Interview with Interview with Alejandro Piscitelli
"The disappointment that the second Internet bubble will cause will be more political than economic"
May , 2007 / By Leo Ruffini, industrial engineer and journalist
Alejandro Piscitelli
In 2003, Alejandro Piscitelli took on the challenge of relaunching educ.ar, a portal promoted by
the Argentine government that is committed to the use of ICTs as a weapon against the education
problems suffered by the country. A philosopher, university lecturer and author of numerous books
and blogs reflecting on the digital age, he took part in a panel discussion at the UOC:
“educ.ar for the 2.0 school: computing and the Internet for the masses – technology
demystified”. Piscitelli spoke of the education of the so-called “digital
natives” and gave an in-depth look at the One Laptop per Child project, the initiative by
Nicholas Negroponte to take a laptop computer to every school desk in the world.
You compare the appearance of blogs with that of the printing press. Is it really going to
change us that much?
It's an idea that I worked on in my last book, Internet: la imprenta del siglo XXI. In fifteenth-century Europe, 1,000 books a year were produced. And each book meant one person – a monk – working a whole year. What was the limit of production, distribution and dissemination? That hyper-scarce and limited labour.
Then the printing press came along and changed everything.
And how. It seemed demonic! In the first 50 years of its appearance, 80 million books were produced! And something else that's interesting, since you like the analogy, is that just a small part of the 220 printing presses that emerged in those 50 years did so in university towns. Most of them were set up in centres of commerce: they were related to accountancy, to retaining the information of numbers and graphs. The scant vocation of innovation of the universities meant that they would take 30 years to adopt the printing press.
Do you mean to say that the same thing is happening today with the Internet?
Exactly. The universities don't quickly discern what the customs of everyday life and commerce see much sooner: the transforming power of the new technologies. During the first Internet bubble – we're now experiencing the second – an author wrote the book El telégrafo, la Internet Victoriana, in which he showed that the telegraph had had many of the traits that the Internet later had: explosion, promotion, fascination, declaration that everything's going to change… For example, did you know that the telegraph, along with the train, generated universal time?
I didn't know that.
Very few people do. In the United States at the end of the nineteenth century there were 180 different local times, uptown times, downtown times…
They had to come to an agreement to receive messages.
To receive messages and so the train arrived at the same time. Imagine if each station had its own local time!
That's not so strange. Lately it seems like every local station has its own time!
So has the AVE high-speed train in Barcelona, because God only knows when that will get here… But getting back to where we were: innovation has to be compared with something similar. If you try to think of the Internet in isolation, you won't understand it; you either think it's nothing or you think it's everything. But if you compare it with the railway, the telegraph, the newspaper, then you start getting it. Tools always have to be seen within a media ecology: they are all involved with each other. Paul Levinson wrote the book McLuhan Digital, where he poses exactly that question.
I mentioned that we're living in a second Internet bubble. In 2001, you said that we were experiencing the autumn of the Internet. If that's the case, where are we today?
Probably at the end of the spring, just approaching the summer of the second bubble. But we all know that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as comedy, and the second bubble is very different from the first. Whereas the first was one of financial speculation, based on venture capital, this one is much more interesting: the great financier of innovations is Google. Most Internet companies are developed thinking that Google's going to buy them and they orbit around it. Besides this, the infrastructure has changed a lot: there is broadband, cheaper machines… And then there's a certain recall of the exaggerated promises of the first bubble and people are more wary.
What expectations will be frustrated this time? Who's going to be the most disappointed when the second bubble bursts?
Yes, as is probable, what everyone thinks is going to happen won't happen, the explosion wouldn't affect so many people economically. The disappointment would be more political.
Political?
Yes. Web 2.0 comes with a heap of very strong libertarian promises: we're all going to be able to have an opinion, publishing policy is going to be dictated by the readers, the masses are intelligent… The first bubble was not democratising, it simply promised that the innovators and the astute were going to get rich.
