INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Your name is usually connected with virtual communities. Can you tell us something about
them?
Answer
A few years ago I wrote a book, which is now in Italian, called The Virtual
Community. It's about people like myself and many others around the world who use the
Internet not just to find information or to publish information but to communicate with
each other by typing on their keyboards and participating in discussions that take place
over a period of time about subjects that interest us. Now that might be a very serious
subject like having a sick parent or a child or it may be something fun like arguing about
politics. There are in fact many tens of thousands of different subjects that people
communicate about. Sometimes a group of people may communicate with each other through the
Internet over a period of time and get to know each other, even though they may have never
met in real life. That's what I call a virtual community: a group of people who use the
Internet to communicate with each other over a period of time. Now, I've found that there
are great advantages to this.
Question 2
How do virtual communities differ from real communities?
Answer
The advantage of a virtual community is that you can find people who share your interests.
You may raise a rare breed of dog or you may be interested in talking to people about a
particular author or you may be interested in films or a particular sport. Well, the
people who live next door or the people who work with you may not be interested in that.
So you can go on the Internet and find people who share those interests. And those people
might be in Italy, or the United States, or in Japan. In fact, people from hundreds of
different countries participate in this. One of the advantages of this - they used to call
them bulletin boards, because it's like a bulletin board where you can put a message up
and come back later and see that someone has put another message up - one of the
advantages is that you don't have to be connected to the Internet at the moment that the
conversation is happening. Some of these conversations take place over weeks or months or
years. So the advantages are that it connects people together over mutual interests; it
transcends time and space. And you don't know what race or age or gender someone is, so a
lot of the prejudices people have, a lot of the things that are barriers to
communications, are gone in this media. Now, some of the disadvantages are really related
to some of the advantages of the virtual communities. Because there isn't a real person in
front of you, because you may never meet that person, you might not have the same sense of
responsibility towards them that you would have with someone that lives next door to you.
It's also easy to disguise your identity and pretend you to be someone you are not
on-line. Very nice people can pretend to be not very nice people and vice versa. People
can try to fool you into communicating with them either socially or to do business with
them in ways that you may not be prepared for. I think that it's important for people to
understand how to use this medium, so that they are not surprised to find out that people
are not who they say they are. Another disadvantage of the on-line medium of virtual
communities, which is also connected to the advantages of it, is that it lowers people's
inhibitions. If you are shy and in a group of people who are having a conversation you may
not have something to say, although you might think of something to say later. But if you
think about the conversation and take your time and compose an answer, in virtual
communities you can be heard in a way that you couldn't otherwise be. It lowers the
inhibition that prevents people from participating in communications. Now, this same
lowering of inhibitions sometimes enables people to be more rude on-line than they would
be face to face. Because someone is not in front of you, you won't see them crying if you
hurt them and they won't punch you in the nose if you insult them. So some people are
somewhat more uninhibited; they're more rude on-line. I also think that one must be very
careful about using the word "community". I think that people on-line can
develop relationships and can meet in the real world and this is a great way of connecting
with people who share values and ideas. But unless you have a real connection with each
other, that idea of community becomes somewhat distant from our traditional ideas of
community.
Question 3
Speaking about those identity problems, is there an identity when you are on-line
and another identity in real life or is it the same identity that you choose in different
times and spaces?
