BLOG BY PROFESSOR RON LAURA

Professor Ronald S. Laura

The University of Newcastle, Australia

Although it is incontestable that we have as a culture been quick to extol the virtues of the computer revolution, it is a characteristic of our culture that we have been slow to recant its indiscretions, or even to acknowledge their existence. One area in which this is especially so is in the context of education. It is worth reflecting that a consequence of our excessive reliance upon computechnological education has given rise to a modality of depersonalization in the classroom, whose adverse impacts have not been sufficiently recognised or adequately assessed. This is partly explained, I submit, because our bedazzlement with the "science fiction-like' magic of technology has blinded them to the ways in which computechnology has compromised the potential for empathetic connectivity and personalized interaction in the classroom, and in society generally. It is undeniable that Computechnology has made it easier for people to communicate, but what is not so clear it that the nature of these communications are progressively less intimate. The pedagogy within which computechnological education become embedded has in essence served covertly to devalue the nature and importance of personalised modalities of human interchange, in favour of electronically mediated ones. The Paradox is that the values we place on 'men' and ' machines' have been inverted and 'turned upside down' to betray an almost imperceptible transition to the devaluation of our own humanity. Moreover, the obsessive reverence for and dependence on computechnology has led society almost ineluctably to a new set of values which institutionally legitimate the anthropomorphisation of our computers, while concomitantly unwittingly dehumanising ourselves. We treat our computers as though they were an extension of our own humanity,exemplified mechanistically. This being so, our idealisation of the value we place on ourselves, and our children in schools, is that we expect them to behave increasingly more like machines, and we are thus implicitly encouraged  to be less forgiving of their shortcomings when they do not so behave.  I suggest that this form of dehumanization can be regarded as an egregious assault on the human spirit, and there is no doubt that those who have been obliged to  continuously, and quite often unknowingly suffer it, both inside  schools and outside them, will inevitably come to feel alienated and disenfranchised. The rate of suicide for school children who feel pressured to perform as if they were machines has risen dramatically over the past two decades. The time is long overdue to nourish rather than deplete the human spirit, and if our schools are to take up this challenge, much deeper critical reflection needs to be given to determining the scope and limits of the goals and shifting sea of values associated with what I shall call, ‘Compuphilia’, meaning an obsession with or addiction to computers.

Computechnology and Dehumanisation

Having set out the general philosophical framework within which our concern about society's blind commitment to technology can be unpacked, the argument to which I shall now turn is that the depersonalization of human relationships is a much neglected consequence of the high-tech power-motivated modes of communication which characterise the world of Computopia.. Moreover, it is my contention that one outcome of the technologization of human relationships is a profound sense of dehumanization arising from the proliferation and universalisation of electronically and mechanistically mediated forms of interaction. Having surrounded ourselves with technology, technological progress has itself become a value which we come inadvertently to use as the measure  by which we judge the worth and nature of our primary modality of interchange with each other and the world around us. We seductively become caught in a web of bizarre moral ambiguity. We still claim we value the lives of  people, but we become progressively less certain what it is that we any longer value them for (Laura & Cotton, 2005; Laura, Machant & Smith, 2008; Lee, 1999; Hallowell, 1999) . This being so, a framework pattern of institutionalised value perception evolves within which we systematically anthropomorphise our machines, while systematically dehumanising each other.

It has now become commonplace to anthropomorphise (i.e.. ascribe human attributes to our computers) while at the same time unabashedly and progressively treating humans as if they were  machines. The implications of this conceptual shift have momentous pedagogic and socio cultural consequences. Many people now ‘christen’ their computer with a name and excuse its aberrant behaviour and mechanistic breakdowns with anthropomorphised descriptions of compassionate concern. When a computer is slow in booting up, or exhibiting aberrations of mechanical functionality,it is not unusual for users to say that the computer is 'exhausted," 'suffering from Monday morning blues', 'temperamental', 'depressed', or even  'on strike", to name only a few. At the same time when a person works less effectively at a workplace task, misunderstands a supervisory direction, is late,etc, it is not unusual for the employee or student to be reprimanded with phrases such as, 'come on, get with the program', 'get plugged in',  'boot up',or even, 'get connected'. Indeed, we also express adulation for an especially diligent worker with a complement such as ,'he works like a machine' or even use mechanistically-inspired  phrases of praise such as 'you are a Machine' to simulate a mechanistic ascription of  personal identity to a human being. In essence we sympathetically treat the mechanistic failings of our computers as human shortcomings, but dispassionately chastise those who display human shortcomings by directly suggesting that they need to be more machine-like. Moreover, when the performance outcomes of humans are high, we have no hesitation in passionately praising them by describing them as if they were, 'machines', though they are in fact humans.' Given the increasing awareness of the pedagogic importance of the depth of bonding between students and teachers, there is a mordant irony in the fact that so little critical reflection exists which questions whether computer-based learning is systematically depersonalising the school environment. To understand the source of this irony we first need to comprehend why western culture is far too quick to applaud the success of technology, while at the same time , reluctantly slow to recant its indiscretions. Because technology is now a defining characteristic of the modern age, so to say, we are as a culture more inclined to embrace new technologies unreflectively than to assess them critically. One plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that technology has itself come to function as the standard measure of progress and thus as the primary means of resolving our problems, whether they be technological or not.

This being so, it is perhaps unsurprising that computechnology has been assimilated into the school curriculum more as matter of course, than as a consequence of critically rational assessment and philosophical discussion. Within the culture of what I have called compuphilia, the trust we put in computer-based education may not so much have been earned, as it has been inherited as part of our socio-cultural commitment to, and ethos of a technological worldview. Is it not possible that we have become so bedazzled by the power of technology to let us walk upon the earth as giants that we have failed in the educational context to discern that we now walk the earth as blind technological giants who have lost our way? Stoll states, “a poor substitute it is this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where- in the holy name of Education and progress-important aspects of human interaction are relentlessly devalued” (Stoll, 1995:4).