Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back - like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust - of course you can’t, it’s just people talking - but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV - a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

this doesn’t have anything much to do with anything, but I found it amusing and semi-relevent

We will be watching the documentary Love Machine by Peter Asaro and Doug Matejka. From the press release:

Love Machine considers the social and moral implications of building humanoid robots sophisticated enough to participate in social and emotional roles that are traditionally considered exclusively or even essentially human: friendship, sex and love. The film examines the actual technologies being developed in these directions, and discusses these issues with the people who are pursuing these technologies as well as those who seek to profit from them. It also confronts various social critics, commentators and philosophers of different perspectives in a effort to open a dialogue on what implications these technologies might have for human relationships in the future.

Among those interviewed are:

Roboticists:
Rodney Brooks, Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Hans Moravec, Carnegie Mellon University
Gill Pratt, Cynthia Breazeal, and Brian Scassellatti, MIT
Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley.

Philosophers:
Daniel Dennett, Tufts University
Hubert Dreyfus, Univesity of California, Berkeley
Manuel DeLanda, Columbia University and Institute of Advanced Study-Princeton

Sex & Culture Commentators:
Carol Queen, Robert Morgan Lawrence and Lisa Palac
Ernest Green, Editor of Taboo Magazine

Childhood technology-use advocates:
Joan Almon, and Colleen Cordes

and the entrepreneurs building such products as the Sybian and Real Doll and others . . .

  For example, on-line education will not provide people with the higher level of education they are looking for, because it for one, lacks the one-on-one interaction with teachers.  Dreyfus believes that a higher level of education relies on teacher-student relationship.  I personally have taken two self internet classes, and I strongly agree with his reasons.  Although it partly has to do with the type of learner you are, I think most people can agree they learn better when someone else tells you first hand and you are able to see different processes or concepts visually.  For myself, it is extremely difficult for me to learn new material on my own.  I learn much better when I can work each step through with someone else.  More experience and real-world situations are key to gaining knowledge and learning about the world around us. On-line education may make someone competent, but he/she will definitely not obtain rational wisdom.  Dreyfus conveys that individuals will never make that transition from novice to expert, because in order to achieve something to our full potential, we have to be truly immersed in what we are doing.  Whether it is learning how to play a sport or learning how to write cursive, you can never be a true expert unless you practice first hand. 

            In addition, Dreyfus talks about intimate relationships and how personal relationships are not the same as on-line relationships.  I could not agree more with Dreyfus, because I believe in order to have a deep and meaningful relationship with a significant other definitely requires actual embodied presence of each person.   I believe that genuine personal connection is what you essential for a relationship to grow.  Words, such as “I love you”, does not have the same meaning as hearing it first hand.  For example, I am sure a lot of guys would agree that it is just wrong to tell a girl for the first time they love her over the internet.  I know I would be upset, because it is very impersonal and it lacks genuine meaning altogether.  In addition, I don’t believe in internet chat rooms and on-line dating programs.  What makes the internet appealing to people is anonymity, which scares me a lot.  Anonymity gives people the opportunity to make up their appearance, personality, interests, ect.  I could have a complete vision in my head about an individual and they could be the exact opposite.  So, basically, I need one-on-one interaction to really develop an intimate relationship with another person.

Prompts and Questions:

• Post any thought you had about the class debate between Clark and Dreyfus.
• Jenkinson and Bleecker both claim that machines deserve credit (and responsibility) for participating in human social activities. How do their claims differ from traditional arguments over artificial intelligence?
• We have basically finished the core course material for this semester. Do you feel like you understand technology better than you did before? Did this class help? Is technology worth understanding well?

The rise of the Internet in the past ten years shows that this technology is here to stay, and it has become an integral part of modern culture.  Users of Facebook.com and myspace.com have made the internet sites part of their daily life and as a tool to stay in contact with friends.  This trend of turning to technology instead of social interaction is particularly troubling to Dreyfus’s theory.

 College-aged people today could hardly imagine what life would be life without the internet.  So much of our interaction is media based, Universities have uprooted the formats of their courses to include blogs and message boards for students to participate in.  Wikipedia provides a free online encyclopedia that users can update themselves, but lacks any kind of authority because it is written by common man.  Dreyfus would say that these trends are dangerous to us and unreliable.  They enable us to disembody from ourselves and seperate us from the truth. 

But Dreyfus’s view that the Internet is an unworthy substitute for social interaction is a weak one.  Though Wikipedia is not writen by experts, the cumulative knowledge of millions of people makes it nearly as reliable as other encyclopedias.  While traditional encyclopedias are still available, wikipedia is another option for those who cannot afford encyclopedias or don’t have access to them.  In the same breath, the use of blogs and message boards by higher education does not necessarily shift the learning from the classroom to the computer.  Many of these University offiliated websites are more of a supplement to the course material. 

Dreyfus’ views are too extreme to adequately attack the Internet, because he assumes that technology will replace real life.  But in actuality real life is negotiated between social interaction, the Internet, and a millieu of other facets.  As we advance as a species there will continue to be new media with which we interact.  But we should not fear these advancements will replace old ones.  Rather, we should utilize all possibilities and prepare for future technology in order to reach our full capacity.