Answer
Communicating on-line has different effects on people's identity than other
forms of communication. If you think about it, we all use different identities in our
daily life. You have a different identity with your mother and father than you do with
your husband and wife. And you have a different identity with a stranger you meet on the
street or someone in an elevator than you do with someone you work with. We're all used to
presenting different faces, different masks to different people. On-line you can create
identities that are very different. If you're a man, you can pretend to be a woman, or if
you're a teenager, you can pretend to be an adult. And in some ways this is very
liberating. If you are a very intelligent person and have a lot to say but you're twelve
years old, it's very difficult to find adults who will pay attention to you. On-line those
adults might think you're a professor or an expert because they don't know that you are
twelve years old. All of these advantages also have disadvantages. It's easy to fool
people and if you think you're communicating with an adult and it turns out to be a
twelve-year old or you think you're communicating with a woman and it turns out to be a
man, then you may find that you don't feel right about that later. People feel somewhat
betrayed about it. People actually use the ability to portray different identities as a
form of entertainment. There are on-line communities sometimes known as MUDs, or
multi-user dungeons, in which people take on different roles. There are princes and
princesses, dragons and magicians. Instead of going to a movie or reading a book to
entertain themselves, they make up their own movies, their own books and play roles in
those. Now, in these particular on-line communities people understand that they are taking
on different roles. There may be other discussions, quite serious discussions, in which
people don't understand that someone is pretending to have a political view that is very
different from what their genuine political view is. So we enter a world on-line where our
identity is much more mouldable than it is in real life. How is this going to affect how
we feel about who we are? Nobody really knows. Very little research has been done. An
author by the name of Sherry Turkle has written about identity on-line. But considering
the fact that hundreds of millions of people sit in front of computers all day and many of
those people communicate with each other through the Internet, it's rather surprising how
little research there is on the social psychology, how it affects the way we communicate
with each other, and the sociological and the anthropological affect. It's a new
phenomenon and the educational establishment has moved rather slowly. So we only have
reports from people like me. We don't really have scientific research to tell us how this
is affecting people's sense of identity. As I said, there are advantages and disadvantages
of being able to hide your identity. You can experiment with a lot of different kinds of
identities. I think it's useful for a man to see how they're treated if they present
themselves as a woman. It's also possible for people to hide behind a false identity and
to slander other people, to attack their reputation, and feel safe because nobody knows
who they are and can't really retaliate. So like any other technology, there are
advantages and disadvantages. We need to learn how to use the technology to our advantage.
We need to learn how to protect ourselves from some of these negative aspects of it.
Question 4
What are the educational opportunities of the new technologies?
Answer
Before you can really talk about the impact of technology on education, you have to
understand that there's a difference between the schooling system and education. Education
has to do with preparing people's minds for dealing with the world, teaching them how to
learn things, and introducing them the history of Western civilisation and world
geography; all the things that you need to know to be effective in the world. Schooling
has a lot to do with what are you going to do with children during the day, while their
parents are working. It's really a kind of a baby-sitting. It also has to do with creating
citizens who will be effective members of society. The school system as we know it now
really was created to teach people to be good citizens of industrial society. You sit
quietly at your desk, the desks are all in a row, you listen to what the teacher has to
say, the teacher really transmits knowledge to you, like they're pouring their substance
into you, and you learn to move from class to class when a big bell rings. Well, those are
all ways of preparing people to work in factories and offices. Now, unfortunately for that
public education system, which was very effective in the industrial age, we've moved into
an age where things change more rapidly, where people don't work in factories and offices
the way they used to, where the way factories and offices work change often. New
technologies, new industries, new ways of life come along so rapidly that what you're
taught in school - the facts that they pour into the students' heads - may be obsolete by
the time you graduate. Now, to prepare students to be citizens of a world that changes
rapidly, that is affected by technology, in which roles change more rapidly than they
used, it's important to teach people to think for themselves, to think critically and to
learn how to learn, not so much a set of facts but a set of skills. That's a problem. Many
parents and many societies don't want to treat children as adults, they don't want to
teach them to think critically. Another major problem that we have in the United States,
and I think in other democratic industrial societies, is that people are less willing to
pay taxes for a public education. So teachers are not well paid and that means you don't
attract the best minds to teaching. Schools are not well equipped: there are not enough
pencils, there are not enough books, the bathrooms are deteriorating, the classrooms need
paint. It's a part of our society that we all depend on, but we haven't agreed on how we
are going to pay for upgrading them. So there's a crisis in education, and some people
think that by adding technology we will solve that crisis. Now, the Internet and computers
have come along and they really create a tremendous educational advantage. If you are in a
tiny school far from metropolitan centres, in the country, perhaps in a place where in the
