By Norman E. Anderson
A note on terminology: I will generally refer to the Internet as the Net, if other than the first use in a paragraph or section. Speaking non-technically, the interface with the Net that allows for graphics and makes use of hypertext is the World Wide Web, which I will generally refer to as the Web.
Many institutions of higher education are wrestling with institutional policy regarding the Internet. Just how important is the Net to the institutional mission? How centralized should the institutional approach be? How can the institution make the best use of the Net? To what extent should traditional public relations (PR) dominate the institutional use of the Net? What kind of challenges does the Net pose to academic institutions?
Attitudes towards the Net range from hype to deep and pervasive suspicion.
Hype may take the form of the assertion that institutions of higher education should totally reorient themselves to computer networking, the centerpiece of which is the Internet, even abandoning classroom teaching and library research in favor of technological delivery of education.
Suspicions and misapprehensions are encountered on the part of academic administrators, who must operate in a rapidly changing and unfamiliar world; on the part of academics, who are deeply concerned about the cultural and pedagogical implications; and on the part of members of the religious community in higher education, who, among others, are concerned about matters of personal virtue and social justice.
As a librarian, I have been working in the online environment on a daily basis for well over two decades. In recent years, I have spent thousands of hours on the Internet, much of that time on the World Wide Web, and I have introduced many to the Net. I am far from enamored of information technology. Experience has sobered me, so that my approach is strategic rather than lurching, realistically grounded rather than fantastic, and cautious rather than abandoned. Nevertheless, I generally welcome and promote information technology; and I have felt it incumbent upon me as an information professional to exercise leadership in library automation. Given this background, perhaps I can offer a seasoned perspective that is based upon experience and reflection rather than hype or fear, a perspective which might enable a more sophisticated approach to the Net than some institutional policy-making has hitherto taken.
The point of this essay is to present a number of observations that will stimulate administrators and academics to think in ways that will lead to a realistic assessment of the Internet for purposes of decision-making in higher education, especially higher education in the humanities and social sciences. These observations may be looked upon as guideposts in a wilderness.
In one sense, laying down markers in order to help others develop an accurate assessment of computer networking is futile. By the time one begins to realize the extraordinary meaning of being able merely to move one's finger like a wand through the air over a little square and thereby to accomplish tasks that were barely imaginable in the typewriter age, perhaps tasks on the other side of the planet, word is out that computers have been fashioned that can respond to brain waves! No assessment can possibly take account of and fathom with profundity all that is happening. However, some characteristics of the shifting terrain can be described on the basis of past and current exploration. So here goes.
The Internet is inherently an anarchy. Its environment is fundamentally hostile to centralization. Even local attempts at centralization are unsustainable over the long term, the more so the more one attempts to bring it under central control.
By anarchy is meant not chaos, rather that insofar as a functioning social system is self-regulating, it is so in terms of its smallest units, namely, voluntary communities and individuals.
In the case of the Net, it is an anarchy with a difference. It is not an anarchy in the world of physical society, but in the world of virtual society, which in physical terms is safer than the other might be.
The initial impact upon me of entering such an anarchy may be instructive. I felt an enormous contrast with the physical society in which I live. American society is free, but the Net is far freer and brings with it a joy of freedom. My experience of virtual anarchy has sparked some reflection on why physical society is not freer than it is. I can easily understand why many a Net citizen bridles at the very suggestion of government regulation of the Net.
Many institutional cultures are used to institutional control. Since computer networking unravels both centralization and tight control, institutions need to think in different terms. For example, rather than control, the question becomes how to manage networking so that an appropriate overall balance is achieved, for instance, a balance of institutional image.
The Internet is far more fluid than other media to which academia has been accustomed. It is under continuous construction. Information appears and disappears. A document can be modified in a matter of seconds and changed again only seconds later. Even hypertext tags are under continuous development.
Stasis thinking under-utilizes the Net. The idea of suddenly projecting one's fully developed and final statement onto the Net reflects the technology of the past (such as printed editions) and fails to take advantage of one of the major characteristics of the Net.
Furthermore, fixed states are left behind as the Internet current flows rapidly forward.
Institutions that forever delay posting their information because it is not yet complete or attractive enough, or that post and then fail to continue development of their sites are failing to employ one of the key features of the Net.
