I was listening to NPR’s OnPoint podcast from November 2nd, where Tom Ashbrook was interviewing Douglass Rushkoff on his “Rules for the Digital Age,” discussing Rushkoff’s new book “Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” The discussion bounced around quite a few topics, but largely focused on the thought that people today take their digital presence for granted and that people interact with digital media in such a way that they don’t control the outcome, but instead they are controlled by their digital media.
For example, Rushkoff recounts a story from their PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Digital Nation,” where the producers ask a child: “What is Facebook for?” The kid’s answer was “for making friends.” It’s a relatively simple answer, and one that many adults would also provide, yet the true answer is “to make money off of the relationships, likes and dislikes of its users.”
As another example, Rushkoff says that students when we were growing up decades ago would go to the World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica in order to get a “primary source” for our book reports. Now, for many people, simply using Google is “good enough” to find the information you want. If you use Google’s Instant Search option, introduced a few months ago, your search results change by the second and are largely influenced by traffic on those sites, yet Google is perfectly capable of adjusting the results so that some pages show up first and others don’t. For many users, they’re just “The Results” that they get, however the user typically doesn’t think about the vested interest that Google has, as a company, in making money off of their Search ventures.
Rushkoff’s solution, outlined in his “10 Rules,” is generally that people should be more computer literate. He says that kids today that take a computer class in junior high or high school learn Microsoft Office. To him, that’s not “computers,” but instead it’s “software.” You aren’t learning how a computer works. You aren’t learning about what programming had to go into those programs. You aren’t learning about the types of programs available (i.e. closed-source vs open-source). You simply accept what you are given as Gospel without critically thinking.
As I listened to the discussion, especially with regards to Google, I had to think about this past election which saw the rise of the Tea Party. While many of them would have you believe that they were all educated, intelligent, active people, so many of them were taken advantage of by other third-party groups, primarily corporations. These are individuals that believed what they found in Google searches without thinking critically about what they were discussing. Rachel Maddow did an interview in Alaska discussing the Senate race of Tea Party favorite Joe Miller (who lost…), and the supporters outside were angry about all the policies that Attorney General Eric Holder had supported, and his voting record prior to becoming A.G. Of course, Maddow points out that Holder never held public office, and thus had no voting record. But these people believed it because that’s what they were told. It’s what they read on the internet. As if “The Internet” is to be equated with the Encyclopedia Britannica of old.
Rushkoff’s larger point, in my view, is that people today simply don’t have the critical thinking skills to handle what digital media has provided. So much information is now provided with so many more sources that individuals can’t effectively wade through it and discern whether what they are reading is fact or fiction.
I’m not sure that a better understanding of computers alone would be enough to combat the problem, honestly. Rushkoff suggests that some basic programming skills would be helpful for people to know as well, much as people thousands of years ago had to learn to write when “text” was invented. He believes that the invention of text empowered people to write laws, to hold each other accountable, and to be more than they were. He believes that giving everyone basic programming skills would do something similar, where they would be more likely to know and understand why a computer does what it does, and how the programs on your system interact with programs on the internet as a whole. I barely have any programming training and I think I’ve got a relatively decent handle on how the internet works, but most of that was self-taught over nearly two decades. I certainly don’t think it would hurt to have kids learn some basic programming, but they’re already missing the boat in various other subjects that programming is surely on the bottom of the list.
To me, it’s the critical thinking part that needs to be improved. With some basic critical thinking skills, hopefully, people would be more informed about everything they do in their daily lives: in raising their children, in voting for elected offices, in thinking about where their food comes from, in choosing which car to drive, in where they get their information, and so on.
But hey: if people want to learn more about computers, I’m all for it.
P.S. Happy birthday, Mom. 🙂
I read this whole post. But the P.S. is the best part. Just so you know.