Geek Heresy (37 page)

16
.
  
Bauerlein (2009), p. 139.

17
.
  
Oppenheimer (2003).
The Flickering Mind
continues to be among the best critiques ever written about computing technology in education.

18
.
  
Hu (2007).

19
.
  
Duncan (2012).

20
.
  
Prensky (2011), p. 9. I don’t deny the possibility that video games can be used for productive educational purposes, and educational video games are worth exploring further. But the evidence for their value is scant. And on top of that, it’s not clear that even if the short-term learning were effective, we’d want to raise a generation of people who can only learn if material is presented as a video game. Part of the point of a deep education is to learn how to learn – even when the material is
not
engaging – or, alternatively, to learn how to make otherwise dull material interesting for yourself. You can’t learn these skills if every learning opportunity is entertaining.

21
.
  
Wood (2013).

22
.
  
Sanders (2013).

23
.
  
Mitra and Dangwal (2010).

24
.
  
Warschauer (2003) and Arora (2010) base their skepticism of the Hole-in-the-Wall program on personal visits. Meanwhile, the only studies that show positive impact of Hole-in-the-Wall installations are methodologically questionable ones conducted by Mitra and his colleagues.

25
.
  
Mitra and Arora (2010).

26
.
  
Fairlie and Robinson’s (2013) study is among the few randomized controlled trials of the educational effect of a personal laptop for students, and the results are definitive. Two of the organizations that funded the study – Computers for Classrooms and ZeroDivide Foundation – are nonprofits whose mission is to
increase home computers for families without them, so they had undoubtedly hoped for a different outcome. Their willingness to fund such research and have the results published is admirable, and it gives additional credibility to the results.

27
.
  
Duncan (2012).

28
.
  
Ibid.

29
.
  
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) (2010b) summary of what makes schools successful is striking in its lack of mention of computers or other technology. The results for China are actually results just for the city of Shanghai. As of 2012, PISA tests have not yet been administered to China as a whole country.

30
.
  
OECD (2010b), p. 106.

31
.
  
Some of the paragraphs in this chapter are either verbatim excerpts or adapted sections of Toyama (2011).

32
.
  
CBS News (2007). Negroponte, however, conducted no serious study of educational gains. His excitement was based on such things as the fact that families used the laptop as a source of light in the evenings, and that their first English word was supposedly “Google.”

33
.
  
Warschauer (2006), pp. 62–83.

34
.
  
Sinclair (1934 [1994]), p. 109.

Chapter 2: The Law of Amplification

A Simple but Powerful Theory of Technology’s Social Impact

1
.
  
Rangaswamy (2009).

2
.
  
Heilbroner’s (1967) article is among the most cited in the technology and society literature, probably because it is one of the few in which a respected scholar sides unabashedly with technological determinism. Heilbroner (1994) later softened his stance, but only slightly. Today, few scholars admit to pure technological determinism, but as the examples later in this chapter show, there are plenty of influential nonacademics who subscribe to its views. MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985) refer to technological determinism as the “single most influential theory of the relationship between technology and society.”

3
.
  
Feenberg (1999), p. 78.

4
.
  
Star Trek: First Contact
(1996).

5
.
  
Schmidt and Cohen (2013), p. 257. Their book takes pains to concede the dark side of technology, but the concessions are raised only to disarm the reader into accepting their larger thesis: More technology is better. Toyama (2013a) reviews the book in more detail.

6
.
  
Shirky (2010).

7
.
  
These quotations are from
Economist
(2008) and Diamandis and Kotler (2012), p. 6.

8
.
  
In a survey by the US Department of Agriculture, Coleman-Jensen et al. (2013) show that in 2012, 7 million households in America had “very low food security,” with, for example, 97 percent of those households reporting that “the food they bought just did not last and they did not have money to get more.” Those households included 4.8 million children.

9
.
  
Food and Agriculture Organization (2013).

10
.
  
Morozov (2011), p. 88. Morozov provides a much-needed overview of the dark side of the Internet in repressive politics around the world.

11
.
  
Ibid., p. 146. The original quotation appears in Dahl (2010).

12
.
  
Ellul (1965 [1973]), p. 87.

13
.
  
Postman (1985 [2005]) makes a strong case that as a result of television, modern society has begun to judge everything by its entertainment value. His analysis is astute, and it applies even more in the Internet age. Postman tends toward a kind of technological determinism, however, and blames the technology itself for societal trends. I would argue that an inclination for entertainment exists within us, and that technology’s role is to amplify it. The question is whether we as a society could amplify other aspects of ourselves without turning into YouTube-obsessed vegetables.

14
.
  
Jasanoff (2002).

15
.
  
Malmodin et al. (2010).

16
.
  
Delforge (2014) estimates data-center electricity use in 2013 at 91 billion kilowatt-hours – about 2.25 percent of total US electricity usage, which hovers around 4,000 billion kilowatt-hours (US Energy Information Administration 2014b). This closely tracks with Koomey (2011), who puts the figure at 2 percent in 2011.