On the other hand, institutions that fail to grab what is of enduring value on the Net and save it in a stasis mode, are missing a tremendous opportunity.
The Internet is unprecedented as a peaceful social catalyst. This is true on many levels and in many dimensions. Despite the large volume of wonderfully perceptive theorizing about what that means, one can safely say that the Net as social catalyst has never yet been fully appreciated.
To give one example of the Net as catalyst, people who would have found it impractical or impossible to associate before are now enabled through the Net to do so with ease. To give some instances:
Academics and decision-makers who would wish to understand what is happening in our society simply cannot afford to ignore the Net. The pace of change is so accelerated by the Net that leisurely scholarship in the social sciences is itself no longer a viable model in many instances.
The human mind readily gravitates towards sensational associations. As a consequence, some of the most frequently pressed issues regarding the Internet have to do with the easy availability of pornography through the Net, the use of the Net by hate groups, and Satanism on the Net. (Waw is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so WWW = 666, the number of the antichrist, which means that for some the Satanism issue involves more than just the use of the World Wide Web by Satanists.)
To make any of these the prime association with the Net is comparable to associating New York City first and foremost with muggings or Los Angeles with gang violence or the United States of America with racism. It simply is not justifiable to make either pornography, hate groups, or Satanism the prime association with the Net or to make these the controlling factors in the development of institutional policy concerning the Net; for the Net is about the whole universe of information; and, even more fundamentally, it is what we make of it.
Furthermore, even with regard to unsavory information on the Net, it is important to keep in mind that information of any kind serves more than the direct purpose for which it was created. It is also a documentation of human culture. Thus unsavory information on the Net has already been the subject of numerous news reports and academic studies. In fact, these remarks have benefited from some of those studies and reports, for instance, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The point is that, although blocking of many sites on the Net may be appropriate so that Internet use on institutional computers falls within the scope of the institutional mission, for most academic institutions the question of access to unsavory information on the Net is more complex than that, involving the issue of academic freedom.
Another risk of orienting policy to the sensational is that more subtle and sometimes much more serious dangers will be left unaddressed. Examples of such dangers may include:
None of this is to downplay the spiritual, moral, psychological, and social dimensions of an individual's or a culture's encounter with unsavory information. However, academic and administrative judgments about the Net should not be shaped by the sensational. Rather they should be shaped by creative approaches and philosophical awareness, by an effort of the will to create the Internet we want.
The Internet has a user-chooses structure. In physical society we are used to the market trying to entice us and intruding upon our lives to do so. Is it possible to watch TV and not see commercials? Can one shop for a single item without having to browse through other merchandise in order to find it? Can one avoid telemarketers without disconnecting one's telephone? Some of that invasiveness is present on the Net (and it is on the increase), but basically there the customer seeks the marketer, not the other way around.
Generally that is good news for educational institutions, which have been good at attracting students by academic reputation but, thankfully for society, dreadful at aggressive marketing. The key principle they need to follow is to make themselves findable, which means, among other things, putting their distinctives up front, especially for purposes of computer indexing.
Having cast the issue in consumerist terms, it must be made clear that the issue is far bigger than marketing. For instance, the user-chooses structure affects the way one reads information on the Net. A home page with a portrait of the person maintaining that site could be read as egotistical, if the portrait were being foisted upon others. But read in terms of user chooses, it is merely having an honest straightforward presence on the Web comparable to one's physical existence. It is, in fact, an extension of one's physical existence.
Afterword: This observation was written in 1995 and now seems woefully out-of-date. The use of the Net as combination invasive billboard and glorified yellow pages has greatly expanded. Each time a search is done, the user is inundated with commercial advertisement. Many Web pages are loaded with advertisements for commercial sites. Furthermore, e-mail addresses are systematically gleaned from the Net and other sources for purposes of creating marketing lists, with the result that e-mail boxes are filled with unsolicited commercial messages. It is with sadness that we note the passing of a too short era when the idea of user chooses implied, in part, easy deselection.