wintertime it's very difficult to travel, you may just have a small library with a few
books. If you have a very bright student or a group of students, they may be smarter than
their teacher. They may have read all the books in the library. They are now limited by
the resources of their local school. But if you have an Internet connection, they can have
access to some of the great libraries of the world. They have access to more information
and more knowledge through the Internet than they could possibly have in a small school
library. Even more importantly, they have access to teachers and other students who could
help them learn together. If it's an advanced mathematics student, they might be able to
study with someone at MIT, even though they are in a small town in Australia. There are
ways that people can use computers to build simulations and to use graphic models of
things that involve students in learning much more actively than with the old-fashioned
blackboard. However, just adding the Internet and a computer to a classroom does not
guarantee that people are going to know how to use it. Teachers need to be trained, money
needs to be allocated for ongoing training of teachers. It's not like you send them to a
class one day and then they know what to do for the rest of their lives. You need to pay
for someone to continually train teachers on how to use the Internet and computers. If
you're going to install computers and install the Internet in a school, almost every day
you're going to need some kind of technical help. Quite often schools will budget to buy
some computers and pay for an Internet connection but they don't pay for training and they
don't pay for support. I think that if you have an Internet connection, you have
sufficient computers for the students, you have a budget for training, and you have a
budget for support, that's really the minimum. But it doesn't guarantee that you're going
to use those computers and that Internet connection in the best educational manner. If you
use it just to pour knowledge into children's heads using a new tool to implement old
educational techniques, I don't think it's worth it. If you can use a computer as a tool
for collaborating, for people to work together to build things together, if you can find
the best practices of those teachers all over the world who found the best ways of using
the Internet and computers and learn from them, then I think there's a tremendous
opportunity. But that opportunity will be lost, unless we think realistically about
technology and education. We need to understand that adding technology to the school
system is not going to solve the wider social problems of education in our society.
Question 5
How can we teach the teachers, how can we make the teachers like the new technologies.
Because if they do not like the new technologies, they will not teach their students.
Answer
A teacher is not going to be an effective teacher of technology if that teacher is not
enthusiastic about using it. If the teacher is underpaid and asked to learn something new
in their own time, if they don't have the effective resources and now they're adding this
expensive technology, then why should teachers be enthusiastic? I think it's important to
talk to the teachers about their needs and to be responsive to the teachers' needs before
installing technology or it's just going to create a resentment of the technology. They
should resent the technology if they're not being paid well. If the roof leaks, but they
have an Internet connection, what sense does that make? If they're given this technology
and nobody trains them how to use it, if they know how to use it, but there's nobody to
fix it when it breaks, you really need to think of the whole system that's involved with
the technology. It's not just the wire that brings the Internet or the computer on the
desk top, it's the whole system of involving the teachers, training the teachers,
supporting the teachers, paying the teachers, and not making something that competes with
what they need to do to teach their students but enhances their ability to teach their
students.
Question 6
Do you have anything else to say about education and the schools of the future?
Answer
One problem with the Internet is that you can access all kinds of material. There's great
educational material on-line. There's also pornographic material on-line. There are also
all kinds of information that is false on-line. So we need first to understand that
students need to be responsible. They and their teachers and their school districts and
their parents need to get together and talk about what the acceptable use of the Internet
is. And they need to sign a piece of paper that's called an "acceptable use
policy" that says that the parent understands and the student takes responsibility
for their behaviour. So if that student is caught surfing the web and looking at
pornography instead of education, well, it's not the responsibility of the teacher, it's
not the responsibility of the school district, it's the responsibility of the student. The
student has accepted that responsibility. I think it's also important to train people to
think critically about what they find on the Internet. You can go to an encyclopaedia and
read an article and be pretty sure that that article is accurate. If you go to the
Internet, and you put a term into a search engine and it gives you a number of different
sites that are about that subject, there's nothing that guarantees that the information
you find is accurate. Secondly, anybody can publish on the Internet. Now, that's a
tremendous advantage. But it also means that the responsibility for determining whether
that information is accurate or totally inaccurate is now up to the person who uses the
information. That means that we need to teach students to question sources of information,
to learn how to think critically about it, to check multiple sources of information
against each other. Again, we have this kind of paradox where in order to use this new
technology effectively we need to teach students to think critically. But many parents and
teachers are somewhat opposed to teaching students to think critically. If you teach them
to question authority, they're going to give their parents trouble, they're going to give
their teachers trouble. So knowing how to teach people to think critically and still
maintain an orderly classroom is an important problem that we need to solve.
