American Is Caught In An Internet of Subversion
One of the oldest adages in teaching is: “Learning is a subversive activity.”
Rebellious, seditious, and a revolutionary are all traits of a student who is vested in his own education. These students want more knowledge. They want to go through doors marked Private - Do No Enter.
When we apply subversive learning to a group, however, we get a range of results from the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring to terrorism of every ilk. In terms of learning, the people in these groups buy into what they have learned about an issue, and collaborate to push the issue in their direction. Their knowledge is not evolving, it’s already evolved. And the sad truth is that we get a lot of heat from these groups, but not much light. Without making any value judgment on their causes, to be connected to a subversive group feels like a learning high, like you’re pushing through that Private – Do Not Enter door.
The Unseen Subversives
["we lose interest in the future of our descendents...and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one." – Alexis De Tocqueville]
Yet, as people take to the streets in protest, America is being gutted from within by unseen subversions – many of them masquerading as virtues.
Wikipedia, something I use every day, is a wonderful collaborative web site. Yet its founder has to beg for financial support (What a business plan!) while all but ruining established encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference businesses. Wikipedia is a subversiveness on steroids.
Wikileaks is an in-your-face subversive activity using guerrilla warfare to bring revolution, truth, and well, something less than the American way to a Brave New World. You may argue that the public has a right to any and all information; I would argue that when the public endorses illegal collaboration, it become a mob. At any rate, if you are in the secrets business, there’s not much new in the mountain of released Wikileaks material. There’s not much learning going on here, either.
Bread and Circus
The Internet, of course, is the enabler of all this subversiveness. This invisible hand, unforeseen by Adam Smith, has leveled the traditional business landscape and allowed darker, more sinister businesses to spike up and grow. Hate groups, pedophilia rings, and terrorist recruiters have been given a new reach and legitimacy by the Internet. In return the Internet has given us something akin to the “bread and circus” of ancient Rome – it’s all free, it’s all entertainment.
It’s all free
Not only does the free aspect of the Internet ruin businesses as Wikipedia does, but the Internet facilitates other disruptions as well.
When a Wal-Mart super center moves into a small town, the impact on local businesses is enormous. Wal-Mart, now the world’s largest business, can offer better prices through economy of scale – at least that’s what they would like you to believe. The truth is as a multi-national, Wal-Mart buys directly from overseas suppliers that mostly have slave-cheap labor costs. Wal-Mart also hires temporary employees in the US (avoiding a host of traditional costs), and they make no pretense of valuing employees above their customers or of being anything more than a thumbnail sketch of a good corporate citizen – and for this we, as consumers, love them.
Amazon has all the advantages of a Wal-Mart without having to build retail centers or having to pay the sales taxes a local business does. It’s pretty much a free ride. Amazon would argue that they pay other usage taxes, but every time the sales tax issue is brought up by a state, Amazon simply says go ahead and we’ll move out of your state. Out of a landscape flattened by the Internet, huge, ominous (if you’re a local small businessman) mountains have risen in very short order.
There is also an argument which says small businesses (the engine of job creation) depend upon the good paying jobs of large corporations. It is easy to find criticism of Wal-Mart’s employment practices on the web, but consider this: Wal-Mart employs roughly two million people in America. Google, which you may be using now, employs only twenty thousand! Amazon and Yahoo have about the same number as Google. It’s hard to see how small businesses are going to create many jobs with these tight little pockets of employment numbers or with Wal-Mart’s low paid, part-time employees.
Size Matters
There are several Internet companies that are so large and have so much vertical integration as to be monopolies. If they were starting out today on fee-for-service basis they would probably not be allowed to operate or last very long because they couldn’t support themselves. The truth is most don’t make money.
YouTube, for instance, has a lot of material available for free that must be (I would think) copyrighted some place. Often the person who has uploaded the material simply puts a disclaimer saying “For Fan Interest Only.” My guess is that they will never face legal action because YouTube is so big (read popular). Also, they don’t make money. Owned by Google (who bought them for around 12 billion dollars!) they are just product-dumping to get market share. We fine China and Japan when they do this, but YouTube floats on by.
SKYPE neither invented nor built the Internet, or phone lines, or phones that they use. Yet, you can make a phone call with Skype anywhere in the world cheaper than you can with the company that owns the equipment. You can even make most calls for free (that Internet come-on, again).
FaceBook is another SKYPE-like company that offers a party line (if you’re old enough to know what that is) for free. They offer their users, well, other users. No one knows what FaceBook is worth, but if they charged a fee – any fee – they would quickly find out.