Nevertheless, the basic point remains. Even though it is now nearly impossible for the user to deselect all intrusive marketing on the Net, the Net is still best set up to serve the person who is looking for information. The institution that makes itself findable on the Web, that makes contact easy, that provides easy accessibility to information typically sought out, that contributes enough of interest to attract a user or to engage a user's attention, and that manages to disclose with all candor and honesty its distinctive character has an edge, since it is utilizing the natural strengths of the Net.
There are mores regarding being a good Internet citizen. In the words of Eric Braun, this is the categorical imperative: "Don't treat people as a means to your end... give as much as you receive." See The Internet Directory (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994): p. xxi.
The good Net citizen thinks first not in terms of self-aggrandizement on the Net, but in terms of what he or she can contribute to the Net, especially by way of useful information. Interplay between contribution and self-interest is recognized as healthy for the Net and okay. But those who use the Net for self-aggrandizement without giving a return, are widely regarded as uncivil and unmannered. Any institution of civility would be well-advised to avoid this gaffe.
This means that an academic institution's Web site should not be primarily about self-marketing. Rather that institution should be pulling its weight in making the Net a place to find information of practical and academic use.
On the Internet, public relations personas are transparent and usually repulsive. It is character, especially institutional character, that shows and that has the potential to attract. This observation may hold more consistently and more profoundly on the Web than with any other medium. The static public relations ways used by educational institutions in the past are simply DEADLY on the Web.
In other words, educational institutions would be well-advised to forget slick presentations of themselves on the Web and exhibit instead their character, meaning, among many other things, their global compass, their welter of academic and artistic creativity, their thriving community, and even their administrative wisdom. An example of the last would be alignment of institutional strengths with the strengths and characteristics of the Net.
Security with respect to the Internet is a legitimate concern, with many facets. Worms, viruses, vulnerability of systems to outside tinkering, intrusive messages, harassment, violation of copyright, invasion of privacy, and vulnerability of confidential or classified records all require constant vigilance. In certain situations, for instance seduction via the Net, physical safety can be at risk. Just as security is a significant management concern with campuses in general, so it is with connecting to the Net.
However, security concerns should always be subordinate to carrying out one's mission. If one's mission is, in part, to support distance education online, security concerns should not be allowed to subvert that mission. There is no security justification for years of delay in going online. As any administrator of a library or museum or bank or intelligence agency, if pressed hard, can testify, the issue with security is not how to make it perfect, but how to bring security problems within manageable limits.
Of all these observations, as an educator I feel the most conflicted about the following.
Conveyance of information is not only continuing its shift from paper to machine, it is changing its very ground. In culture at large over the last five hundred years, the dominant way by which information has been conveyed has shifted three times. Initially it was aural, that is, by speaking and hearing. With the pervasive spread of printing, it made its first major shift and became textual. Then with the pervasive spread of photography and especially moving pictures, it shifted again and became graphical. Now with the pervasive spread of the Web, it is shifting yet again and becoming versatile, so that not only are the aural, textual, and graphical becoming integrated and part of a hypertext system of linkage, but people are expecting their information needs to be met on their own terms. Thus if they prefer the graphical to the textual, then they expect to have a choice. (Despite expectations, the ironic reality is that people are being required to become increasingly versatile themselves, namely in their ability to handle information.)
The patterns in higher education over the last five hundred years have not followed suit. While the aural has retained a strong place in the form of the lecture, the textual has dominated in the form of lecture notes, reading, and research. As for the graphical, it has been merely auxiliary or a subject for study unto itself. Even though textbooks nowadays tend to be much more graphically oriented than they used to be, the graphical has never risen to dominance in higher education. Now higher education is facing its first serious shift, and that is due to the combined influence of a culture with a different orientation to information and the Web. The Web is consolidating the power of the graphical and drawing higher education under the dominance of information versatility.
Allow me to focus for a moment on the graphical aspect of that versatility.
Until access to the Web became easily attainable, academics could, with only minor uneasiness, classify most graphically based information into a handful of categories: art (paintings and sculpture, for instance); entertainment (movies and most television fare, for instance); public information (photographic journalism, for instance); advertisement (billboards and bumper stickers, for instance); archival information (family albums, for instance); and reference or supplemental academic information (maps and diagrams, for instance). Much of the graphically based information on the Web cannot be relegated to these categories. A simple example is the use of photographs to enhance presence. Graphically based information has broken out of past categories, and it has done so in a way that its power is now unmistakable in nearly every field of knowledge.
