Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability

225 Pages·2000·9.73 MB·English

by  C. A. Bowers

Let Them Eat Data
OTHER BOOKS BY C. A. BOWERS
The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (1969)
Cultural Literacy for Freedom (1974)
The Promise of Theory: Education and the Politics of Cultural Change (1984)
Elements of a Post-Liberal Theory of Education (1987)
The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the
Non-Neutrality of Technology (1988)
Responsive Teaching: An Ecological Approach to Classroom Patterns of
Language, Culture, and Thought (1990, with D. Flinders)
Critical Essays on Education, Modernity, and the Recovery of the Ecological
Imperative (1993)
Education, Cultural Myths, and the Ecological Crisis: Toward Deep Changes
(1993)
Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable Culture: Rethinking Moral
Education, Creativity, Intelligence, and Other Modern Orthodoxies (1995)
The Culture of Denial: Why the Environmental Movement Needs a Strategy for
Reforming Universities and Public Schools (1997)
Educating for Eco-Justice and Community (forthcoming)
Let Them Eat Data
How Computers
Affect Education,
Cultural Diversity,
and the Prospects of
Ecological Sustainability
C. A. BOWERS
The University of Georgia Press Athens and London
© 2000 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
All rights reserved
Set in 10.3 on 15 Minion by G&S Typesetters
Printed digitally in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/00026718
Bowers, C. A.
Let them eat data : how computers affect education, cultural
diversity, and the prospects of ecological sustainability / C. A. Bowers.
viii, 216 p. ; 22 cm.
ISBN 0-8203-2229-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN 082032230X (pbk.: alk. paper)
Includes bibliographical refer ences (p. 197–204) and index.
1. Computers and civilization. 2. Education—Data processing.
I. Title
QA76.9.C66 B68 2000
303.48'34 21LC 00-26718
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN for this electronic edition: 978-0-8203-4073-9
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Part 1. Cultural and Ecological Consequences I
1. Globalizing Cyberspace: Vision and Reality 3
2. The Culture of Cyberspace and Everyday Life 16
3. Displacing Wisdom with Data: Ecological Implications 48
4. Evolutionary Theory and the Global Computer Culture 76
Part 2. Educational Consequences 109
5. The False Promises of Computer-Based Education 111
6. Why Computers Should Not Replace Teachers 140
7. Rethinking Technology: What Educational Institutions Can Do 177
References 197
Index 205
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Acknowledgments
Let Them Eat Data is the outgrowth of many influences and personal
experiences, which included encountering the perceptions of how
computers are being viewed in cultures in South Africa, Asia, Mex-
ico, and the indigenous cultures of the American Southwest. The
question of whether the proponents of educational computing un-
derstood the broader educational and cultural implications first be-
came a concern in the late 1980s as I watched the proliferation of
computer education courses that failed to engage issues surround-
ing the most dominant characteristic of a computer: It is a cultural
mediating and thus transforming technology. Concerns about the
vision of a global culture based on computer-related technologies
that continue to be promoted in books and through the media be-
came more central as I began to learn how Third World writers were
questioning the Western approach to technological and economic
development. My more long-standing focus of attention, which has
been on writing about how the educational process reproduces the
vii
viii Acknowledgments
cultural patterns that are exacerbating the ecological crisis, became
a major source of motivation for writing a book that examines the
linkages between computer-mediated learning and the spread of en-
vironmentally destructive cultural patterns and practices.
But books never spring from the head of an autonomous thinker.
Conversations with scholars and activists who share similar con-
cerns, years of reading over a wide area of related topics, and con-
ducting graduate seminars where ideas were questioned and refined,
all had an important influence. The scholar-activists whose conver-
sations and books have been especially useful include Fritjof Capra,
Alan Drengson, Harold Glasser, Andrew Kimbrell, Jerry Mander,
Helena Norberg-Hodge, George Sessions, Vandana Shiva, Charlene
Spretnak, and Langdon Winner. The many opportunities to learn
from them can be traced to the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which
brought together on a fairly regular basis scholar-activists who are
addressing global issues from a deep ecology perspective. Students
in the doctoral specialization of Community and Environmental
Renewal at Portland State University who have helped in the clari-
fication of ideas include Bill Bigelow, Eric Brattain, Jeff Edmund-
son, Stephen Gilchrist, Shelley Simon, Andrea Smith, and Robyn
Voetterl.
The support given by my wife, Mary Katharine Bowers, has taken
many forms, including suggestions for making parts of the analysis
more lucid and sharing insights and perspectives on issues that I had
overlooked. Also appreciated is the awareness on the part of Barbara
Ras, executive editor of the University of Georgia Press, that the
book addresses the growing concerns of many parents and citizens
that have not been adequately examined in a public forum. Her en-
couragement and suggestions for improving the manuscript have
been especially useful. A special debt is owed to copyeditor Marcella
Friel for suggesting changes that significantly improved the read-
ability of the book.
Parti
Cultural and
Ecological Consequences
N
early everyone who owns a computer has found it to be a
useful technology. The uses vary from sending e-mail to
relatives and professional colleagues to modeling systems
and delivering university courses to storing and retrieving data con-
nected with business operations. More generally, the "experts" who
promote globalization view the computer in a more messianic light,
as the technology that will create new markets and thus reduce pov-
erty and so-called backwardness in the seemingly undeveloped parts
of the world. The Information Highway, according to their vision of
the future, will not only increase efficiency in creating more goods
and services within a shrinking resource base but will also contrib-
ute to the disappearance of traditional cultures—just as the inter-
state highway system led to the demise of local communities that
could not join the new economic order.
There are several major flaws in this line of thinking. The most
significant is that computers embody the double binds experienced
by the cultures that created them and that are now giving them a cen-
tral role in the messianic project of modernization. Because a double
bind encompasses both benefits and drawbacks, and because we usu-
ally focus only on the benefits, the drawbacks often go unnoticed.
For example, the Industrial Revolution raised the material standard
of living and brought many conveniences into the lives of ordinary
people; but its success depended on the destruction of self-sufficient
and symbolically rich cultures, turned much of the environment
into a wasteland, and put the world on its current environmentally
destructive pathway.
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