This is more romantic. Then, the disappointment will be greater…
[Laughs] Another one will come along! Don't worry. If you want to get depressed, there are better reasons!
In fact, the truth is not so romantic: the Internet doesn’t just do away with borders and bring us closer, it also widens the gap between the developed world and the one that isn't…
The technological globalisation phenomenon is too complex to place it in intellectual categories, which are usually very simplistic, very dualist (good/bad, democratisation/polarisation). It follows fuzzy logic more, which maintains that the true values of propositions are not just true or false but are true, false and, in between the two, a thousand possible things.
Neither black nor white, but the exact opposite.
There are very, very many shades of grey, many ways of using technology, some revolutionary, others evolutional, some global, others specific… What is clear is that there is a digital gap caused by the access, no longer to the computer, but to Wi-Fi, to content… And this gap is getting deeper because those who are the digital poor are also the analogue poor, so they are doubly poor. And it's also true that technological development increases a little the number of people it reaches and, simultaneously, it excludes with much more force than before. But neither should we forget that more than 1,000 million people access the web every day, that there are more than 30 million public booths in Argentina, that street kids play videogames in exactly the same way as school kids…
Now that you're talking about young people: the pace at which technology advances is constantly accelerating. Are the gaps between generations increasingly greater? Does the old line “my parents don't understand me” take on increasingly more meaning?
There has always been a generation gap and rebellion against parents, and that's a good thing. But it's true to say that the “digital natives”, in other words, people born after 1980 and who have grown up surrounded by technology, have a very different cognitive diet from the one we had.
Sorry: Cognitive diet?
We basically “ate” books – paper – and information pre-digested by our teachers. They, on the other hand, are brought up watching television, playing on the computer and the console or questioning grown-ups much more sophisticatedly.
So telling them about the stork doesn't work any more…
No way! Now they ask you directly about ova, about spermatozoids… And more! The ecology of interaction is changing, in other words, the relationships between parents and children, between students and teachers, between all of us and technology.
Will the Internet definitively revolutionise the way of teaching?
Listen: when the first cars appeared in the nineteenth century, they were called "horseless carriages". They were named for what they weren’t instead of for what they were! At first, they didn’t go much faster than horses, but they ended up changing the world much more than the telegraph did or what the telephone would do later. I say this because nowadays we spend hours talking about mobiles and the Internet but nobody knows what the next car will be.
We're still worried about the horse.
Exactly. We don't see what we don't see! We admire desktop computers and they're rubbish! They're monsters that are extremely difficult to take anywhere, 50-year-old technology that doesn't go where it should, which is what Donald Norman calls “the invisible computer”. But there are people working on these things.
The laptop computer being designed by the One Laptop per Child project is not so ambitious…
But what is the least intellectually relevant about this project is the hardware. Negroponte's proposal is very anarchistic, very much of destruction of the classroom space. He says: “Let it be”: “Let the children come together and learn for themselves, minimally guided by an intelligent teacher who guides them and they will achieve wonderful things.”
So it is, obviously, revolutionary.
That's why educationalists want to string Negroponte up in the main square! Constructing the machine and taking it into the schools is very difficult, but it will be even more difficult for it to be accepted by a group that generally despises and fears computers: teachers, inspectors, the education system… To start with, because the adoption of technology has its own dynamic. But also, and this is much more interesting, because it is very probable that at an unconscious level most of the actors in the system won't want it to work.
Why would they prefer such a thing?
Because even though the socio-economic situation of Latin America may lead us to believe that there's a lot of interest in change taking place, the truth is that there is much more deep conformity, many people who are all right with things not changing.
Beyond the obstacles, why would it be a good thing if the idea triumphed?
I think that the idea of a computer per student is really revolutionary. Everything that there's been of educational teaching using computers has been awful: laboratories, workshops…. A disaster! You just have to compare what it cost with what it has contributed to realise that.
Because there weren't enough in every classroom?
Firstly because of that. Secondly, because they are used with programmes that are made for businesses. Thirdly because the interface is based on windows.
