to extend its activity will reorganize itself at the level of neural connections, even growing new ones. In all, it suggests that reading grows parts of the brain even in the lifetime of individual humans, just as losing the ability to read devolves the brain of individual humans, or forces the brain to re-wire itself. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the cognitive abilities we grow up in our contemporary mediasphere trace the same line as the evolution of culture in its use of successively more complex, sensory, and intimate communications.
Fun with your new brain: a brief history of the rise of the alphabet
In transit, trying a new alphabet must have been (and still is) tantamount to an ongoing progressive hallucination. It lets you think things that you couldn't have thought before, makes connections for which your brain wasn't wired before, and invites you into different information processing patterns, different mental events or experiences. It's like having a whole new brain, or at least, the same operating system brain with new applications that transform the operating system. Now imagine the mass hallucination of an entire culture learning how to use writing for the first time, and then later, progressively more efficient scripts for the first time. Whole tribes of people, or important segments of them, put on this new cybernetic headgear virtually all at once. We can imagine this mass cybernetic experiment would be accompanied by social, epistemological, and metaphysical revolutions, apocalyptic prophesies, and re-definitions of the self in relation to body, mind, others, and the invisible. In short, it might provoke the emergence of a new religion.
With this hypothesis, let’s take a look at the advent of writing itself. Imagine a time-lapse video of the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia before and just after the very first invention of writing, Sumerian pictographs in the late fourth millenium B.C. These time-lapsed films would show millions of years of animal activity, including the hunting gathering and some low-level animal husbandry (shepherding, desultory breeding) by upright hominids after 35,000 BC. As we approach 10,000 BC, activity begins to pick up pace and organization. Clusters of hominids show tool use, primitive mound building, expressive cave painting, and cultivation of the earth, though in indifferent and almost-random-seeming patterns, pockets that flare and fade. Then around 3800 BCE, Something leaps into a new order of rapid self-organization. Compressed into a few frames you see a dramatic transformation; blink and you'll miss the instant. These fertile regions undergo massive terraforming along rectilinear plots. Rivers are diverted into rectangular irrigation systems. Cities emerge, themselves rectilinear, or at least rectangles pressing against circles, deforming them into ovals, the ovals containing rectangles.
Zoom in with me now into the squared walls of the cities,
and into the very rooms of the city, and we will find the intimate source of this sudden change. There, a row of hard stone benches, arranged regularly.
It is a schoolroom for scribes! Hundreds of boys, mostly the sons of privileged nobility, sit for hours hunched over clay tablets, learning to scrawl in regular lines. Indeed, if we superimpose the scratching of these lines they look like the lines of irrigation written on the face of the earth itself, as seen from an orbiting satellite, both canals in the clay.
Cuneiform Tablet from Ur – Courtesy of the British Museum
The discipline of the schoolchildren being tutored in script "canalizes" their thought processes, reinforcing certain pathways. It is hard not to imagine that what's written on neural habits and gets projected onto the world, which is literally canalized, too.
Looking at a picture of the ancient Sumerian classroom for scribes found in Shuruppak (from ca. 3200 BC) for the first time in Edward Chiera’s They Wrote on Clay,[7] I immediately was struck by the familiarity of rows of stone benches and the headmaster’s desk up front. Then I was seized with a terrible recognition: Five thousand years later, most children are still sitting in classrooms that enforce the linear discipline of writing in virtually the same methods and with not so dissimilar effects as did these ancient Sumerians, "that gifted and practical people" as Edward Chiera calls them in his groundbreaking work, Sumerians invented cuneiform as a perfectly portable means to effect commerce, extend the authority of their kings, preserve metaphysical and transcendent information, and secure the stability of caste and rank. Teaching in this physical format was self-reinforcing, and education was a means to its own ends.
The invention of pictographic writing by the Sumerians was "a secret treasure or mystery which the laymen could not be expected to understand and which was therefore the peculiar possession of a professional class of clerks or scribes,” Chiera writes. Furthermore, the metaphysics associated with this new telepathic technology becomes clear in the priestly functions these scribes served. Neo-Babylonian texts used the same ideogram for priest and scribe. Along with the script came a new mythology that, predictably, placed the power of language in the center of its metaphysics: "As for the creating technique attributed to these [new] deities, Sumerian philosophers developed a doctrine which became dogma throughout the Near East -- the doctrine of the creative power of the divine word. All that the creating deity had to do, according to this doctrine, was to lay his plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name.”
In fact, everywhere pictographic writing makes its advent, we find the sudden emergence of what we can think of as "tech writing empires": civilizations geometrically akin in their compulsive rectilinearity to the hexagonal hive structures of bees. In China, among the Aztecs of Mexico or Incas in Peru, in Babylon, Sumeria, and Egypt, we see the same pattern of physical, social, epistemological, and metaphysical organization. Along with writing come other inventions so predictably similar that they seem to derive directly from imperatives in the nervous system itself amplified or newly grown by use of the new cyborg device of writing: centralized authority in god/kings; monumental ziggurat-like or pyramidal architecture;
The Ziggurat of Ur
Monumental buildings announce the imperial success of this form immortalized as the Tower of Babel.