17
.
  
Skeptics have derided utopians as starry-eyed, and in response, utopians have learned to tone down their rhetoric – but not entirely convincingly. Sometimes, the attempts are clumsy, as when Schmidt and Cohen (2013), p. 257, write, “The case for optimism lies not in sci-fi gadgets or holograms, but in the check that technology and connectivity bring against the abuses, suffering and destruction in our world.” Translation: The case for optimism isn’t in technology, but it’s in technology. Others are more careful. I scoured two of Shirky’s (2010, 2011) books and found no instances in which he credits social benefit to any technology outright. Yet it’s undeniable that he’s gaga for technology. The conceit behind his book
Cognitive Surplus
is that, thanks to the participatory nature of the Internet, couch potatoes worldwide will stop wasting billions of hours watching TV – that’s the surplus of the title – and instead put some of that time to good use.

18
.
  
Linda Stone (2008) popularized the notion that we maintain “continuous partial attention” with our many digital technologies. She did not necessarily mean it in the derogatory way I suggest here.

19
.
  
Jensen (1998 [2005]), p. 252.

20
.
  
Carr (2011), p. 224.

21
.
  
Ellul (1964), p. xxxi.

22
.
  
Kranzberg (1986).

23
.
  
Latour (1991). In the academic field called “science and technology studies,” there’s a cottage industry stating and restating various versions of contextualism. These kinds of theories are occasionally profound, but often they’re just unedifying. Among the field’s most popular ideas is one promoted – and sometimes self-criticized – by influential French sociologist Bruno Latour. He helped develop a concept called Actor-Network Theory, in which people and technologies are nodes that affect one another in a fluid web of interconnected relationships. Latour (1991) describes it like this: “If we display a socio-technical network – defining trajectories by actants’ association and substitution, defining actants by all the trajectories in which they enter, by following translations and, finally, by varying the observer’s point of view – we have no need to look for any additional causes. The explanation emerges once the description is saturated.” Even for describing something as simple as a hotel key chain, though, the networks quickly become a tangled Gordian Knot, and Latour insists that the only way to understand the whole is by carefully tracing every last strand. So, on the one hand, you have a richer description. On the other hand, that’s all you have. Concise explanation or understanding is not forthcoming.

24
.
  
Veeraraghavan et al. (2009).

25
.
  
In a paper we titled “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way,” Smyth et al. (2010) found that many low-literate young urban adults in India are facile users of Bluetooth file exchange on their phones despite the English interfaces and complex steps required. They were driven by a strong desire to trade music and movie files. Poor user interfaces were not an obstacle to usage.

26
.
  
The phrase “social determinism” as used in this book always refers to the idea that technology’s impact is determined by human forces. It should not be confused with another definition of social determinism, in which individual human behavior is believed to be caused entirely by social and cultural forces, and not by physical or biological ones.

27
.
  
Autonomous robots – physical or virtual – could be said to act on their own, but even then, it will be people who designed and directed the robot personalities, or the processes by which they think. Those robots may end up acting in a way we didn’t wholly intend, of course. In Chapter 3, I’ll address the nature of unintended consequences.

28
.
  
Medhi et al. (2007).

29
.
  
Medhi et al. (2013). The description of the experiment is simplified in these paragraphs: The actual experiment involved three different interfaces, involving two nested interfaces of different depths.

30
.
  
The studies referred to are, respectively, Findlater et al. (2009), Chew et al. (2011), and DeRenzi et al. (2012).

31
.
  
Amplification is notably absent in the field of science and technology studies; scholars in that field tend to have a low opinion of instrumental theories of technology. In the information systems literature, one theory that comes close to amplification is absorptive capacity theory, as first articulated by Cohen and Levinthal (1990), which argues that an organization’s ability to absorb technology determines what it can do with it.

32
.
  
I first wrote about amplification as it applies to technology and poverty in Toyama (2010).

33
.
  
Linden (2008); Santiago et al. (2010).

34
.
  
Some people emphasize the value of play in child-rearing, and play is certainly important. Some amount of video games and social media may serve that purpose and nurture children in some intangible ways. But digital recreation is not sufficient for anything like a true K-12 education any more than extended time at a jungle gym in and of itself produces Olympic athletes.

35
.
  
Rao (2011).

36
.
  
Hauslohner (2011).

37
.
  
Cohen (2011).

38
.
  
Tsotsis (2011).

39
.
  
CNN (2011).

40
.
  
Olivarez-Giles (2011).

41
.
  
Kirkpatrick and El-Naggar (2011).

42
.
  
Chulov (2012).

43
.
  
Anyone interested in the real forces of revolution and suppression in the Middle East would profit by reading Madawi Al-Rasheed’s work. She strikes the right balance in acknowledging the role of social media while consistently returning to essential political and cultural forces as the underlying explanations for high-visibility events and non-events. This quotation and the descriptions in the previous paragraph were taken from Al-Rasheed (2012).

44
.
  
Lee and Weinthal (2011).