And is that a bad thing? We're very used to windows…
But they have millions of defects. Why does a child have to learn that information is kept in folders when they live in a free world where there aren't any?
Folders are a metaphor for the office.
They're teaching how to class information in folders when in truth information is free! The use of computers with these tools serves to accustom them to the way of working of businesses, so that these save on training. In short: the education system is providing vocational training. Negroponte, by contrast, proposes a cheap, light and portable machine, new specific software for kids… More like pencil and paper!
It's an idea that I worked on in my last book, Internet: la imprenta del siglo XXI. In fifteenth-century Europe, 1,000 books a year were produced. And each book meant one person – a monk – working a whole year. What was the limit of production, distribution and dissemination? That hyper-scarce and limited labour.
Then the printing press came along and changed everything.
And how. It seemed demonic! In the first 50 years of its appearance, 80 million books were produced! And something else that's interesting, since you like the analogy, is that just a small part of the 220 printing presses that emerged in those 50 years did so in university towns. Most of them were set up in centres of commerce: they were related to accountancy, to retaining the information of numbers and graphs. The scant vocation of innovation of the universities meant that they would take 30 years to adopt the printing press.
Do you mean to say that the same thing is happening today with the Internet?
Exactly. The universities don't quickly discern what the customs of everyday life and commerce see much sooner: the transforming power of the new technologies. During the first Internet bubble – we're now experiencing the second – an author wrote the book El telégrafo, la Internet Victoriana, in which he showed that the telegraph had had many of the traits that the Internet later had: explosion, promotion, fascination, declaration that everything's going to change… For example, did you know that the telegraph, along with the train, generated universal time?
I didn't know that.
Very few people do. In the United States at the end of the nineteenth century there were 180 different local times, uptown times, downtown times…
They had to come to an agreement to receive messages.
To receive messages and so the train arrived at the same time. Imagine if each station had its own local time!
That's not so strange. Lately it seems like every local station has its own time!
So has the AVE high-speed train in Barcelona, because God only knows when that will get here… But getting back to where we were: innovation has to be compared with something similar. If you try to think of the Internet in isolation, you won't understand it; you either think it's nothing or you think it's everything. But if you compare it with the railway, the telegraph, the newspaper, then you start getting it. Tools always have to be seen within a media ecology: they are all involved with each other. Paul Levinson wrote the book McLuhan Digital, where he poses exactly that question.
I mentioned that we're living in a second Internet bubble. In 2001, you said that we were experiencing the autumn of the Internet. If that's the case, where are we today?
Probably at the end of the spring, just approaching the summer of the second bubble. But we all know that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as comedy, and the second bubble is very different from the first. Whereas the first was one of financial speculation, based on venture capital, this one is much more interesting: the great financier of innovations is Google. Most Internet companies are developed thinking that Google's going to buy them and they orbit around it. Besides this, the infrastructure has changed a lot: there is broadband, cheaper machines… And then there's a certain recall of the exaggerated promises of the first bubble and people are more wary.
What expectations will be frustrated this time? Who's going to be the most disappointed when the second bubble bursts?
Yes, as is probable, what everyone thinks is going to happen won't happen, the explosion wouldn't affect so many people economically. The disappointment would be more political.
Political?
Yes. Web 2.0 comes with a heap of very strong libertarian promises: we're all going to be able to have an opinion, publishing policy is going to be dictated by the readers, the masses are intelligent… The first bubble was not democratising, it simply promised that the innovators and the astute were going to get rich.
This is more romantic. Then, the disappointment will be greater…
[Laughs] Another one will come along! Don't worry. If you want to get depressed, there are better reasons!
In fact, the truth is not so romantic: the Internet doesn’t just do away with borders and bring us closer, it also widens the gap between the developed world and the one that isn't…
The technological globalisation phenomenon is too complex to place it in intellectual categories, which are usually very simplistic, very dualist (good/bad, democratisation/polarisation). It follows fuzzy logic more, which maintains that the true values of propositions are not just true or false but are true, false and, in between the two, a thousand possible things.
