The following paper was delivered by Daniel Matthys at the Dawson Society’s “What is a Good Education” conference on the 18/05/2024.
Introduction:
On the Eastern Hill Fire Station in Melbourne, there is a mosaic that spans some three stories of concrete façade. The mosaic depicts the myth of Prometheus, a titan, who disobeying Zeus stole heavenly fire and gave its secret to humanity. To the left of the tribe of grateful humanity receiving fire is a short illustrative history of technology from campfires to the industrial revolution and modern power stations. But to the right of Prometheus the image is foregrounded by Pandora, a symbol of the entry of evil and suffering into the world. About her cars, buildings, and landscapes are ablaze, humans shelter from the catastrophic destruction that fire has unleashed, and in the bottom right there is the ominous shape of a mushroom cloud.
The mosaic illustrates a clear ambiguity or dichotomy in the attitude humanity has to its own tools, an overall attitude that the good of technologies is unavoidably enmeshed also with unintended (though perhaps not unforeseen) consequences. This critique of technology can be traced at least as far back as Plato who warned that the technology of writing would lead to the decline of memory and the acquisition of knowledge at the expense of wisdom. Since the explosion of new technologies in the Industrial Revolution cultural expressions of technological anxiety have ranged from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the self-aware A.I., HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, from human batteries in The Matrix to the omnipresent cameras and microphones of George Orwell’s 1984.
Yet, the argument might be made that this strain of technological anxiety has been ineffective at changing behaviours towards technology, even while it might provoke some uncomfortable thoughts or reflections. In society today, at least as far as information and communications technologies are concerned, the only constant it appears is change. One might go further and suggest that western societies are currently in the midst of an unprecedented experiment to discover what an entire society raised on an addictive, distraction-prone, and voyeuristic internet might look like.
And if this sounds a little overblown, I would challenge you to reflect on whether you are happy with the relationship you have with your devices. I would suggest that those who are most happy with this relationship are those who use them least.
My intuition is that the dystopian imaginings of pop-culture are a reflection of subconscious societal understanding that we have a problem here. That the average user of the internet has an unhealthy relationship with their devices and on some level knows that they have an unhealthy dependence on these tools but feels helpless to reset the terms of their engagement.
This brings us to the implications that this brave new world of the internet might have for a good education.
Now, I need to set up some guide rails for this discussion if I have any chance of confining it to 30 minutes, so I am going to proceed on the assumption that a good education encompasses not only the acquisition of technical skills and knowledge but the formation of a moral character. But as to what technical details or moral character a good education might promote, that is beyond the scope of this presentation.
I also want to be specific about what type of technology I am critiquing, which is ICT (that is information and communication technologies) or the internet. This is an entirely separate technology to computers or specific computer programs such as excel or word processing software. It is appropriate that we draw this distinction because (while we might have grown used to the idea that all computers connect to the internet and that all homes, schools, and institutions have access to Wi-Fi) the technology of a program like word processing is not inherently dependant on an internet connection. The question for this presentation then is not the role of computers in education, but the role of the internet in education.
I am going to proceed by interrogating some of the truisms embedded in our culture regarding technology which I believe paralyse us against effectually assessing how ICT might be harming the possibility of a good education and I will suggest that a few key changes in our understanding of technology opens the possibility for effectual action. I will conclude with some practical steps people might take in their own lives and families to ensure that a good education is still possible in the age of the internet.
Examining Technological Truisms: Technological predispositions
Perhaps the simplest cliché regarding morality and technologies is that technology itself is neither good nor evil, only its uses can be assessed by a moral framework. Thus, nuclear technology might be used to provide comparatively clean power or to create destructive weapons. Drugs might be used in clinical settings to provide pain relief or might be abused recreationally resulting in addiction and antisocial behaviour. The internet might be used to communicate commercial or academic information, or it might be used to access pornography and other exploitative material.
There is obviously some truth to this understanding of technologies and indeed it has some support from the Catholic Church’s own understanding of the good of human ingenuity and the role technology might legitimately play in the dominion we have been given over the natural world. Yet ultimately this understanding is too simplistic if we do not allow as part of our critical focus, the biases of technologies for certain uses and against other uses.
