On the Internet

Hubert L. Dreyfus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415775168
• eBook ISBN: 9781135973780
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Can the internet solve the problem of mass education, and bring human beings to a new level of community? Drawing on a diverse array of thinkers from Plato to Kierkegaard, On the Internet argues that there is much in common between the disembodied, free floating web and Descartes' separation of mind and body. Hubert Dreyfus also shows how Kierkegaard's insights into the origins of a media-obsessed public anticipate the web surfer, blogger and chat room. Drawing on studies of the isolation experienced by many internet users and the insights of philosopher such as Descartes and Kierkegaard, Dreyfus shows how the internet's privatisation of experience ignores essential human capacities such as trust, moods, risk, shared local concerns and commitment.

The second edition includes a brand new chapter on 'Second Life' and is revised and updated throughout.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 The Extropians are very far out, but the same ideas show up in supposedly serious books such as Hans Moravec’s Mind Children, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988.

2 A tendency that Martin Heidegger claims is definitive of our modern understanding of what it is to be anything at all. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, in The Question Concerning Technology, New York, Harper and Row, 1977.

3 Not that there haven’t been real innovations. New ways of linking information have transformed libraries; course Websites in colleges and universities have made it possible for students to hear lectures and engage in discussions without leaving their rooms; telerobotics has made it possible to control a vehicle on Mars and one day millions of spectators will no doubt be able to look out of such a vehicle as it moves across the Mars surface; and e-mail has opened up surprising new possibilities, from political dissidents working together for reform, to proud grandparents sending their friends the latest digital photos of their grandchildren. But all these surprising new developments are minor compared to what has been predicted.

4 A. Harmon, “Researchers Find Sad, Lonely World in Cyberspace”, The New York Times, August 30, 1998. Harmon continues:

Those participants who were lonelier and more depressed at the start of the two-year study, as determined by a standard questionnaire administered to all subjects, were not more likely to use the Internet. Instead, Internet use itself appeared to cause a decline in psychological well being, the researchers said.

5 R. Kraut, M. Patterson, V. Lundmark, S. Kiesler, T. Mukophadhyay and W. Scherlis, “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-being?” American Psychologist, 1998, vol. 53, no. 9, pp. 1017–31.

6 Ibid. It seems that lack of physical presence can lead to a kind of moral isolation too. When Larry Froistad confessed to his e-mail support group that he had murdered his daughter, the members of the group offered him sympathy; only one, Ms. De Carlo, felt they should turn him over to the police. See, “On-Line Thoughts on Off-Line Killing” by Amy Harmon, The New York Times, April 30, 1998. “It seemed to Ms. De Carlo that the nature of on-line communication – which creates a psychological as well as physical distance between participants – was causing her friends to forget their off-line responsibilities to bring a confessed murderer to justice.”

7 J. P. Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, Davos, Switzerland, February 8, 1996.

8 Moravec, Mind Children.

9 R. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, New York, Penguin, 2000.

10 Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. Release 1.2” – August 1994, Washington, DC, The Progress and Freedom Foundation. http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/ futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html.

11 Plato, “Gorgias”, 492e7–493a5. Socrates says: “I once heard one of our wise men say that we are now dead, and that our body (soma) is a tomb (sema).”

12 Plato, “Phaedo”, The Last Days of Socrates, Baltimore, MD, Penguin, 1954, p. 84.

13 F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, Viking Press, 1966, p. 35.

14 Ibid., p. 34.

ONE THE HYPE ABOUT HYPERLINKS

1 National Public Radio, “The Future of Computing”, Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, July 7, 2000.

2 Fallows, D., ­«Search Engine Users­», Pew Foundation, URL http:// www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Searchengine_users.pdf, 2005.12.

3 S. Lawrence and C. L. Giles, NEC Research Institute, “Searching the World Wide Web”, Science, 280, April 3, 1998, p. 98. Moreover, the size isn’t just the number of Websites or pages; the number of hyperlinks embedded in the Web pages is even larger.

4 There has been some interesting litigation of late trying to stop this “free-linking” of anything to anything, in which parties have sued others who made links to the plaintiff’s Web page. Of course, this is a fraction of a fraction of a per cent, and is unlikely to have any significant effect on the way the Web is run which has been called a “loose ad-hocracy”. It no doubt just reflects the dying gasp of the old guard who would like to place at least some limits on the eventual linking of everything to everything.

5 The Dewey decimal system was organized in this way. It did not even allow the same item to be filed under two different categories, but now librarians have more leeway and file the same information under several different headings. For example, Philosophy of Religion would presumably be filed under Philosophy and Religion. Still, however, there is an agreed-upon hierarchical taxonomy.

