Movement
1:
Heaven's Gates
Movement
2:
Cyborgs Can't be Educated
Movement
3:
I Don't Want to be a Computer!
Movement
4:
You are Here!
A Cyborg Humanist’s Vision forTeaching/LearningTechnology: 2/4
The more clearly one deals (in research and teaching) with information, and the more complex and involved are the informational operations, the more clearly IT is important. Workers in the sciences traditionally deal more extensively and complexly with information (often numbers and abstract symbols) than humanists. Scientists need technologies capable of the complex processing of large amounts of information. In the humanities the most commonly identified counterpart is published information: books, manuscripts, journals, etc. (which, of course, also exist in the sciences). The parallel is clumsy and not very useful, but it is often made to serve the legislated democratic sensitivities of public universities. Despite an awkward effort to include humanists, the assumptions on which the effort is made are never challenged. The consequences have been the creation the monster we now call IT.
When I attend the planning and envisioning meetings called by IT, I invariably feel the pain of having my voice destroyed. In these meetings those whose voices dominate are the scientists who speak (and frequently interrupt) in technobabble about their high end needs supported by numerous large dollar grants. The only thing in the university that designates greater power than high-end computing is attracting large external grants. The spatial metaphors that so strongly emerge–HIGH IS GOOD and MORE IS BETTER–help me understand (remembering that I was expected to show gratitute at being provided with DOWN-STREAMED computers for a class) how the university values me and my work. I continue to hear the tone in the voices, THE VOICES OF IT, when referring to those 70% or 80 % of the faculty whose work does not revolve around IT. The VOICES have a tone of scorn and disbelief about the fact that some members of the faculty do not even have computers or use e-mail. When the discussion table is set under these restricted terms, many will be ignored as uninterested or incapable, and those who hold the power are but servants of the monster IT.
The humanists and artists invited to the table are those who explicitly use IT for something they do. They have tiny voices that are often apologetic. Even humanists who research the cultural and historical implications of IT have little voices, because their information needs are minor, low end.
Every horror novel needs clever and courageous souls to seek and destroy the monster. I call upon the artists and humanists to do just that. We must demand that the orientational metaphor that steals our voices be replaced. We must demand that more does not necessarily mean better. We must demand that teaching/learning be understood as something quite different from mere information processing. We must insist that teaching/learning has to do with human development, thought, expression of the minded-bodies, values, enquiry. We must show that teaching/learning has much more to do with engaging people and cultures and histories and the arts rather than with the accumulation, possession, and recall of information. We must be convincing that teaching/learning enhances our humanity (the "org" of cyborg) through its conjunction with the machine and consequently information.