That power certainly resides in the conveyance of information, but it is much more. The graphical brings a dimension of experiencing information that the textual does not so easily provide. (This is not to deny the possibility of experiencing textual information. Narrative, for instance, can evoke a powerful sense of experience.) Furthermore, graphically based information appeals to instinctual ways of gathering information. Therefore moving from a mere textual interface with the Net to a graphical interface on the Web may well feel like an advance to be measured in light years. It may also cause one to feel that the human race has come full circle.
Add to the power of graphics hypertext, which allows one to flit between pieces of information as lightly as a butterfly, and one is forced to realize that a future in which the traditional textual base holds primacy is no longer in view. That base will continue to be important; and in terms of some types of information, it will continue to be primary; but in more and more contexts, it is likely to serve the graphical and hypertext approaches to information rather than the other way around. Educators must come to grips with this revolutionary development, all the more so those who value traditional knowledge.
The presence of the Internet means displacement of the original justifications for the existence of the publishing industry. Publishers evolved to fill a special niche and made inroads into a wide variety of social structures, such as the educational process, on the basis of filling that niche. The Internet has broken the industry monopoly upon that niche.
Publishers are not necessary for hard copy production. Judging from a thread on the Book Arts listserv, binders are already keenly conscious that people who want a book in hard copy can download it, cast it into any font style and page format they want, add illustrations if they so choose, print it on whatever type of paper they select, and have it bound any way they like.
Publishers are not necessary for peer review. Scores of alternatives exist for peer review, including inter-activity on the Net.
Publishers are not necessary to make a work accessible world-wide. As a matter of fact, placing an academic work on a permanent ftp (file transfer protocol) site makes it more accessible than any publisher is likely to manage with hard copy.
Publishers are not necessary for the generation of royalties. A variety of alternatives are available for generating income online.
At a fundamental level, the hard copy book publishing industry is in competition with the Net. Its principle hope is to find ways in which it can do a better job, and its challenge is to demonstrate that it is the best means to the best end.
Publishers have two advantages: first, the continuing attraction of large numbers of people to the physical book format; second, their contractual control of a large number of copyrights. This is a fragile structure upon which to build a viable long-term future.
Ironically the publishing community itself presents one of the greatest dangers to this fragile structure. By pressing to extend control of copyright over electronic texts into what for hard copy has been "fair use" territory, publishers are encouraging the academic community to bypass them. If academic communities generate information, why, if they have adequate alternatives, should they hand it over to publishers only to buy it back from them under more restrictions than ever?
Academic institutions should thoroughly reevaluate their relationship to the publishing industry, giving the development of processes for academic publication on the Net at least as much attention.
Institutions of higher education are in much the same boat as publishers, in that the Internet provides alternatives to traditional modes of education. To a certain extent, the traditional university lost its original justification for existence centuries ago with the advent of the public research library. Of the three main functions of the institution of higher learning -- education, research, and credentialing -- alternatives have existed, but institutions of higher learning have won broadest and often exclusive acceptance.
Now the Internet and other online capabilities present a new and extraordinarily formidable challenge to the dominance of academic culture as it has been known. The challenge is manifold and includes alternative pedagogical, economic, and community models for academia.
In terms of competition with the Net, traditional higher education has a number of advantages, chief among them being direct human contact as part of the pedagogical process. Of course, the Net has its advantages too, chief among them being convenience.
In terms of what is necessary for function, institutions of higher learning have at least two advantages: first, their libraries, insofar as their libraries include what is not readily available in the public system or on the Net; second, their role in making the Net viable and valuable.
Ironically, the Net, while challenging the very existence of institutions of higher education, feeds on them for infra-structure and information.
Another irony is that institutions of higher education are failing to invest sufficiently in those elements that justify their existence as necessary over against the alternatives. For instance, the September 1993 issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship (v. 19, no. 4: p. 212) reported that, in 1989-90, academic libraries received 3.082% of the total educational and general expenditures of all institutions of higher education in the United States, which was part of a downward trend. According to usual standards, the rock-bottom minimum is 6%. The ideal for a traditional institution is between 8% and 15%.
Academic administrators sometimes operate with an over-realized eschatology, believing that the wholly electronic online library can now replace the physical library.
