L. Gregory Bloomquist

Saint Paul University, 223 Main, Ottawa, Ontario K1S1C4

gbloomquist@ustpaul.uottawa.ca

 

PICO in the YEAR 2010: Epilogue: A Reflexion on Information Technology from a Humanities Perspective

 

By the year 2010, we shall be twenty-five more years into what has been variously called post-modernity,post-capitalism (Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York, HarperCollins, 1993)), the "end of history" (From the title of the much-discussed essay by Francis Fukuyama, "Are we at the end of history?" Fortune 121 (January 15, 1990) 75 ff.), the "new world order" (The phrase is often associated with the words of Mikhail Gorbachev and/or George Bush. See Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order, ed. Meredith Woo-Cumings and Michael Loriaux (Boulder: Westview, 1993).), the "information age" (T. C. Helvey, The Age of Information: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Cybernetics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1971), or the "post-industrial age" (International Council on Social Welfare. Regional Symposium, The Post-industrial Age: A Challenge for Social Policy and Action = L'ere post-industrielle: un defi pour la politique et l'action sociale: 13th Regional Symposium, Turku, Finland, June 9-14, 1985 (Helsinki: International Council on Social Welfare, European Region, 1987)). Already people are perceiving that our world is fundamentally different from the world our immediate predecessors knew over the last two centuries; by the year 2010 that perception will motivate significant change. Information technology needs to be understood in this context of change. For some it represents a way of hope; for others, it is the confirmation of their worst expectations.

*The situation: the relation between community and individual values

A major cultural, economic, or political paradigm shift is not a new thing, but it is something that takes time to perceive. Think of the earth-shaking shift that began when cities began to fill with contracted workers migrating from the countryside. This migration began to supplant a stable, millenia-old rural culture that was both tribal in its relationships and slave or serf-based in its economy.

This economic shift coincided with major philosophical and scientific shifts a produced our modern reality -- experienced in the Europe of the Industrial Revolution, a few decades later in the colonies of those European countries, and still today in the developing countries of the world. This enduring shift continues to break down the boundaries that have kept people in their ancestral places. It has created anomie but it has also opened up new opportunities. So, the modern age has been stamped with both disastrous working conditions and a kind of generalised optimism that even the worst conditions could be improved.

Not surprisingly, relations between the self (the individual) and the community changed dramatically. In fact, the very definitions of self and community changed. For a person who had been known by his or her tribe or village, individuality presented great possibilities and serious threats. One could now enter into contractual agreements and arrangements with others for the mutual benefit of each or one could remain isolated. This was true both for physical persons and for juridical institutions, including the nation-state. According to Peter Drucker, "in the four hundred years since the French lawyer-politician Jean Bodin (1530-1596) invented it (in his Six Livres de la République, published in 1576), the nation-state became the sole organ of political power, both internally and externally. ... Political theory and constitutional law still know only the sovereign state. And in the last hundred years this state has steadily become more powerful and more dominant, mutating into a "megastate". ... Every one of the nearly 200 new countries that have been carved out of the former colonial empires since the end of World War II has been set up as a sovereign nation-state. (Post-Capitalist Society, 10-11).

As noted at the outset, we are today again experiencing the trembling of the foundations`of our known world. In the so-called industrialised West there is now an elastic relationship between place of work and place of habitation, caused in part by a kind of anomie of the modern city. That anomie extends to the relationship between the person and the community around: there is a growing discomfort with the isolationism that pure individualism affords and a desire to return to some kind`of community. Some have even called the economic and political period we are living "neo-medieval".

One of the motors of this change has been and will continue to be information technology, by which we mean all of those applications of techne that allow the flow of information. Obviously, information technology is not new. What is new is the proliferation of new kinds of electronic technologies that have led some authors to call this the "information age", namely, an age in which information has replaced agriculture and industry as the generating source of wealth, in which a product-oriented industrial base has yielded to a process-oriented, information base (Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992)). This does not mean that industry disappears from the socio-economic scene, just as the zenith of the industrial period never saw the disappearance of rural life and agriculture. The central factor stimulating social change and transition is the transformation of the economy from one that is industry-oriented to one that is information-oriented (including the expansion of higher education).