Question 7
So you don't think it's enough to have a V-chip on the television or to start a
cyber-sitter program to lock the Internet?
Answer
The problem with putting a filtering device on an Internet connection or on an Internet
service is that there's no way of determining what is being censored. So a site that
censors sex will prevent you from getting pornography, it will also prevent people from
getting information about breast cancer or AIDS. And if it's created by a private service
like Microsoft or America On-line or an Internet service provider, then there's no way of
making them answerable. Now, if the government is a censor, I think that's dangerous. But
there is a way of making them answerable to citizens. That's not true for private
enterprise. If you're going to have a filter, it's important to know what is being
filtered and to have the opportunity to change that yourself. If there were a tool that
would enable a teacher to say, I don't want my children to go to the Playboy site,
but if they want to get information about breast cancer or see a classical painting with a
nude in it, then they're able to do that, then I think that's a very useful tool. But we
must be very careful that these tools don't turn into censors that we have no control
over.
Question 8
The problem is that parents may not have enough time to teach their kids, so they use the
Internet and the TV as a baby-sitter.
Answer
People who are concerned about education and people who are concerned about the way youth
use technology need to understand that parents have a responsibility. Many parents use
television as a kind of electronic baby-sitter. How many parents sit down with their
children when they're very young and teach them how to watch television? How many say:
This is a commercial. The people who pay for this want you to buy that product. Or how
many people say: The violence you see on television is very different in real life. The
same is true of the Internet. Most parents do not understand as much about technology as
their children do. They don't sit there with them to find out how they use it. As a
civilisation, we lack a way of training our children to participate in all of the media
that surround them. Children now spend more time watching television than they spend in
the classroom. Yet, there are no classes on media literacy. I think that one of the things
that we need to do if we are to have an effective civilisation, to use technology to its
advantage, and to avoid some of the disadvantages of technology, is to teach parents how
to teach children how to use the media. We have a problem with parents who don't care or
are too busy or where there is only a single parent in the home or the parents are on
drugs or drink. Those are social problems that have a direct impact on education. By the
time a child gets to a classroom at six or seven years old, most of the damage has already
been done. So if we're going to ask ourselves serious questions about education, we need
to ask ourselves serious questions about parenting.
Question 9
Anyone can publish their own news on the Net, will television become the same?
Answer
The Internet is the first many-to-many medium. That means that every computer connected to
the Internet, every desktop that has a modem and a telephone line, is potentially a
printing press, a television and radio broadcasting station, as well as a place of
assembly where people can come and discuss things. This is really a radical change in the
power to communicate, to influence and persuade people, and ultimately that's going to
have a very deep impact on our political systems. I think it pays to understand the way
this has happened in the past. The printing press really made the modern democratic
nation-state possible. Before the printing press, literacy, the ability to decode
knowledge from books, was really restricted to a small elite, but after the printing
press, entire populations became literate. Within fifty years of the invention of the
printing press, millions of people in Europe could read and write. That meant that they
were capable of governing themselves. You really can't have a population that can govern
itself democratically unless they are literate, unless they can understand and communicate
about the issues that concern them. Now, in the 20th century we've had the mass
media, radio and the television. And these media have tremendous power to influence people
by bringing images from all over the world into our homes. But these are broadcast media
in which just a small number of people determines what a larger number of people can see
and hear about the world. You can't point a television camera out of your window and then
broadcast that to the world unless you use the Internet. The Internet makes it possible
for very many voices to be heard where there used to be just a few. And we've seen this
during the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square when the Chinese students got eye-witness
reports out of China onto the Internet. During the upheavals in the Soviet Union when
communism was breaking up, information got in and out of what was formerly a closed
society in ways that it had never travelled before. In Bosnia when the opposition radio
station was shut down in Serbia, it went up on the Internet within hours. So we now have
potentially a tool for democratic communication. It's very hard to centrally control the
way television and radio can be centrally controlled. It also means that all kinds of
people including extremists, including insane people, can now broadcast their views to the
world. We need to come to terms with the fact that we no longer have gatekeepers who
determine what and when people have access to the media.
