Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education and Cultural Diversity

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Bowers, C. A. (2000). Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press.
Pp. 216

$18.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-8203-2229-6
Reviewed by Bryan R. Warnick
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
July 6, 2001

The costs of using computers in the classroom are various and real. To his credit, C.A. Bowers has been one of only a few voices in educational literature to cast a critical eye on the uses and abuses of computers in the classroom. Although now there are more voices joining Bowers in his criticism (Clifford Stoll is an example of another prominent critic), there are still too few. Indeed, I recently reviewed the New York Times's archive of articles dealing with technology use in education and found very few articles that were anything but celebratory in tone. Given this lack of critical discussion, the real costs of using computers in educational settings remain almost completely untallied. In his latest book, Bowers has gone a long way toward achieving a deeper understanding of how using computers in classrooms affects students as he places the computer in a broader context of environmental and cultural degradation. This is itself a service. In addition, as he develops his critique, Bowers outlines a method that may be helpful in not only analyzing the relationship between educational technology and environmental destruction, but may also be useful in looking at more general issues in education.

Bowers's main thesis is that computer use reinforces the attitudes of the Western Industrial Revolution, and that this, in turn, leads to environmental corruption. His stance is fairly pessimistic, and he seems to find only a little hope that using computers as educational tools will yield anything but negative consequences. Although I will be critical of some of his more pessimistic conclusions, I believe Bowers's focus on the cultural experience of computer use itself is an important contribution to the study of technology in education. His analysis deals with a topic that is rarely broached in educational discourse, and Bowers's book is timely in filling this lacuna of discussion.

In his introduction, Bowers outlines some of the global environment's most pressing problems: exploding overpopulation, exhaustion of agricultural land and fisheries, global warming, hazardous waste, and harm caused by synthetic chemicals. These environmental problems, Bowers argues, will be the major headache of the 21st century, and they are already having a demonstrably detrimental impact on human health. The first half of the book, comprising chapters one to four, reveals the general complicity of the computer in worsening environmental problems; the remainder of the book examines this complicity with specific reference to educational concerns. Bowers attempts to end the book on a more positive note, exploring ways of reversing the environmental and cultural damage wrought in an environment of technological ubiquity.

Bowers, of course, does recognize that computers have been used for environmental action and cultural conservation, but he quickly dismisses such activities as unable to justify computer use in education. For Bowers, programs posing as environmental learning software merely further the illusion of computational neutrality with respect to the environment that may deflect attention from the real problems inherent in the learning technology. He reviews how the cyberworld has been glowingly represented to the public by such writers as Sherry Turkle (1995) and Howard Rheingold (1991). These writers have praised the attitude of decentered subjectivity encouraged by the computer, and the on-line community creation made possible by the Internet. Bowers, however, shows the darker side of these same attitudes and thought- patterns. He argues that the subjective, decentered attitudes hailed by computer enthusiasts as personally liberating, are in reality culturally and environmentally destructive, and reducible to a devil-may-care individualism. He also adds to the list other attitudes that are reinforced by computer use — moral relativism, a disregard for “local” knowledge, anthropocentrism, and other such demeanors — and shows how these ways of thinking play a role in thwarting the prospects of ecological sustainability.

As a mechanism for how the computer reinforces these ecologically unsound postures, Bowers turns to metaphor theory. Western industrial culture is based on what he describes as certain “root” metaphors that embody the culture's assumptions about human beings and their place in the world. The root metaphors of Western culture stem from the Book of Genesis which, according to Bowers, “extols the mythopoetic narrative that led to viewing men as dominant over both women and the environment” (p. 27). By looking at more recent history, Bowers traces our current fascination with materialist, technological lifestyles back to the birth of Modernity and its mechanistic view of life processes. Of particular concern is the master narrative of organic evolution which has served to spawn the social Darwinism often supported by computer advocates generally, and artificial intelligence enthusiasts specifically.

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http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev119.htm

[teach1st]

1. It depends!

It depends on how technology is employed in the classroom.