Neither black nor white, but the exact opposite.
There are very, very many shades of grey, many ways of using technology, some revolutionary, others evolutional, some global, others specific… What is clear is that there is a digital gap caused by the access, no longer to the computer, but to Wi-Fi, to content… And this gap is getting deeper because those who are the digital poor are also the analogue poor, so they are doubly poor. And it's also true that technological development increases a little the number of people it reaches and, simultaneously, it excludes with much more force than before. But neither should we forget that more than 1,000 million people access the web every day, that there are more than 30 million public booths in Argentina, that street kids play videogames in exactly the same way as school kids…
Now that you're talking about young people: the pace at which technology advances is constantly accelerating. Are the gaps between generations increasingly greater? Does the old line “my parents don't understand me” take on increasingly more meaning?
There has always been a generation gap and rebellion against parents, and that's a good thing. But it's true to say that the “digital natives”, in other words, people born after 1980 and who have grown up surrounded by technology, have a very different cognitive diet from the one we had.
Sorry: Cognitive diet?
We basically “ate” books – paper – and information pre-digested by our teachers. They, on the other hand, are brought up watching television, playing on the computer and the console or questioning grown-ups much more sophisticatedly.
So telling them about the stork doesn't work any more…
No way! Now they ask you directly about ova, about spermatozoids… And more! The ecology of interaction is changing, in other words, the relationships between parents and children, between students and teachers, between all of us and technology.
Will the Internet definitively revolutionise the way of teaching?
Listen: when the first cars appeared in the nineteenth century, they were called "horseless carriages". They were named for what they weren’t instead of for what they were! At first, they didn’t go much faster than horses, but they ended up changing the world much more than the telegraph did or what the telephone would do later. I say this because nowadays we spend hours talking about mobiles and the Internet but nobody knows what the next car will be.
We're still worried about the horse.
Exactly. We don't see what we don't see! We admire desktop computers and they're rubbish! They're monsters that are extremely difficult to take anywhere, 50-year-old technology that doesn't go where it should, which is what Donald Norman calls “the invisible computer”. But there are people working on these things.
The laptop computer being designed by the One Laptop per Child project is not so ambitious…
But what is the least intellectually relevant about this project is the hardware. Negroponte's proposal is very anarchistic, very much of destruction of the classroom space. He says: “Let it be”: “Let the children come together and learn for themselves, minimally guided by an intelligent teacher who guides them and they will achieve wonderful things.”
So it is, obviously, revolutionary.
That's why educationalists want to string Negroponte up in the main square! Constructing the machine and taking it into the schools is very difficult, but it will be even more difficult for it to be accepted by a group that generally despises and fears computers: teachers, inspectors, the education system… To start with, because the adoption of technology has its own dynamic. But also, and this is much more interesting, because it is very probable that at an unconscious level most of the actors in the system won't want it to work.
Why would they prefer such a thing?
Because even though the socio-economic situation of Latin America may lead us to believe that there's a lot of interest in change taking place, the truth is that there is much more deep conformity, many people who are all right with things not changing.
Beyond the obstacles, why would it be a good thing if the idea triumphed?
I think that the idea of a computer per student is really revolutionary. Everything that there's been of educational teaching using computers has been awful: laboratories, workshops…. A disaster! You just have to compare what it cost with what it has contributed to realise that.
Because there weren't enough in every classroom?
Firstly because of that. Secondly, because they are used with programmes that are made for businesses. Thirdly because the interface is based on windows.
And is that a bad thing? We're very used to windows…
But they have millions of defects. Why does a child have to learn that information is kept in folders when they live in a free world where there aren't any?
Folders are a metaphor for the office.
They're teaching how to class information in folders when in truth information is free! The use of computers with these tools serves to accustom them to the way of working of businesses, so that these save on training. In short: the education system is providing vocational training. Negroponte, by contrast, proposes a cheap, light and portable machine, new specific software for kids… More like pencil and paper!