Several of the PICO roundtable panelists spoke of "globalisation" through information technology. Globalisation, whereby people and situations around the globe become the neighbours and concerns of all inhabitants of the globe, is leading us to distance ourselves more and more from "state-centric realist approaches" and to adopt approaches stressing "the importance of transnational and transgovernmental actors in the international system." By the year 2010, "the formal trappings of sovereignty" will remain, but states will "no longer effectively exercise their power because" they will "not control international economic movements, at least not at acceptable costs" (International Regimes,edited by Stephen D. Krasner (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), vii). Brought about by tensions between the USSR and the US, foreign trade pressures, demands by developing countries for "a New International Economic Order", OPEC, the end of the Vietnam War, the deterioration of global economic performance.

By the year 2010 we shall perceive more fully how the flow of information has broken down geographical divisions and even national sovereignty if even now, we can begin to see the erosion of the nation-state in favour of trans-national organisations, be they IBM and Sony or multi-national organisations, such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace and the Internet? According to Drucker, though the nation-state has been on the rise for 400 years,

since the end of World War II, the sovereign nation-state has steadily been losing its position as the sole organ of power. Internally, developed countries are fast becoming pluralist societies of organizations.


While some academics -- including our panelists -- have noted the change, this change has been mandated not by academics but by the business community in its challenge to the traditional canons and in its engagement of practical multiculturalism (Rieff, "Multiculturalism's Silent Partner: It's the Newly Globalized Consumer Economy, Stupid," Harper's, August, 1993, 62-72). Rieff notes that "the advent of multiculturalism is [no] more separable from the society in which it has arisen than, say, the philosophy of the Enlightenment was from the rapidly secularizing and industrializing world that gave birth to it" (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 62). In fact, he argues, what is seen as "a threat to the capitalist system ... is nothing of the sort, as becomes clear the moment`one stops looking at multiculturalism in ideologized, millenarian terms -- as if it were some kind of pure, homegrown manifestation of the Zeitgeist -- and instead sees it as perhaps the most salient cultural epiphenomenon of an increasingly globalized capitalist system" (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 63). Not surprisingly, the article itself has passed almost entirely unnoticed and uncommented in the academic world.

Think, for example, of the area of finance, which can today only be described as a sector governed by a certain order within chaos, with no one form of organisation or power center being dominant. This chaos is well-reflected in Joel Kurtzman's book The Death of Money, which is appropriately sub-titled How the Electronic Economy Has Destablized the World's Markets and Created Financial Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). Kurtzman notes that in the world of the new, electronic economy, which he calls the "megabyte standard", national economies have become relatively immaterial, with national governments unable to control or supervise markets.

For business, however, this is not at all a negative situation. According to David Rieff, "the multiculturalist mode is what any smart businessman would prefer" (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 64 asks, "are the multiculturalists truly unaware of how closely their treasured catchphrases -- 'cultural diversity', 'difference', the need to 'do away with boundaries' -- resemble the stock phrases of the modern corporation -- 'product diversification', 'the global marketplace', and 'the boundary-less company'?" For the last phrase, "boundary-less company," Rieff draws on the work of Larry Hirschhorn and Thomas Gilmore, "The New Boundaries of the "Boundaryless" Company," Harvard Business Review 70 (May - June, 1992) 104-115).

Contemporary corporate thinking was at the vanguard of seeing "that non-white workers will be the key to the twenty-first century American labor market ..., of the crucial role of women, and of the need to change the workplace in such a way as to make it more hospitable to them," of the impossibility of speaking of "the United States as some fixed, sovereign entity" (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 64-65).