In his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death the American writer Neil Postman describes some of the various uses to which a television set might be put. He describes a university student who used his set as an improvised light source to write a paper when his only light globe had blown, he describes how some sturdy sets (this is the 1980s) had been used as bookshelves, or how television channels existed which were purely comprised of written text as an electronic bulletin. It is, Postman supposes, possible that a television set might be purchased to fill one of these functions. But it is not the use towards which the technology is orientated.[1]
Technologies in other words have their own agendas. Postman writes that technology “has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that technology is entirely neutral”.[2]
For certain technologies it would seem that our society understands this concept very well. I would submit that Australia’s gun laws since the Port Arthur massacre have taken as their impetus the understanding that the gun is a weapon. Of course, a gun might be used as a hat stand, it might be a collector’s item, it might be uses as a piece of sporting equipment for target shooting. And there will be people who purchase a gun for these reasons. Yet this does not change the reality that the ‘purpose’ or the bias of a gun is towards the taking of life.
This internal logic or bias is something that can take some time to properly manifest particularly where the technology is complexed or widely integrated into ordinary life. And there is a standing bias towards believing that new technologies will integrate into established pattens and mores of the society that adopts them without anticipating that the technologies might, by virtue of their inherent biases, remake society in their own image. The results can sometimes be exactly opposite to what early promoters of a technology anticipate.
The oral contraceptive pill was promoted in the 60s and 70s as a technology that would significantly decrease if not eliminate illegitimate or out-of-wedlock births. Had social expectations surrounding premarital sex and childrearing remained what they were in the 50s, it is conceivable how such a technology might accomplish this. But the “bias” or agenda of the Pill as a powerful signifier that the functions of procreation and sexual activity were now separate in turn assisted with the erosion of sexual norms and likely contributed to the rising rate of single parenthood from the 70s until the present.
The Disposition of the Internet
Technologies, in other words, might represent an occasion of sin for the user even if, ontologically speaking, they are not innately evil.
What then is the bias or predisposition of the internet?
Broadband internet has been widely available since the early 2000s, meaning that we have enough data to start to draw some conclusions as to the bias or predisposition of this technology and, as I hope has already been made clear, we ought not to confuse the possible use of this technology with its likely use.
There are, I believe three obvious and worrying biases of the internet, is its disposition towards distraction over sustained intellectual activity, its disposition towards the passive consumption of entertainment, and its disposition towards voyeurism.
Let’s begin with the bias towards distraction. This is an inherent feature of a technology whose intrinsic ability is the possibility of finding any piece of media content with little sustained effort. The ever-present possibility of substituting what you are currently engaged with, coupled with the low cost of finding some new distraction, predisposes the user away from sustained engagement and towards short-form content. The TikTok video is thus the logical evolution of a technology where content is cheap and thereby meaningless.
I do not think I need to belabour this point. The book is a technology that is predisposed towards a sustained activity. The eBook is a technology disposed towards 10 minutes of reading, followed by 10 minutes of social media, followed by 2 hours of TikTok or YouTube shorts.
If a good education means the developing the ability to engage in sustained mental activity, the internet not only cannot help students to develop this capacity but actively habituates its users against a sustained attention span.
Let’s briefly turn our attention then to the Internet’s disposition towards the passive consumption of entertainment. Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, traces the transition during the mid-20th century from a society based on print media to a society base upon visual media. Postman channels the media theorist Marshall Mcluhan’s famous saying “the medium is the message”[3] to argue that visual media, in his era the television, cannot engage in the same messages as print media once did as the medium of visual media is better suited to spectacle than rational enquiry. And spectacle, as it does not require anything of the audience other than passive consumption, is ill suited to the development of mental discipline required by a good education.
Now while the internet might be better able to accommodate the written word than the television, I would argue that nevertheless the disposition of the technology is bent towards audio-visual media. Of the top 20 websites by traffic, only one (Wikipedia) is predominantly uses a written medium. The rest are either search engines or video sharing websites (including porn sites).[4]
And all this is without discussing the Internet’s tendency towards addiction an element that is very much a feature not a bug of apps and websites that make their money by monopolising the eyeballs of their users. This monopolisation is far better accomplished through visual rather than written media as again visual media, particularly short form visual media, demands less from its consumers while appealing to a wider audience.
