One of the great intensifiers of our professional experience in these very interesting times has been the onset of computer technology. The emergence of the Online Educators Group, the appearance of many departmental and faculty web pages, and the articles in the latest Sextant by Professors Mauriello and Wilkens all speak to the high excitement of being on the verge of something new and uncharted in the field of higher education — and, of course, within the larger culture as well, where the total investment in this technology has become literally incalculable. Apart from the ubiquitous and ongoing market phenomenon, there are the contingent tithes and costs that accrue as computers consume more of our time and energy in the "shadow work" of applying them to the routines of maintaining a personal or a working life. The widely documented increase in the average workweek has surely to do in part with the difficulties people face in managing the technological resources their work environment has imposed on them. A similar tax on our time applies to these tools at home: financial management software doesn't work very well unless the user undertakes the learning curve, the upgrade path, and all the downright drudgery that comes with a complex software hobby. When you factor in the consumer, entertainment, and communications commitments that fuel the Web and games marketplaces, it's not hard to hypothesize a mass mobilization of human energies as impressive as any ever told in prose or rhyme.

     So of course educators are participating, particularly since computing technology has precisely to do with the creation, storage, and delivery of information in every category. But this proximity of an oncoming technology to our own disciplines, methods, and professional objectives puts an especially fine point on the anxiety most of us feel about the emergence of computers as a mass medium. A complete anatomy of our unease might begin with the varieties of pure superstition which make people fear and resent real change in any of its aspects. There are also well-founded insecurities about a new technology's destructive capacities: breathing down the neck of every Luddite there's a downsizer. Qualms about the losses and costs of taking up new media date back as far as Socrates, who mistrusted writing on the grounds that it weakened the memory and isolated its users from the real-time, face-to-face exchanges of dialectic reasoning. I think, though, that there are some misdoubts unique to, or at least very specific to, computers in education, and that probing them may clear a way to a new level of insight, if not comfort, about the technology that unnerves us most of all.

     To tease these misdoubts out into the open, I'll simply declare that any educational institution that defines its "products" as being deliverable by computers, even the most powerful servers, deserves to be replaced by those computers, and very likely will be. The application of computer technology to distance learning tends to degrade higher education to a certification process by which students absorb "content" and attain "skills" with a vocational objective in view. For educators blindsided by computerization, the tragedy will reside not in the reduction of surviving faculty and administrators to the status of webmasters, but in the lost opportunity to mobilize and apply the critical capacities of teachers and students to the technology that most demands and rewards these capacities.

     Marshall McLuhan famously observed that the content of a new medium is always the old one. It's easy to misapprehend this motto, I think: a hegemonic implication rises from it all too readily. In fact, it's up to us to apply this insight to our disciplines and methods, and part of this obligation is precisely to counter the imperialisms, fallacies, and reductions a new technology inspires among its enthusiasts. All serious observers of the Internet, for example, have encountered the ritual formulation that hypertext triumphs over the dreadful, old, "linear" way of reading and thinking — frequently enough, in my own case, to cause the suspicion that a macro has infected some of the best minds of our generation. One of the inventors of virtual reality, Myron E. Krueger, for example, states that "hypertext breaks with the linear sequence of ordered thought demanded by the printed word" and that the "nonlinear, free-association format of hypertext" liberates the reader to "make decisions about order of presentation that the author was not willing to make." Robert Coover, one of our most inventive literary sensibilities, has used this argument to justify the title of his manifesto "The End of Books." Statements like these make it necessary to recall that the book, or codex, was invented as a replacement for the scroll by the early Christians, whose typological reading style, with its cross-references between the New Testament and the Old, required them to move back and forth easily from one to the other. It's impossible even to glance at the Talmud, with its astounding apparatus of marginal annotations and citations, without seeing a hypertext masterpiece. By the time of the Renaissance, hypertext had advanced to the invention of machine books and rotary reading desks.

     But even more egregious than the misrepresentation of the Internet's linking technology as something revolutionary is the dumbed-down, reductionist view of the reading experience concentrated in the term "linear." A longing to be liberated from the tyranny of thinking consecutively through a text cannot be satisfied by "chunking" its contents into smaller units — all reading is cumulative. Readers construct the meaning of the text, or hypertext, as they proceed, generating meaning as they connect their knowledge and experience with the writing on the scroll, or book, or monitor.

     A similar reductionism confronts us in the development and use of search engines. Except on the highest plane of this technology, where human readers catalog new sources and references on a daily basis and field queries scan flexibly organized databases, search engines are founded on the keyword. Looking for needles, they turn texts into haystacks. There is no comparison here with the structured intelligence, the contextual acuteness, of a good index, which can take an experienced professional many months to produce, but which furnishes the reader with a comprehensive guide to the organizing principles, factual bases, and argumentative structure of a complex text. Very few textbooks or scholarly works include an index of any quality today, because it's cheaper to seed the electronic manuscript with anchors and harvest a keyword index automatically, producing a much less useful, and frequently even useless, word list with page references.

     I don't mean to blame the abuse of electronic publishing or dynamic linking on the technology itself, but to emphasize that grabbing a toolbox and running with it can degrade the quality of one's work and diminish the culture's understanding of it. Approaching a technology pre-emptively or defensively can lead to destructive results and the decline of entire disciplines. But for educators, obsolescence is not the worst of it. It's our mission to understand and illuminate the human mind and all its works — not only in our particular disciplines but also and more essentially in the larger world our specialties participate in and create, the culture we comprise. Our privilege is to work directly on the consciousness that shapes and directs the lives of everyone, that subsumes all the local, contingent, incidental phenomena of the entire project of human self-knowledge. It's from this vantage that computer technology represents our great opportunity, if we can see it for what it really is.

     It's difficult to see computer technology for what it is, of course. Situated a foot-and-a-half from our monitors, who among us actually sees the windows through which we're viewing the world? Everyone knows, in a generalized sense, that new technologies for information storage and communication affect human awareness and redefine knowledge; we easily distinguish historical periods according to their principal means of articulating, remembering, and sharing truth. But it takes a particular discipline of mind to apply this kind of general insight to our own situation — to maintain a critical view of current technology. We need to look beyond our concern with the proliferation of new methods and devices and our preoccupation with "keeping up" to a more fundamental perspective which requires us to question what Heidegger called the clearing or backdrop from which these tools and resources emerge.

     Mindfulness of this standpoint allows us to cut away from a variety of distractions, including the tendency to reduce the human mind to an information-processing system and the assumption that thinking obeys formalistic, algorithmic patterns which cleverly programmed supercomputers might be able to emulate. Refuting such fallacies takes time and energy and also generates a counterforce encouraging a view of the computer as a metaphysical competitor or adversary. The actual perils of a new technology reside not in the Twilight Zone, where machines run amok, or even in our nervous tendency to misapprehend ourselves in relation to our tools, but in a reluctance to see technology as a mode of human existence. Like all technologies, beginning with spoken and written language, computers are metaphysical tools, means we have invented to test and question our understanding of reality. Seeing them as threats to the profession or defensive weapons against obsolescence, as bottom-line enhancers or dark, satanic diploma mills compromises their value and retards our comprehension of ourselves.

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