Corporate citizens were among the first to see that "the world has moved on; capital and labor are mobile; and with each passing year national borders, not to speak of national identities, become less relevant either to consciousness or to commerce" (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 65).For Rieff, academic multiculturalists -- including, of course, humanities scholars -- are in fact significantly less radical than, for example, people like Ted Turner who no longer allows the use of the word "foreign" in CNN broadcasts (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 65).

No serious player in the business world has anything but the most vestigial or sentimental interest in Western civilization, as it is roughly understood by campus radicals and conservatives alike. What each side's argument fails to take into account is that capitalism is the bull in the china shop of human history. The market economy, now global in scale, is by its nature corrosive of all established hierarchies and certainties, up to and including -- in a world now more than 50 percent non-white and in which the most promising markets lie in Asia -- white racism and male domination. ... Eurocentrism makes no economic sense in a world where, within twenty-five years, the combined gross national product of East Asia will likely be larger than Europe's and twice that of the United States (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 69-70).

During the next twenty-five years, we shall know better whether the results are more positive or more negative for those outside of the business community. We can only speculate now on where things will end up, should no changes be made in the present situation. On the one hand, there appear to be greater possibilities for minorities and women around the world than ever before. In this context, the information highway can be some to be a significant road forward in the expansion of knowledge, which " creates a basis for cooperation by illuminating complex interconnections that were not previously understood. Knowledge can not only enhance the prospects for convergent state behavior, it can also transcend 'prevailing lines of ideological cleavage'" (Stephen D. Krasner, "Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables," International Regimes, edited by Stephen D. Krasner (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 19 (quoting from Ernst Haas, "Why Collaborate? Issue-Linkage and International Regimes," World Politics 32 (1980) 367-368)).

Right now, however, the change is being perceived negatively for those who are not in the "management class". Lower- and middle-class North Americans of all races and both genders are complaining that their livelihood is being eaten away and that they are working harder and harder just to keep pace. People in the US and Canada sense an "unraveling of the middle class and the erosion of its comfortable expectations" about their future (Daniel Bell, "Into the 21st Century, Bleakly," New York Times, Sunday, July 26, 1992, op. ed.).

Americans are frightened that US economist Robert Solow may be correct when he notes that "this generation may be the first in American history that will leave its children poorer than itself" (Bell, "Into the 21st Century.").

On our own continent, we are already abundantly aware of a down-side to the picture, namely, the loss of millions of low-paying, low-education, industrial production jobs that are being re-structured out of existence. These jobs seem to be disappearing to countries of the Pacific Rim, Europe and the southern Americas.

But, the situation goes deeper than the economic reality. While the changes we are witnessing may be "an economic necessity" (Rieff, "Multiculturalism," 70),people are beginning to perceive that the implications for them are that the very economic foundation for their culture is itself beginning to crack (Bell, "Into the 21st Century").

Yet, they find no unified sets of beliefs to take the place of the modernist positions that have left us where we are now, but without direction as to where to go, and with a progressive belief that we cannot go backward, most feel no way out, "only the splintering of cultures and political fragmentation" (Bell, "Into the 21st Century") that leads to "culture wars" among those seeking to make sense of the fragments of modern or even pre-modern belief-systems.

Faced with this situation, some attempt to arrest the changes by demonising either the corporations they perceive to be responsible for the globalisation or the countries that are now their immediate economic neighbours (Finn, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, argues for strong checks on the unfettered progress of corporations and the growing internationalisation of business. He suggests that this happened in the 19th century, when the power of corporations "was curbed by a combination of strong unions and reform-minded national governments [which] managed to stop or moderate the worst excesses of unfettered capitalism" (""New World Order" merely a plot by transnational corporations,", Ottawa Citizen, October 17, 1993, B1)).

Others attempt to deal with the situation by forcing the splintered fragments of modern realities into some kind of post-modern, relativistic context. But, as Prof. Richard Shweder noted in a speech to the 1993-1994 class of freshmen at the University of Chicago, the post-modern relativistic facade of "political correctness" is anything but relativism; rather, it is contemporary Puritanism (Richard A. Shweder, "Puritans in High-Top Sneakers," New York Times, Monday, September 27, 1993, p. A17),

an iron fist of shrapnel, an assemblage of broken fragments.