The implications for education arrive when students begin to expect their learning to mimic their browsing. Or when engaging learning become equated with entertainment demanding little from students who consequently lack resilience when their learning becomes difficult.
These first two dispositions of the internet compromise student’s ability to sustain the mental discipline required for academic excellence. But the internet has a further disposition that threatens to corrode the formation of a moral character. And this is the tendency of the internet to place its users in the position of the voyeur.
In other words, I am suggesting that the internet has a tendency to create within its users a detachment from the content being viewed. Or a tendency to degrade what should be opportunities of genuine human concern to curiosity and consumption of the other. Its disposition towards this distance between the viewer and the subject is a natural extension of being able to browse and consume content from anywhere in the world with the expectation that one’s viewing remains anonymous.
In this way the internet user is akin to the gossip, taking a curiosity in matters that they have no real right to engage in.
The most obvious example of this is the consumption of pornography where the consumer of pornography reduces another’s sexual act into a product to be consumed. But the internet creates a voyeuristic mentality in other arenas including politics.
I would submit that part of the rapid growth of political opinions, virtue signalling, and cancel culture over the past decade is a result of people voyeuristically engaging in matters that have very little to do with their lives and their sphere of moral influence. Part of the cultivation of virtue that we ought to expect from a good education is the cultivation of an individual that understands the duties and responsibilities they have towards their neighbour and not the right opinion to hold on the latest moral outrage.
But the internet is disposed towards words not actions and, due to the speed and reach of its connections, it matters little whether the words are directed against strangers half a world away, or whether they are of particular relevance to the speaker.
And because I anticipate that most people might cite the importance of the internet as a research tool, I will state for the record I do not think that the internet performs well in this duty.
Indeed, I will argue that the internet is a tool that is very poorly disposed towards research. That is at least that the internet has a predisposition towards answering simple close ended questions that can be answered in a single or a couple of sentences and a disposition against sustained, focused research on open ended questions.
The google search result is best suited to returning simple answers and thus becomes a tool that trains the user to ask simple questions. From my experience in a classroom, students do not open webpages if they can help. And why would they? Google typically offers an answer to their question (if they have asked it “right”) at the top of the search result with a handy drop-down chart of related questions with their answers.
Of course, it might be argued, that students ought to engage with ICT in the classroom so that they can be taught research skills including acquiring information from multiple sources, researching and interpreting context, and critically examining the sources they unearth. But all these skills or techniques are not facilitated by the disposition of the internet. On the contrary, teachers are subtly encouraged by the technology at their disposal to design research activities that focus on the acquiring of ‘facts’, and scaffold activities so students can manage their research without the need for self-directed research or critical thought.
Examining Technological Truisms: Self-referential Technology
I will turn now to the second truism we tend to hold regarding technology, that is its efficaciousness.
The dissident priest and social critic Ivan Illich presents a critique of technology in his 1973 work Tools for Conviviality. In this work Illich identifies two watersheds through which he argues all industrial institutions have passed over the last 150 years. The first watershed is when a technology or “new knowledge” is applied to a “clearly stated problem” where progress can be measured against the particular problem. The second watershed is when progress against the original problem becomes used as rationale for the expansion of the technology throughout society where further progress will be measured not against a specific problem but by self-referential goals established by bureaucrats and technocratic elites.[5]
The case of the car is used by Illich as illustrative of the issue. It must be imagined that the invention of the car was intended to bring speed and convenience to transportation. One must imagine that it was highly successful in this goal as car ownership quickly became a fact of life in Western societies. Indeed, the design of suburbia since the Second World War has virtually necessitated private car ownership and the norm of a two-car household.
Yet as the technology of the car became ubiquitous urban planners began to reference what the car had made possible or tolerable for transportation rather than the problems that the car had been invented to resolve in the first instance. The result is that the average individual spends more time commuting today than they did before the car was invented. Moreover, when it is remembered that cars are not cheap, and that time must be spent at work to pay for their purchase, fuel, and maintenance it is quite possible that the average commuter travels in their car no faster than they would on a bicycle.
