"Obviously, I'm somebody who believes that personal computers are empowering tools," Bill Gates said after he bestowed a $200 million dollar gift to America's public libraries so they could hook up to the Internet.
"People are entitled to disagree," Gates said. "But I would invite them to visit some of these libraries and see the impact on kids using this technology."
Well, I have seen the impact, and I disagree. Many of my students -- undergraduate media and communications majors at a New York university -- have access to the endless information bubbling through cyberspace, and it is not empowering.
Most of the data my students Net is like trash fish -- and it is hard for them to tell a dead one-legged crab from a healthy sea bass. Scant on world knowledge and critical thinking skills, they are ill-equipped to interpret or judge the so-called facts, which they insert into their papers confidently but in no discernible order.
Their writing often "clicks" from info-bit to info-bit, their arguments free of that gluey, old-fashioned encumbrance -- the transitional sentence. When I try to help them corral their impressions into coherent stories, I keep hearing the same complaint: "I can't concentrate." I've diagnosed this phenomenon as epidemic attention deficit disorder. And I can't help but trace its etiology, at least in part, to the promiscuous pointing and clicking that has come to stand in for intellectual inquiry.
These students surf; therefore, they do not read. They do not read scholarly articles -- which can be trusted because they are juried or challenged because they are footnoted. They do not read books -- which tell stories and sustain arguments by placing idea and metaphor one on top of the other, so as to hold weight, like a stone wall. Even the journalism students read few magazines and even fewer newspapers, which are edited by people with recognizable and sometimes even admitted cultural and political biases and checked by fact-checkers using other edited sources.
On the Net, nobody knows if any particular "fact" is a dog. One student handed in a paper about tobacco companies' liability for smokers' health, which she had gleaned almost entirely from the Web pages of the Tobacco Institute. Did she know what the Tobacco Institute is? Apparently not, because she had done her research on the Net, and was deprived of the modifying clause, "a research organization supported by the tobacco industry," obligatory in any edited news article.
Another young woman, writing about teen pregnancy, used data generated by the Family Research Council, which, along with other right-wing Christian think tanks, dominates the links on many subjects related to family and sexuality and offers a decidedly one-sided view.
A teacher at another school told me one of her students had written a paper quoting a person who had a name but no identifying characteristics. "Who's this?" the professor asked. "Someone with a Web page," the young man said.
If there is no context on the Net, neither is there history. My friend who teaches biology told me her students propose research that was completed, and often discredited, 50 years ago. "They go online," she said, "where nothing has been indexed before 1980."
A San Francisco librarian interviewed on National Public Radio worried that, space and resources strained as they are, more computers will inevitably mean fewer books. Another commentator on the Gates gift suggested that the computers would not be very valuable without commensurate human resources -- that is, trained workers to help people use them.
At New York's gleaming new Science, Industry, & Business Library (SIBL), you can sit in an ergonomically correct chair at one of several hundred lovely color computer terminals and call up, among hundreds of other databases, the powerful journalistic and legal service Nexis/Lexis. But since Nexis/Lexis is in great demand, you have about 45 minutes at the screen, half of which the inexperienced user will blow figuring out the system, because there is only one harassed staff person to assist all the computer-users. Then you'll learn that the library cannot afford the stratospheric fees for downloading the articles. So most users, I imagine, will manage to copy out quotes from a couple of articles before relinquishing the seat to the next person waiting for the cyber-kiosk.
Unlike a paper or microfilm version of the same pieces, which could be photocopied or copied at leisure onto a pad or laptop, the zillion articles available on the library's Nexis/Lexis are more or less unavailable -- that is, to no avail. Useless.
Technology may empower, but how and to what end will that power be used? What else is necessary to use it well and wisely? I'd suggest, for a start, reading books -- literature and history, poetry and politics -- and listening to people who know what they're talking about. Otherwise, the brains of those kids in Gates' libraries will be glutted with "information" but bereft of ideas, rich in tools but clueless about what to build or how to build it. Like the search engines that retrieve more than 100,000 links or none at all, they will be awkward at discerning meaning, or discerning at all.