It’s all entertainment
The “everything is entertainment” aspect of the Internet is equally subversive. In a world where you can Google anything, at any time of day, why would anyone want to learn anything except for amusement? If you need to find a toilet in a foreign country, a hand held on-the-fly translator will translate your question into the foreign language. A smart phone may even give you maps or tag a picture with the same information. There is no need to actually learn the language yourself. What drives most Internet searches is an immediate need, a curiosity of sorts to be sure, but not an intellectual curiosity.
The phenomenon of social media diminishes learning still further. Texting, tweets, and brief entries are ephemeral and meant to be so. It is what it is (ugh!), but as virtually everyone in the world seems to have a social media account, critical thinking has been painted into a small corner. It may be that this corner is exactly the same size as it was fifty years ago, but the sheer babble of more and more people backing up and crowding in on this corner makes it seem smaller, and worse, truly insignificant.
The Digitizing of Education Has Been Disappointing
I think it is safe to say that the Internet has not been the boon to education it was touted to be. It is true that if you are already enrolled in an institution you can take some courses on line in a virtual classroom, but you could do this before with TV distant learning and supplemental lectures on CDs. The Internet does not reach out to people who can’t afford to be enrolled – or who cannot even afford to have a computer.
It’s true that you can take Internet courses for free, but the credits earned will not be recognized. You’re more likely to get “life credits” for running a grocery scanner or getting a driver’s license than for an on-line course. But you’ll earn these credits only if you enroll. And as the instructor has no way of being paid, well, there is no business plan for free.
Surfing, whether done at the sea shore or on the web, is a recreational activity and makes it is hard for both students and the education industry to take on-line learning seriously. For the student, too many fun options are just a click away, and for the educational industry there’s always the chance that your business will be destroyed. If it can be digitized after all, it can be ripped off.
In the end, we have been overwhelmed by the technology – and we will continue to be. The Laptop for Every Child program to help poor students is now, some 18 months later, offering a much improved version. Moore’s Law (memory size and efficiency doubles every 18 months) still operates. Woe to the poor student who got an early version, woe to us who thought we wouldn’t be fooled again.
FG 14 January 2012
This is a follow-on essay to Chopstick Nation which is next.
Rebellious, seditious, and a revolutionary are all traits of a student who is vested in his own education. These students want more knowledge. They want to go through doors marked Private - Do No Enter.
When we apply subversive learning to a group, however, we get a range of results from the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring to terrorism of every ilk. In terms of learning, the people in these groups buy into what they have learned about an issue, and collaborate to push the issue in their direction. Their knowledge is not evolving, it’s already evolved. And the sad truth is that we get a lot of heat from these groups, but not much light. Without making any value judgment on their causes, to be connected to a subversive group feels like a learning high, like you’re pushing through that Private – Do Not Enter door.
The Unseen Subversives
["we lose interest in the future of our descendents...and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one." – Alexis De Tocqueville]
Yet, as people take to the streets in protest, America is being gutted from within by unseen subversions – many of them masquerading as virtues.
Wikipedia, something I use every day, is a wonderful collaborative web site. Yet its founder has to beg for financial support (What a business plan!) while all but ruining established encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference businesses. Wikipedia is a subversiveness on steroids.
Wikileaks is an in-your-face subversive activity using guerrilla warfare to bring revolution, truth, and well, something less than the American way to a Brave New World. You may argue that the public has a right to any and all information; I would argue that when the public endorses illegal collaboration, it become a mob. At any rate, if you are in the secrets business, there’s not much new in the mountain of released Wikileaks material. There’s not much learning going on here, either.
Bread and Circus
The Internet, of course, is the enabler of all this subversiveness. This invisible hand, unforeseen by Adam Smith, has leveled the traditional business landscape and allowed darker, more sinister businesses to spike up and grow. Hate groups, pedophilia rings, and terrorist recruiters have been given a new reach and legitimacy by the Internet. In return the Internet has given us something akin to the “bread and circus” of ancient Rome – it’s all free, it’s all entertainment.
It’s all free
Not only does the free aspect of the Internet ruin businesses as Wikipedia does, but the Internet facilitates other disruptions as well.
