This summary is edited from a student book report for the Computers in the Arts course. Quotes are from Schultze's book not the student report. Most of the summary and comment is from the author of this blog. The numbers with "-"s in front of them refer to page numbers in the book.
- "We need to recover a meaningful sense of historical connections in order to allow ourselves to live more fully and creatively in the present and to provide a basis for a sense of connection with posterity" -quoted by Schultz on page 70 from Kasson in pg. 50 Technological Change and the Transformation of America by Steven E. Goldberg (Editor), Charles R. Strain (Editor)
- Wisdom in the information age is not just simplifying lifestyles -69
- Wisdom from tradition gives us a sense of "first things" which form a basis for participating virtuously in the information age -70
- Information is only useful with a framework to interpret it in.
- Language for the meaning of life "virtue & intimacy....[and] the cause of Shalom" (reconciliation as presented in Judeo-Christian tradition) needs to go beyond the language commonly used in information intense communication-73
- Traditions need to be passed from generation to generation
- We need to be "remembering proven wisdom in ever-changing cultural contexts"-75
- As primary carriers of noninstrumental wisdom we need to counterbalance informationism
- Traditional wisdom provides us with the "oughts"
Page 86
Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day call for "information ecologies" anchored in local communities. They cite schools that established their own guidelines for responsible use of online media......Instead of seeking an "information ecology", we should foster "ecologies of shared wisdom"or "ecologies of mutual caring" that embrace shalom. When we focus on information rather than on virtue, we are less likely to create communities where people care for one another.
Page 87
Seeking justice is one of the most potent forms of caring......Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in Letter from Birmingham Jail that negative peace is merely the "absence of tension," whereas positive peace is the "presence of justice."...Shalom is hardly equivalent to universal Internet access or a computer in every classroom; such weak notions of justice could merely lead us to enslave every individual to the same technological system... A caring institution seeks a goodness beyond what is required for organizational self-preservervation or simply for parity with other institutions. Moral wisdom reminds us that virtuous action is performing above normal principles and beyond ordinary laws. It captures a "rightness" that is good for actual people in a real place and time, not solely for everyone in the abstract. Communities of revealed religion, for instance, remember stories of justice so that people can recall what justice is and know how to be just. If personal caring is being a mensch [American Slang] - a responsible person of honorable intentions and deep regard for others - then institutional caring is not just being an organization of individual mensches but also a mensch-like community. Both individual and institutional mensches offer us their lives as parables of victue...Why do we talk about Internet geeks, hackers, and spammers but never about Internet mensches or saints? It is even difficult to imagine how a Net saint would live, what he or she would do that is fundamentally self-sacrificial and God honoring. We have little notion of goodness and righteousness within the social use of information technologies. If we desire to use information technology for the purpose of caring, we need a compelling concept of the cyber-commonweal, sustained by stories about virtuous people who use the technology wisely.
Page 88
Maybe on saintly model on the web is Kathleen Wilson... [who accepted the adiscovery that she had MS and little help was available on the Internet] as the beginning of her life's calling namely, to create a Web site, MSWorld, where people with MS could exchange information about the disease and communicate with others who had it. "We're all about enhancing the lives of people with MS", she says, "We're into maximizing the joy out of every day" [a quoted by Max DePree]....
Finally, listening to a religious tradition can remind us that caring communities nurture people who hold each other accountable. A community's historical narratives carry moral standards that serve as yard sticks for the moral health of people and institutions. Such stories should remind us that we are responsible not just for our own thoughts and actions but also for our neighbors.....We should care about what we all do with cyber-technologies, particularly within the domains of our own commumnities at work, home, school and beighborhood....If, on the other hand, our religious meta-narratives reveal our accountablity for the world, we are much more likely to become people whom our communities can count on to listen and then to care....
Admist all of the hubbub about cyber-progress, we should remember that virtuous communities are made up of people who listen and who embrace stories that inspire virtue. Throughout history the most virtuous forming stories have come from religious traditions, not from self-help manuals, flow charts, mission statements, or organizational operating principles.....
Page 89
Stewardship requires us to develop technologies that are in tune with our particular narrative traditions, related memories, modes of caring, and forms of accountablity. Our tendency toward "öne-size fits all" products "out-of-the-box" soltutions and "turnkey" technologies--where only technique defines use--is an unlikely penchant if we seek to nurture virtue.
Conclusion..Page 89
We are now entering an era in which "Culture refers to Culture, having superseded Nature to the point that Nature is artificially revived ("perserved") as a cultural form". If Castells is right, we are all becoming "environmentalists" in the sense of creating our own artificial environments without appeals to tradition or ears for listening to voices of virtue......
On the contrary, the wisdom of the past is not merely a bias or a prejudice but a necessary source of moral direction. Without historical memory, there can be no wisdom. Deleting all earlier habits of the heart, all wisdom and related customs, all divine discourse in favor of pure information, is not progressive thoughyt as much as scatterbrained illogic....
Conclusion..Page 90
Gratefully accepting God's gifts and then responding responsibiliy are ways of being wiser...Responsible stewardship is our relationship to creation as well as our effort exerted on creation. Just by being good people, we leaven the world around us.... Such a lofty notion of virtue challenges the instrumentalism of technique, which wrongly assumes that efficiency and control are inherently good. If virtue guides our high-tech endeavors, we are far more likely to gain real and worthy benefits from information technologies.... Balancing the practical gains from tehnique with the virtuous gains of moral wisdom is the best synergy that we could hope for in a high-tech world......
This is why we need to assess not just our technological progress but also our moral being. In Solzhenitzn's language, we should live toward "the fulfillement of a permanent, earnest dudy so that [our] life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it."
Quotes from other Chapters
To the degree we can revive organic forms of community marked by neighborliness, we can protect cyberspace from the ravages of heartless egos run amok. 188
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