Question 10
You mentioned that if something happened outside your house you could write about it on
the Net. So we no longer need CNN ? Is there still a role for journalists?
Answer
Journalism is definitely changing because of the new media represented by the Internet.
There are really two aspects to the news that separate the professionals from the
amateurs: one is access to the means of production. It used to be very expensive to have a
video camera; it cost about US$60,000. Now you can get a good video camera for a few
hundred dollars. We saw in the United States this famous amateur video tape of the police
beating Rodney King in Los Angeles caused riots and a lot of political upheaval . Well,
that's because the cost of access to the means of production dropped low enough that
amateurs could do it. But there's also access to the means of distribution. The Rodney
King tape became famous because the amateur who took that tape gave it to a network who
broadcast it. Now, with the Internet and with the new technologies that enable you to do
video from your desktop, it's possible for anyone to broadcast. I don't believe that means
the end of professional journalism. If anyone can broadcast, they can broadcast
information, misinformation or disinformation. How do you know what to trust? Well, you
know what to trust because you trust that the person that is giving you that information
gave you accurate information yesterday. So today's news organisations may not need the
buildings that they're in, they may not the paper that they print on, they may not need
the broadcasting stations that they broadcast from, but they do need people who understand
how to get a story, how to interview sources, how to verify information, and how to
present that information in an understandable way. It may be that many amateurs now join
the professionals. But that doesn't mean the end of trusted brands. CNN is a trusted
brand. People know that what they're presented on CNN may have a point of view but it's
not totally bogus.
Question 11
The problem is that if anyone can put what he wants on the net, Should we be aware of the
fact that you can find some terrorist proclamations on the Net, or does anyone have the
right to say what he wants. Where is the breaking point?
Answer
Democratic societies are based on really two principles. One of them is that you vote for
your leaders, but the other one is equally important. It's the freedom of expression. It's
the freedom of citizens to communicate with each other. For that reason most democratic
societies protect freedom of expression, even when people express views that others
consider to be extreme or even abhorrent. In the United States you can print a newspaper
that expresses communist or fascist views, and we protect that because we feel it is
important to have a variety of expressions and because we don't trust the government to
decide who should and who should not have access to freedom of expression. Now, it used to
be fairly simple, because the major networks controlled what was communicated in the mass
media. That really kept it to the middle and the extreme expressions were marginalised.
Now of course, you can put up a web site about anything and people do. Now, I believe the
answer is not censorship but education. And that the answer to bad speech is more speech,
not censored speech. But it does offer a challenge. You need to have an educated
population who knows how to think critically or they're going to be swayed by these
extremist views in ways that they wouldn't have been swayed before. But you can't have it
both ways. You can't have a new democratic means for people to communicate their
eye-witness reports and their manifestos and their ideas, and decide that you're going to
cut this group off or that group off from access. I think that the best you can do is to
educate people.
Question 12
Will this new democracy bring people closer to the politicians?
Answer
One of the problems with the mass media is that they really closed down citizen discourse
about politics. Where we used to go to meetings or to cafés or bars to argue about
politics, we now sit at home and watch television, and politicians and political ideas are
sold to us. They're packaged by advertising agencies. It's not necessarily the truth in
what a politician has to say but how well they are packaged that determines how well they
do. In the United States we elected Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, I think, because they
were very, very good at television. If you're not a television commentator, you don't
really have access to most people. Now we have these on-line discussion groups. People are
arguing politics 24 hours a day. I think that must be a good thing. The more people turn
to each other instead of just passively receiving what is sent to them, the more people
argue and debate the better. That's not the same thing as saying that the Internet equals
electronic democracy. Is access to discourse and debate going to improve democracy or not?
I don't think we know the answer. I think the first step is for people to understand that
the Internet, and our ability to communicate with each other, is fundamentally a political
tool. The ability to communicate eye-witness reports or opinions, to argue and debate;
those are the foundations of democracy. And that's what's happening on the Internet. It's
not just access to libraries, it's not just access to pornography. It's political speech.
And unless more people recognise that, we're going to make decisions about how to regulate
the Internet and how to use it without understanding that it could be potentially very
important for democracy.
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