Thus, the original goal for the car has long ceased to drive their use, so much that we can no longer envisage commuting without one and thus the question of whether transportation has been made faster and more convenient with the car has ceased to be of relevance. People will use their cars for transportation and thus the society will be designed to accommodate this fact.
What then of the internet? Can we say of the internet that it has passed the second watershed? If we limit our discussion to the role of the internet in education, I would argue that a clear indicator of this second watershed would be if the role of ICT is envisaged not as supporting a student’s ability to learn but as a necessary requirement of an education.
I will turn now to the WA Curriculum and its articulation of the general capability of ICT. The capacity is described as follows:
“ICT capability involves students in learning to make the most of the technologies available to them; adapting to new ways of doing things as technologies evolve and limiting the risks to themselves and others in a digital environment.”
And students are expected to develop this capacity in order to
“To participate in a knowledge-based economy and to be empowered within a technologically sophisticated society now and into the future.”[6]
In other words, ICT is incorporated into the curriculum because the internet has remade society in its own image and is conceived as now as a necessary technology irrespective of whether solves problems external to itself or is orientated towards human flourishing.
The antidote for the tendency of technology to become self-referential is to root oneself, family, and community in the real. That is an immersion in the real goods of life coupled with an understanding of the telos of human life allows us to judge the fruits of technology not against the previous generation of technology but against what is objectively good.
For instance, I spoke earlier about how I believe that the internet is not a tool well disposed towards research unless it is used in a manner that goes against the grain or its own disposition. If we want students to be able to use the internet as a tool for research, I would submit that it is better that they learn what constitutes good research separate from their use of ICT so that they might be able to accurately judge the efficaciousness of the internet against an external standard.
I would give similar advice for the use of the internet in other fields such as communication or socialising or for that matter dating. While ICT might solve legitimate problems such as distance or a limited social circle, it is best engaged in by those who have a strong grasp of real life and hold their use of technology to that standard.
As for needing an ICT capability for a “knowledge-based economy”, a fully fledged critique of this particular nonsense is beyond the remit of my presentation, but I will state here that a “knowledge-based economy” might indeed be a lovely thing to have but only in so far as actual economies can be relied upon to produce real goods and useful services.
Examining Technological Truisms: Turning back the clock
The final technological truism I wish to examine is that once a technology is embraced by society there is no going back. We are all familiar with sayings like “that’s the way the world is moving” or “you can’t turn back the clock”.
Embedded in both of these sayings is the point-of-view that there is no point asking whether technology contributes or impedes a good education or human flourishing. Technology will be increasingly enmeshed with society and if there are negative effects, our only option is to make the best of a bad situation.
Yet I suspect that there is more idealism hiding behind this pragmatist worldview than might first meet the eye. For the cultural attitude which most determines our society’s reception towards technology is the by now more that 150-year-old cult of progress which among large swathes of the Western world has replaced Christianity as the dominant form of faith.
Christopher Dawson identified this cult of progress in his 1929 work Progress and Religion where Dawson made the argument that a society without religion would be a society without an animating principle and would shortly cease to be a society at all. In other words, societies are made cohesive by shared beliefs, beliefs that are religious in origin. Yet in the unique historical conditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, Dawson believed that conditions had arisen that had provided his society with an animating principle that was not explicitly religious.[7]
This animating principle believes in short in human progress, a belief in a sort of secular redemption (a new heaven and a new earth) crafted through technology and science.
This modern belief in progress, Dawson argued, has adopted new technologies as a sort of sacramentalism (it actualises the ‘graces’ of progress) and thereby dictates how our culture receives and integrates new technologies. We think it natural, in other words, that new technologies are freely marketed and available often without regulation or substantive testing even when our recent history is replete with examples of technologies that have been uncritically embraced resulting in significant harm. (A short list might include: DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, leaded petrol, glyphosate, single use plastics, and high fructose corn syrup).
