LAPTOPS AT LAKESIDEPeter Rhines (father and student of Andy, Grade 10)
3 iii 2001
The first draft of this letter was carried out in December with an HB pencil on a feint yellow pad (feint..interesting spelling, perhaps deriving from English printers' tradition, but I prefer the third OED definition, 'a figure whereby the orator touches on something, in making a show of passing it over in silence.'). I feel that the technology involved in the modern mechanical pencil is somewhat inhibiting, and has an effect on creative thought. The classic wooden pencil develops a 'slant', a non-circular cross-section which acts somewhat the same as an italic pen-point. This slant gives my hand-writing extra nuance. In turn, my thoughts begin to shade over with uncertainty and nuance, with the sketching of geometric images, though these thoughts began with the simple need to express an objection, not about mechanical pencils but about laptops in class. In the end, I find myself not objecting.
We have to struggle with computers to keep the upper hand. We scientists are surrounded by them. The machines are indispensable organizers, analyzers, data stores, image archives, and perhaps of most significance, they simulate. They solve the mathematic al equations that govern the physical world, and to some extent the relationships found in chemistry and biology. They encourage us to build numerical models, simple and elaborate, elegant and hopelessly complex, of the environment, of human genetics, and of things we would like to engineer and to realize physically...to build. They analyze images for their hidden internal message. The images themselves they acquire from enormous yet invisible data archives: the Earth as seen by orbiting satellites, who c an sense the height of the sea-surface to within one centimeter, and add up all the primary productivity of the world ocean, and where it lives. The human genome as a three-dimensional molecular puzzle. Computers are inside those orbiting devices, chattin g with other computers on the ground.
Computers are restructuring our minds. The simple act of writing a paragraph in longhand requires a long span of attention, a construction in which the entire argument is held in mind at once. In word-processing the speed increases, words are flung on the screen and then pushed like dominos to sculpt a paragraph. Our mind is now shared with the machine. A simple, unthreatening improvement by a faster typewriter? Perhaps today, but tomorrow the machine will alter your logic, and insert its own slant into your writing. It will challenge your facts with things it has learned from its parent, the Web. It will cite authors who are better than you. It will silence you with myriad facts. It may be a friend, or it may not be.
Where is the computer? On your lap? Not at all. It is everywhere. Like the modern vision we have heard, of the library...it is not Piggott, it is anywhere that students are dealing with new information, whatever the source. The computer is a new part of our anatomy, or, we are a new part of its. Daily it becomes more a gateway than a place. But, do you really want to be in one great room with everyone else on Earth? Where will be diversity, creativity? Does it not thrive in dark recesses, under logs , in moist, protected marshes?
Digital Darwinism will have many lessons, and we can study them. And, perhaps, regain the upper digit. The human mind has shown itself extraordinarily adaptable, though the body is hopelessly slow to evolve. The computer has become an exoskeleton, a satellite mind. Where is it taking us? Now mind and Machine must co-evolve, or we will be left behind as irrelevant. Run to pasture perhaps by our digital masters. Art, history, English, science: nothing at Lakeside is untouched. It must be confronted and tamed. Not for the first time: when still photography was invented (by Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, a collaborator with Daguerre, in 1826) it soon became so popular that it was expected to mark the end of drawing and painting. Instead, photography made artists honest, requiring more of them than mere representation. Now, there is digital photography, with limitless burning and dodging and the same challenge to purely human vision.
Every digital future has an analog in the external world...the world beyond humans. Biodiversity is declining rapidly. Farmers plant just soybeans after RoundUp (TM) has zapped the weeds. Away with the weeds goes the full sweep of wildness which, for example, in the ancient agriculture of India is a rich source of nutrition. In the ocean near the coasts life has evolved since the beginning of time, in relative isolation. Now tankers plying the global routes that maximize profit, transport entire ecosystems from one shore to the next, in their ballast tanks. Colonization of new species transported by human activity has produced a monoculture of Asian clams in San Francisco Bay. We feel the ground shifting, but do not realize what is coming. Loss of diversity is everywhere.
There is dissent in the face of computation. David Jones (writing as 'Daedelus', Nature v390, p 127): 'I almost weep to think of all the potentially fruitful, creative minds who get hooked on compulsive computer nerdery, and are thenceforth lost to civi lization. Analysts look in vain for any increase in productivity or economic value from all this digital churning.' But it is hopeless.
Every time I sit at my computer, that is many hours each day, the creative spark waxes and wanes. Early in the morning it is best. My energy and intentions are stronger, and I can whip this machine and make it do my bidding. Later on I drift. It is easier, more fun, more immediate to veer right or left. My task is forgotten. I write letters, replay ocean images that I don't need to look at. Rather than my thoughts pouring outward, I begin to cut and paste to shuffle together a committee report, a tedious rearrangement of incoming ideas. Passive assembly of snippets of ideas: we have seen that in the classroom.
This discussion has to go forward, and proponents and opponents of laptops both seem to be ignoring the central challenge. They are here, the Machines. Keeping them out of the classroom is not a battle worth fighting. I sorely miss the old sounds of my private school classroom, the creak of wooden desks and oak floors, the feeling of isolated energy. The croaking voice of my Latin master who would have fallen stone cold at the sight of a laptop. But that was another day, like the days in my favorite adolescent novel, 'A Separate Peace' (John Knowles; http://www.exeter.edu/library1/separate_peace/).
Seize the upper hand Lakeside AND parents, take control of this thing, which has been called the boldest invention since fire. We trust you teachers and administrators to do it well, but beware the computer 'professionals' and show us all of the costs. Slow the process to a walking pace. Then turn to face the real battle where victories will be won and defeats will be bitter.
===============
Peter B. Rhines
Prof. of Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences
Box 357940
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, 98195
206-543-0593 (212 ORB-1..office)
206-685-3548 (209 OTB..GFD lab)
Web sites:
www.ocean.washington.edu/research/gfd/gfd.html
and
www.ocean.washington.edu (=> Faculty => Rhines)