When a Wal-Mart super center moves into a small town, the impact on local businesses is enormous. Wal-Mart, now the world’s largest business, can offer better prices through economy of scale – at least that’s what they would like you to believe. The truth is as a multi-national, Wal-Mart buys directly from overseas suppliers that mostly have slave-cheap labor costs. Wal-Mart also hires temporary employees in the US (avoiding a host of traditional costs), and they make no pretense of valuing employees above their customers or of being anything more than a thumbnail sketch of a good corporate citizen – and for this we, as consumers, love them.
Amazon has all the advantages of a Wal-Mart without having to build retail centers or having to pay the sales taxes a local business does. It’s pretty much a free ride. Amazon would argue that they pay other usage taxes, but every time the sales tax issue is brought up by a state, Amazon simply says go ahead and we’ll move out of your state. Out of a landscape flattened by the Internet, huge, ominous (if you’re a local small businessman) mountains have risen in very short order.
There is also an argument which says small businesses (the engine of job creation) depend upon the good paying jobs of large corporations. It is easy to find criticism of Wal-Mart’s employment practices on the web, but consider this: Wal-Mart employs roughly two million people in America. Google, which you may be using now, employs only twenty thousand! Amazon and Yahoo have about the same number as Google. It’s hard to see how small businesses are going to create many jobs with these tight little pockets of employment numbers or with Wal-Mart’s low paid, part-time employees.
Size Matters
There are several Internet companies that are so large and have so much vertical integration as to be monopolies. If they were starting out today on fee-for-service basis they would probably not be allowed to operate or last very long because they couldn’t support themselves. The truth is most don’t make money.
YouTube, for instance, has a lot of material available for free that must be (I would think) copyrighted some place. Often the person who has uploaded the material simply puts a disclaimer saying “For Fan Interest Only.” My guess is that they will never face legal action because YouTube is so big (read popular). Also, they don’t make money. Owned by Google (who bought them for around 12 billion dollars!) they are just product-dumping to get market share. We fine China and Japan when they do this, but YouTube floats on by.
SKYPE neither invented nor built the Internet, or phone lines, or phones that they use. Yet, you can make a phone call with Skype anywhere in the world cheaper than you can with the company that owns the equipment. You can even make most calls for free (that Internet come-on, again).
FaceBook is another SKYPE-like company that offers a party line (if you’re old enough to know what that is) for free. They offer their users, well, other users. No one knows what FaceBook is worth, but if they charged a fee – any fee – they would quickly find out.
It’s all entertainment
The “everything is entertainment” aspect of the Internet is equally subversive. In a world where you can Google anything, at any time of day, why would anyone want to learn anything except for amusement? If you need to find a toilet in a foreign country, a hand held on-the-fly translator will translate your question into the foreign language. A smart phone may even give you maps or tag a picture with the same information. There is no need to actually learn the language yourself. What drives most Internet searches is an immediate need, a curiosity of sorts to be sure, but not an intellectual curiosity.
The phenomenon of social media diminishes learning still further. Texting, tweets, and brief entries are ephemeral and meant to be so. It is what it is (ugh!), but as virtually everyone in the world seems to have a social media account, critical thinking has been painted into a small corner. It may be that this corner is exactly the same size as it was fifty years ago, but the sheer babble of more and more people backing up and crowding in on this corner makes it seem smaller, and worse, truly insignificant.
The Digitizing of Education Has Been Disappointing
I think it is safe to say that the Internet has not been the boon to education it was touted to be. It is true that if you are already enrolled in an institution you can take some courses on line in a virtual classroom, but you could do this before with TV distant learning and supplemental lectures on CDs. The Internet does not reach out to people who can’t afford to be enrolled – or who cannot even afford to have a computer.
It’s true that you can take Internet courses for free, but the credits earned will not be recognized. You’re more likely to get “life credits” for running a grocery scanner or getting a driver’s license than for an on-line course. But you’ll earn these credits only if you enroll. And as the instructor has no way of being paid, well, there is no business plan for free.
Surfing, whether done at the sea shore or on the web, is a recreational activity and makes it is hard for both students and the education industry to take on-line learning seriously. For the student, too many fun options are just a click away, and for the educational industry there’s always the chance that your business will be destroyed. If it can be digitized after all, it can be ripped off.
In the end, we have been overwhelmed by the technology – and we will continue to be. The Laptop for Every Child program to help poor students is now, some 18 months later, offering a much improved version. Moore’s Law (memory size and efficiency doubles every 18 months) still operates. Woe to the poor student who got an early version, woe to us who thought we wouldn’t be fooled again.
FG 14 January 2012
This is a follow-on essay to Chopstick Nation which is next.
posted by Forrest at
9:18 PM
0 Comments
