XplanaZine

There are many proponents of distance learning but the multitude of benefits raises both enthusiasm and fear. Many ask, is it possible to get the same, or even better quality of education by replacing the traditional classroom experience? Do we have to simulate it, pattern it along the same lines, or change it altogether? These important questions are subjects of further investigation, experimentation, data compilation and serious thinking. These are topics and issues I will come back to at a later time. However, when it comes to any question dealing with technology we can detect a vague global anxiety; does technology have a dehumanizing effect? Should we curb our enthusiasm and resist change?
Most people who resist technological adaptation, besides their personal reasons for it, also tend to appeal to the following type of reasoning: One thing brings another and before we know it computers may eventually replace everything and perhaps even revolt and devour, or assimilate, humanity in a Borg-like fashion. In other words, it is the fear of extinction. Schools, banks, business offices will no longer require a physical space to exist, at least no more than the space required for storing a bunch of computers which, in turn, store and transmit data bits. Humans will be represented and described by electronic blips and will be totally reduced to binary code.
But this final product of reduction presupposes a process of abstraction, a gradual layer remotion. According to the popular belief, the first one to depart will be human interaction resulting in the subsequent removal of feelings and emotions inducing the abnegation of morals. At the end, perhaps, there will be no physical bodies. Therefore, in the earlier stages of the nightmare, humans will be living in a meaningless and distressing world. If they survive these stages they will probably end up being cold, calculating disembodied entities that will have nothing in common with their human past.
But this kind of thinking is rather flawed. Even if these extremities could be obtained, they would be nothing like what most imagine.
Let’s start from the beginning. The unlikely case of total absence of face-to-face encounter doesn’t entail absence of human interaction. Human interaction is not limited to bodily interaction. We don’t have to go as far as drawing conclusions from the more recent examples of online discussions or email. Even old-fashioned letters fail to leave their recipients unmoved and that is without necessitating the physical presence of the sender. In fact, there are innumerable instances where the written word has a much more powerful effect than verbal interlocution. Why then consider the absence of face to face encounters to augur the beginning of an emotionless existence?
In addition, past experience has shown us the dynamics of our familiar multifaceted human interaction. But we can’t abstract from this and claim knowledge of a future when one or more aspects will have ceased to exist, e.g., face to face encounters. We know the effects of solitary confinement on a normal human being in the present (or past). However, the effects obtain in conjunction with the individual’s past experiences as well as with the state of humanity as a whole (which is still dependent on many such contacts). If humanity finds different ways of exchanging ideas, feelings, energies, to gradually replace old ones, then the replacement will also occur within each individual, and therefore, today’s evidence will be no longer valid. After all, we should not forget that such deeply rooted changes always pass very rigorous social and individual tests as well as tight filters made by nature. Therefore, it is unreasonable to think that if any fundamental changes happen they will be for the worse.
Besides the anxiety related to the possible absence of physical proximity we could also detect a vague subject/object confusion. Without explicit reasoning, some believe that apparent facts pertaining to the object of the interaction must be also facts about the experiencing subject. For example, when we, the subjects, correspond electronically with others who are the objects of our interaction, we may not always know if they are as real as we are. In some cases they may be real but not who they say they are, they may even be computer-simulated persons. But our lack of knowledge about their physical existence doesn’t cause, or correspond to, the disappearance of our own physical presence. Just because we may be interacting with what we perceive as others’ minds doesn’t reduce our own beings to bare minds. We are using our eyes to read what’s on the screen, or ears to hear it read to us, our fingers (or voice) to type, we recall and draw from past experiences to make connections, we have emotional reactions; in short, we are still whole human beings.
We don’t know what the distant future of humanity will look like. But I am confident it will be better than the present. It will take advantage of all past experience and everything it was based on. It is unlikely that humans will end up being disembodied entities or something similar. But if they do, they will not be partly human, i.e., mere intellects or computing machines. It is only the probabilistic projection into the future and the incomplete treatise about the influence of computers that is an intellectual activity and not the future itself. Technological evolution involves true experiences of whole beings that aren’t losing parts of their humanity. They may have to hit a few relative extremes of short duration, as with everything new, but, in the end, they manage to reach even further in spaciotemporal, communal and ideational distances.