Still others attempt to take refuge in the past. For example, we are seeing that the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia is not simply the result of competing nation-states and economic claims but of competing civilizations, as is the clash between Islam and the West, and between Confucian civilization and non-Confucian. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington argued that the world of the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century would be characterised by just such cultural conflicts between nations and groups of different civilizations because, says Huntington, civilizations are more basic than our economic relations and have differing views or fundamental issues. Accepting the reality of globalisation, Hunter argues that as civilizations come into closer contact with each other, people lose their identity within the nation state and regain it through a re-discovery (and retrenchment!) of civilization (often associated with religion). Furthermore, he senses a rejection of the Western secularist -- what I have called here "modernist" -- approach (Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1993, 22-28. According to Huntington, these new flash points will involve the West vs. Islam, Confucian China, and Japan; and Islam vs. the West, animist, black Africa, the orthodox east, and Hinduism ("Clash of Civilizations," 29-35).).

But, if we assume that we cannot go back in history -- and it is an assumption that remains to be substantiated -- the one thing that we perhaps can do at this time is to provide avenues of communication whereby people are allowed to talk and bring those broken fragments to the table, where they are allowed to come to the hard point of really disagreeing and -- perhaps agreeing --, rather than taking refuge in balkanized, ideological positions of one kind or another. According to Jean Bethke Elshtain (Democracy on Trial [New York: HarperCollins, 1995]), such true communication of ideas is not possible in the puritanical society of "scrutiny, total accountability, and instant justice" in which "the social space for difference, dissent, refusal and indifference is squeezed out". Then, and only then, will we be on the road to a solution that will leave us better human beings in 2010 than we now are.

*The beginnings of a solution: a community of networks

It is in this context of conflict and the search for new avenues of communication that the information highway will play an important role. For, in our big picture, I think that what we will see replacing both pre-modern, tribal communities and modern agglomerations of individuals -- including the intentional societies of those who attempt to `shore up fragments against the ruins' (T.S. Eliot)of their modernism -- will be new forms of communities, not defined by geography or by class, communities that will be made possible, at least in part, by new modes of electronic communication.

I believe that by the year 2010 it will have become clear that the modern self or individual was a construct of the modern period rather than some sort of ontological given. In fact, there may not be a given subject in our world. If that is so, then what we always deal with is constructs. And, as evidenced by the rise of ecological and green movements, by the incredible "take-off" of the Internet as a tool of communication, and by shifts in literary style to hypertext -- in which books are no longer final products of individual authors but texts in process of being authored by a community of creator --, community will be the construct of the subject in an information society. This ideological shift is "trickling down" to non-partisan groups, as is clear from last year's Democratic convention, in which appeal was consistently made to communitarian values, as opposed to the traditional Democratic calls to individual worth

By "community", however, it should be clear that we are not thinking of tribal communities, medieval guilds or the modern suburban community. The community of the information age will be essentially functional. Furthermore, one of the features of that new situation will be constant engagement with those who hold differing or even conflicting ideological opinions, an engagement that will eventually lead to new communities based not on dogma and on culture, but to communities formed through strategic alliances. According to Robert Bellah and his team, "contemporary society desperately needs the kind of integrative vision that can only be obtained by drawing upon the sensitivities of groups -- such as the groups who gather in churches and synagogues -- who have maintained their particularized visions of community and belonging and faith in God" (quoted in Richard Mouw and Sander Griffioen, Pluralisms and Horizons: An Essay in Christian Public Philosophy (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1993), 160 using: kinship motif (p. 161), common worship (p. 165)).

Hirschhorn and Gilmore have given evidence of a clear move in this direction in the business world. They begin by noting that the traditional organizational map describes a world that no longer exists, a world in which roles are rigidly defined. Companies that are best able to respond to new situations are companies that have found that "creating the right kind of relationships at the right time is the key to productivity, innovation and effectiveness" through creating and managing new boundaries (Hirschhorn and Gilmore "The "Boundaryless" Company," 106).