Not yet. In another essay, I have outlined some of the factors which under gird at least the short-term future of physical libraries, such as the difficulty of resolving copyright issues associated with the free flow of electronic information. Most of those factors are social rather than technological, and they are far from resolution, much less resolution in the direction of displacement of the physical library. In the limited sense that the electronic library can serve as the common medium for many kinds of information, the physical library, like the hard copy publisher and the campus university, is having its original justification challenged. Yet, by a curious convolution, the physical library's necessity and role have become more sharply defined over against the purely electronic library; and its raison d'etre has expanded rather than diminished, one reason being that it is the one place that is in command of all types of information in a world of information that is becoming increasing complex.
To think in terms of lurching from a library of books to a library of electronic texts, perhaps texts maintained at sites other than one's own, is tempting. It suggests that the enormous expense of the physical library may be coming to an end and that physical libraries can be deprived of resources now because a grander vision is nearing fulfillment. Librarians who criticize the idea that fulfillment is at hand are often accused of being empire builders, resisters of change, or representatives of alternatives that are too expensive to be palatable. Unfortunately, the reality really is more complex than a simple lurch from an expensive to an inexpensive way of providing library services or even from an old technology to a new technology of comparable cost. It is in the nature of information that we must be engaged in a building process -- brick upon brick -- rather than a lurching process. Electronic texts happen to be the next brick.
Ironically institutions of higher education are themselves more vulnerable to alternative models afforded by information technology than are their libraries, except insofar as the libraries depend economically upon those institutions.
At present, the Internet cannot be safely ignored for research in any field of knowledge. Period.
The observations could go on and on to address the learning curve (computers affect it for better and worse in dramatic ways), changes in serendipitous learning, the multi-faceted orientation of academic work to the computer, reallocation of time with regard to online pedagogy, the peculiar character of e-mail (and its resuscitation of a 19th century approach to correspondence), immersion into networking followed by rapid obsolescence, and much more. But enough of a sketch has been given to derive a sense of the character of the Net for academic decision-making.
Many lessons for academic administrators can be distilled from the preceding observations. Let me draw just two.
First, the Net does not lend itself well to centralization, image-shaping, and control. However, for those whose concerns have to do with academics, leadership, connectivity, having a presence, and functioning as a magnet of creativity, the Net has enormous potential. Policy development with respect to the Net in academic institutions should be in the direction of facilitation and decentralization, not tight control.
Second, the Net does not lend itself well to either trepidation or the slow pace of bureaucracy. The Net or (for the sake of the metaphor) the Web is for the quick walk of the spider, not the quagmired walk of swampers and marsh plodders (as much as I like swamping and marsh plodding). That is a lesson which must be taken to heart by many an educational institution, even if it means a fundamental change of institutional culture.
Many lessons can be distilled from the preceding observations for those concerned with cultural implications, personal virtue, and social justice. However, in conversations on these subjects, I find that one of the principal roots of these concerns has less to do with the Net than with computers in general. So just a brief word on that.
A great fear exists that computers are devaluing our humanity. I suggest that this fear is an unfounded insecurity, unfounded provided that our values are well-grounded from the start. Antiquity has bequeathed to us a heritage rich in humanity. Think of the transcendental values of truth, beauty, and goodness; or of the great spiritual virtues: faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians 13:13; cf. Galatians 3:28). Society does not readily organize itself around such. Our society has instead organized itself, far more than necessity requires, around material values.
Computers are well able to make inroads in material territory. Hence our sense of devaluation. We have defined much of ourselves in terms that merely point to physical function or that serve the economic function and not that elucidate the human spirit or our sentience. Not only might we have expected computers to emerge from such a social construct, but it is entirely appropriate that they should challenge in the most thorough way our own sense of ourselves. Human beings are about truth, beauty, goodness, faith, hope, and love. Computers are not, except insofar as they are instruments of our humanity.
Institutions of higher education can do a great service to society both through their participation as good citizens in the Internet and by seriously engaging the human element in the interface between human beings and information technology.
Begun, October 31, 1995; posted, January 17, 1998; new url, Janaury 28, 2004; last modification, January 28, 2004
Copyright ©1998-2004 by Norman E. Anderson
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