Technological Forecasting in situ

One aspect that strikes me about these readings is the forecasting components. Namely, I’m interested in how the accurate and inaccurate components of these forecasts were informed by the ages in which they were made, and what this means for us as educational technologists.

Bush (1945) was writing, as pointed out by Englebart (1963), from a post-war era: what were all these highly skilled technologists and scientists to do with themselves after the conclusion of the war? These were individuals who would enjoy the prosperity and consumerism of the 50s after the horrors of the war. With Bush, we get a forecast focused on the technical aspects of a technology and its relationship to the rational individual and the individual’s immediate circle (e.g., sharing with friends). Technology itself is, in Bush, also conceptualized as a centralized, directed system.

Englebart (1963) himself was writing from a time of disruption and change; a time of promise alongside distrust: the Civil Rights Movement, a time of increasing distrust of the state as the Vietnam War dragged on and people became increasingly aware of attempts by the state to mislead the public. Bush’s forecast speaks to the relationship of the individual to technology, and how this relationship, a closed system, augments intelligence. Again, as with Bush, Englebart focuses on a centralized, directed system.

Interestingly, Englebart’s framework uses concepts that resonate with Vygotsky’s (1978) view of learning and language. It is noticeable that Englebart does not make the (Marxist informed) leap that Vygotsky does, and does not situate psychology or intelligence in a wider cultural or social fabric. This was, to make plain, also the time of the Cold War and post-McCarthyanism (e.g., paranoia surrounding communism), whereby anything sounding “social” or “communist” raised alarm bells and witch-hunts.

Nelson (1999), writing at the height of the dot-com bubble, continues this trend towards a technical and rational view. For Nelson, the internet, though successful, is based on faulty foundations. This is evidenced by the irrational nature of how links work, or rather how they break. The emphasis with Nelson is on the impermanence of information in the present system, and how that system should be directed by a more rational relational system.

Most of the other authors are writing from either a post dot-com bubble era (e.g., Bolter, 2001) and the trend continues: technical, rationalist; here’s how technology will change because it would make sense for it to develop in this direction. As an example, Bolter (2001) ends his book by arguing that interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style books will come to predominate in literature production and consumption.

That aspects of these authors have or have not come to fruition is not what interests me. What interests me is what is informing the analysis of the authors. From this brief historical overview of Western, American, and male authors, we can see a trend towards the technical, individual, and rational. Where they have been strongest is in persuasively rationalizing their concept of the future (regardless of whether or not it turned out the ways they envisioned).

The divide between what is, and what ought to be, is made most clear by reading Nelson (1999). Nelson is railing against a “broken system” that seems to be working quite well. To be honest, he almost convinced me. Then I reflected: why is it so important to people, to society, to markets that links remain unbroken? Is it actually important? History seems to be saying “No, it’s not important.”

While it may be the case that it isn’t important “yet,” I’d argue the opposite: Nelson’s project is not relevant to wider historical processes—not because it hasn’t proven true thus far, but because it makes assumptions about how people will use technology without delving into deeper psychology, sociology, anthropology, or relationships between institutions and other power structures; the basis of his own assumptions are never made explicit. So, for instance, the fact that we have developed decentralized, crowd-sourced systems of information sorting like hashtags, is not considered nor considered by a theory that focused on the technical nature of the technology of the internet.

This is also representational of Bolter ( ). Why have the hypertexts Bolter insists we will have? Well, because they give the user more choice. This is more implicit than explicit in Bolter: he never makes clear, nor does he seem aware, that he has made this assumption. Bolter’s framing of the question is not “How do people use this technology and what does this tell us about how people will use the technology?” but more “What can the technology enable us to do?”

By ignoring wider processes, the forecasts above inadvertently reduce the agency of individual human themselves. This seems due to an underlying thread of technological determinism: we develop a technology and the world will change in such and such a way because of this technology. And yet, the accuracies and inaccuracies of these forecasts tell us the exact opposite of teleology: technology is formed and situated in a specific environment which only includes technological artefacts and knowledge; the development of technology isn’t determined by technological artefacts and knowledge.

I find it interesting that one of the pieces that does situate technology in wider processes, the New London Group (1996), is of a more activist bent. The NLG is attempting to design a future by both identifying important dimensions of the present world, and forecasting where the future is heading based on these dimensions. To say the least, their undertaking is complex and epic.

All of these readings, as well as readings from other courses, and in particular readings I did for my video on Gutenberg, lead me back to an article I read outside of school: Rittel and Webber (1973). Coming out of the design world, and hot on the heels of the failure of centralized, directed measures such as were pursued by the majority of those in Bush and Englebart’s days, Rittel and Webber speak of “wicked problems.” Wicked problems are those problems which, when you try to solve them, are changed by your attempts to solve them. These include social and political problems. These are also problems which, incidentally, are impossible to predict or even to fully understand when they do occur. This sounds like both forecasting technology and education: there is so much going on, and the situation is increasingly complex over time.

With the benefit of all these readings, I reflect on these readings by asking: what is the way the world is now (which aspects of important) that we may tap into? What projects should we undertake? What should we create? What role can we as educational technologists play in creating a better tomorrow?

Thanks,

Mackenzie

References:

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2^nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Etymonline.com. (2016). Online Etymology Dictionary. [online] Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/design [Accessed 22 Jul. 2018].

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108. Retrieved August 2, 2009, from http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Englebart, Douglas. (1963). “A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect.” In Hawerton, P.W. and Weeks, D.C. (Eds), Vistas in information handling, Volume I: The augmentation of man’s intellect by machine. Washington, DC: Spartan Books. Augmentation of human intellect: A conceptual framework. Retrieved August 2, 2009, from http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Nelson, Theodore. (1999). “Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use.” ACM Computing Surveys 31(4), np. Retrieved, August 2, 2009, from http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. Retrieved, August 15, 2009, from http://newlearningonline.com/_uploads/multiliteracies_her_vol_66_1996.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Rittel, H.W.J. & Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences 4, 155-169. Retrieved July 22, 2018, from http://www.ask-force.org/web/Discourse/Rittel-Dilemmas-General-Theory-Planning-1973.pdf

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Retrieved July 22, 2018 from http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Vygotsky-Mind-in-Society.pdf