0.2 Three special events in the history of technology for creating  (Page 2/12)

In this paper, we discuss in particular detail the educational publishing project, Connexions , as an example of a new technology that is both a natural evolutionout of literacy and the printing press and a revolutionary change or paradigm shift that will be as disruptive as were writing andprinting. The reason we do this in a historical context is to develop Connexions in a deliberate way, to achieve the positive goals we currently envisage for education as well as generalinformation usage, and to use a strategy that will attempt to maximize the positive unintended consequences and minimize thenegative ones. We try to take a “holistic” approach, taking into account what goes on (or can go on) in the human brain, what goeson (or can go on) in individuals or small groups, and what can go on in large societies or cultures.

Because this short paper covers a large span of time, ideas, and history that cannot be fully developed, weprovide a fairly comprehensive set of references.

Literacy

The emergence of writing and literate activity some five thousand years ago transformed human life as profoundlyas the earlier revolutions of intensive agriculture and language. [Goody]

The earliest uses of writing were to record lists of inventories and of sale and purchase transactions. Later,writing served as a means of helping the memory of storytellers in the oral tradition—writing was used as a prompt, not as part of anintellectual or creative activity. The people who read used writing to help them remember stories they and their audiences alreadyknew. Only later did people read stories that writers had created, not merely recorded.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writingbut normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed humanconsciousness. [Ong, p. 78]

Resistance to change occurred even in the earliest stages of literacy. As intellectuals, leaders, andthinkers considered the merits of this new “technology” called writing and literacy, they predicted its potential shortcomings. Inthe Phaedrus , Plato has Socrates say that writing is inhuman, a pretender, establishing “outside the mind what in reality can beonly in the mind,” then adding that “writing weakens the mind.” Perhaps writing does weaken the memory, just as the calculator mayweaken the memorized knowledge of the multiplication tables or speed-dial may reduce the memory of telephone numbers. Experiencehas demonstrated, however, that some very positive personal and societal effects accompanied these “weakenings.”

Some of the dire predictions came true, of course, because they were grounded in what was known. The positivethings produced by literacy generally outweighed the negative but were often not predictable because nothing like them had ever existed. Literacy created a new culture, but it also destroyed partof the old one, and that should be kept in mind. This example illustrates the Law of Unintended Consequences .