6 What people now refer to as the modern subject came into being in the early seventeenth century as – thanks to Luther, the printing press, and the new science – people began to think of themselves as self-sufficient individuals. Descartes introduced the idea of the subject as what underlay changing mental states, and Kant argued that, as the objectifier of everything, the subject must be free and autonomous. As we shall see in Chapter 4, Søren Kierkegaard concluded that each one of us is a subject called upon to take on a fixed identity that defines who one is and what is meaningful in one’s world.

7 Steve Lohr, “Ideas and Trends: Net Americana; Welcome to the Internet, the First Clobal Colony,” The New York Times, January 9, 2000.

8 David Blair’s book, Language and Representation in Information Retrieval, New York, Elsevier Science, 1990, was chosen “Best Information Science Book of the Year” in 1999 by the American Society for Information Science, and Blair himself was named “Outstanding Researcher of the Year” by the same society in the same year.

9 David Blair, Wittgenstein, Language and Information, Springer, 2006, 287.

10 See H. Dreyfus, What Computers (Still) Can’t Do, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992.

11 See D. Lenat and R .V. Guha, Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems, New York, Addison Wesley, 1990.

12 Ibid.

13 V. Pratt, CYC Report, Stanford University, April 16, 1994.

14 D. Swanson, “Historical Note: Information Retrieval and the Future of an Illusion”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 32, no. 2, 1998, pp. 92–8.

15 The role of the body in our being able to experience space, time and objects is worked out in detail in S. Todes, Body and World, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001.

16 D. Swanson, op. cit.

17 Indeed, in spite of repeated failures, there is always some new promise on the horizon. The latest company to promise intelligent Web search is Powerset. The current hope is that syntactic natural language processing could at least allow the user’s requests to be made in everyday language and, ideally, also enable the computer to understand the meaning of what is written on each Website. But the problems of capturing embodied common sense knowledge that stalled Lenat for over 20 years have not been solved. They have simply been ignored.

18 S. Brin and L. Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 1991.

19 S. Brin, R. Motwani, L. Page, T. Winograd, What can you do with a Web in your Pocket?, Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering, 1998.

20 L. Page, S. Brin, R. Motwani, T. Winograd, The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1998). Stanford Digital Libraries SIDL-WP-1999-0120.

21 From “Our Search: Google technology” at http://www.google.com/ technology/

22 Ibid.

23 S. Brin, R. Motwani, L. Page, T. Winograd, What can you do with a Web in your Pocket? op. cit.

24 S. Brin and L. Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”

TWO HOW FAR IS DISTANCE LEARNING FROM EDUCATION?

1 T. Oppenheimer, “The Computer Delusion”, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1997.

2 See Dreyfus and Dreyfus, Mind over Machine, New York, Free Press, 1988, Chapter 5.

3 It seems that this optimism is shared in China. Reuters reports on August 22, 2000: “Chinese President Jiang Zemin offered a ringing endorsement of the Internet on Monday, saying e-mail, e-commerce, distance learning and medicine would transform China.”

4 “The Paula Gordon Show”, broadcast on February 19, 2000, on WGUN.

5 T. Gabriel, “Computers Can Unify Campuses, But Also Drive Students Apart”, The New York Times, November 11, 1996.

6 For more details, see Dreyfus and Dreyfus, op. cit.

7 See M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.

8 Patricia Benner has described this phenomenon in From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice, Menlo Park, CA, Addison-Wesley, 1984, p. 164. Furthermore, failure to take risks leads to rigidity rather than the flexibility we associate with expertise. When a risk-averse person makes an inappropriate decision and consequently finds himself in trouble, he tries to characterize his mistake by describing a certain class of dangerous situation and then makes a rule to avoid that type of situation in the future. To take an extreme example, if a driver, hastily pulling out of a parking space, is side-swiped by an oncoming car he mistakenly took to be approaching too slowly to be a danger, he may resolve to follow the rule, never pull out if there is a car approaching. Such a rigid response will make for safe driving in a certain class of cases, but it will block further skill refinement. In this case, it will prevent acquiring the skill of flexibly pulling out of parking places. In general, if one follows general rules one will not get beyond competence. Progress is only possible if, responding quite differently, the driver accepts the deeply-felt consequences of his action without detachedly asking himself what went wrong and why. If he does this, he is less likely to pull out too quickly in the future, but...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• One The Hype about Hyperlinks
• Two How Far is Distance Learning from Education?
• Three Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real
• Four Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age
• Five Virtual Embodiment: Myths of Meaning in Second Life
• Conclusion
• Notes