The pragmatist who claims that in is not possible to unwind our embrace of particular technologies is, I suspect, comfortable in this laissez faire approach to technology only because they believe that ultimately (through perhaps with some bumps along the road) technology will bring humanity progress.
The overwhelming issue with this attitude is however that it is simply not true. Even in our own society dominated by a belief in progress, there is a distinction between those privileged technologies that we assume are impossible to regulate and those technologies which we have been very comfortable regulating even with the goal of eliminating their use.
Such is the case with cigarettes where the stated goal is the elimination of smoking, a clear example of seeking (quite successfully) to eliminate a technology that was once ubiquitous.
Unwillingness to regulate a technology like that of the internet is just that, unwillingness. It would not be an impossible goal were their enough social will to tackle the issue.
Turning back the clock:
And this, if you are following my argument so far, brings us to the final and most practical question. Can we regulate our use of ICT within our homes and our communities so that our engagement with this technology is consistent with a good education (both for the acquisition of technical skill and knowledge and the formation of a moral character).
I will specify here that the regulation of which I am speaking ought not to be equated with governmental regulation. To be as practical as I can, I will focus on the household and the local community in this response.
Christopher Dawson, we might remember, argues in Progress and Religion that a society’s culture, underpinned by its religious beliefs, helps to negotiate its adoption of technology. This is good news for while we are surrounded by a culture animated by the cult of progress, we are able to create subcultures in our homes, workplaces, schools, and communities. And these subcultures ought to be animated by our own religious beliefs and desires for our education and ultimately our souls.
I am going to suggest a guiding principle and three points for self-reflection.
For the guiding principle I want to turn to the English writer and recent convert to Romanian Orthodoxy, Paul Kingsnorth. In a fascinating and sometimes apocalyptic series of essays on his Substack The Abbey of Misrule, Kingsnorth explores what he calls the “rise of the machine” that is technocratic civilisation. In searching for the answer to the spiritual crisis he believes has accompanied the internet Kingsnorth writes:
“The best answer I have found is in the Christian tradition of ascesis. Ascesis is usually translated from the Greek as self-discipline, or sometimes self-denial, and it has been at the root of the Christian spiritual tradition since the very beginning. If the digital revolution represents a spiritual crisis—and I think it does—then a spiritual response is needed. That response, I would suggest, should be the practice of technological askesis.”
This in practice means “[choosing] the limits of our engagement and then [sticking] to them.”[8]
To guide the choosing of the limits of engagement, I would suggest the following points for self-reflection:
- How is my household/community likely to use the technology at its disposal? – bearing in mind that technology that might be productively used by one person might represent an occasion of sin or temptation for someone else.
- What specific problems does the technology at our disposal solve? – realise that our cultural mode favours the adoption of new technologies and the assumption of their efficaciousness thus adopting technology with no clear issue that needs to be solved.
- Can we measure the success or failure of the technology we introduce? – recognising that we will need to continually reassess the terms of our engagement and that unless we are clear about what a successful use of a technology is, we will be unable to properly assess its use.
This then is where I sign off. Technology is never neutral. Its effects deserve to be taken seriously and we need each other to create the culture through which we engage with it. Choose your limits, stick to them, and, if you are unable to stick to the limits, reset the terms of your engagement.
Thankyou.
[1] Postman, N, Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York, Viking, 1986.
[2] Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, p.
[3] Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, p.
[4] In Top websites ranking – most visited websites in April 2024, <https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/> [accessed 19 May 2024].
[5] Illich, I, Tools for conviviality. London ; New York, Marion Boyars, 2021.
[6] ‘General Capacities: ICT Capability, Introduction’. in k-10 Outline, School Curriculum and Standards Authority, 2020, <https://k10outline.scsa.wa.edu.au/home/teaching/general-capabilities-over/information-and-communication-technology-ict-capability/introduction> [accessed 19 May 2024].
[7] Dawson, C, Progress and religion: An historical inquiry (the works of Christopher Dawson).Catholic University of America Press, 2012.
[8] Kingsnorth, P, ‘The neon god’.in The Abbey of Misrule, The Abbey of Misrule, 2023, <https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-neon-god> [accessed 19 May 2024].