Strategic alliances will also become normative in the global context. Nation-states or regions within nation-states have already begun to form strategic alliances with "elites", that is, with "the practical actors in international relations." For

then we will faced with a context that present modernist nation-states are completely unprepared for.

This is clearest in discussions of the information highway. For, in the context of the communications nets of "elites", it will be impossible to limit the information highway to a national context or even to control it within that context. So, for example, it will be impossible to view the information highway merely through a Canadian optic alone. The information highway is an essential moment and "regime" within the broader, international context. Nevertheless, an emphasis on the national -- e.g., Canadian -- will probably remain among those who are still dominated by the modernist nation-state focus. In doing so, however, they will risk relegating that nation-state's citizens to the position of onlookers as others create a Global Information Infrastructure.

As a positive suggestion, then, I would suggest that the goal of Canadians -- including Canadian humanists -- in this nascent information age not be to ensure Canada's borders through such slogans as "cultural sovereignty" but to look outwards and to bring what is uniquely Canadian into the world melting-pot. And what that is specifically is a generous and open invitation to help the less fortunate found in few other countries. Canada, through its international development policies and peace-keeping status in the world, is uniquely situated to concentrate more and more on the international order, and on how regions of the world relate within that international context. Canada has an opportunity to move the never-ending dilemma of federal-provincial debates into the world context in the positive context of assisting others to understand each other.

*The link: Education

Canadian humanities scholars have a significant role to play in all of this. For, where the above can best happen is in the communications context par excellence, namely, education. But, in order for education to take its proper role in the information age does not mean simply to ensure that every school has a computer on every desk. Rather, educationists ought to reflect seriously on the present inadequate modernist mission of education to which computers are simply added as the latest technological piece of machinery in the factory. What will this mean?

In large part education still takes place according to a 19th century industrial model. Think, for example, of the huge physical plants still in place and used to churn out the "products" of the educational factory. Think of the tremendous overhead in costs to staff these factories with workers. Think of the process and capital costs involved in upgrading these factories. This industry, as much as any other, falls within the bounds of Thurow's critique!

In the age we are now living, prescient minds have seen that other models than the modernist, industrial one are not only possible but necessary. There are experiments at the primary and secondary school levels. New Brunswick is attempting to implement smaller, decentralised, more accountable schools. Alberta is proceeding with an experiment in "charter schools". In Ontario, the Supreme Court is now hearing cases brought against it by a "strategic alliance" of religious schools, all seeking to fund independent school operations, following their own curriculum, but using public monies to do so.

Major changes are also necessary at the tertiary level. During the first half of the 20th century, university education was the arena for the teaching of humanistic truth, the domain of the academy. As such, university education was clearly distinguished from the church (the domain for the teaching of transcendental truth) and the workplace (the domain for the teaching practical truth to workers and managers).

But, changes in the economy, in society, and in philosophy have altered this situation. While skills are still taught in trade-schools, the distinction between these schools and universities is, for better or worse, gradually being eroded as universities encourage more professional courses and as trade schools and community colleges teach more humanities courses to remedy the shortcomings of secondary education.

Demographic changes are also having a significant impact. For example, the student population is aging. From 1972 to 1993, enrolment of students over 25 grew by 142% while that of students under 25 grew by only 65%. In 1972, the former group accounted for only 19% of all students; by 1993, it accounted for over 25% (Mongi Mouelhi, "University Enrolment Trends," Education Quarterly Review, 2.1 (1995), 41-42).

Furthermore, among the age-groups involved in the growth of the part-time students, the over-25 age-group, which is the fastest growing group of university students, is the majority among part-time students (Moumlhi, "Enrolment Trends," 42).

But because these students are usually already involved in job or family relationships, they are less mobile than former students. But, because there is less mobility, there has been a significant increase in part-time attendance that, unlike modest and short-term increases in full-time attendance, will continue.

True, full-time enrolment continues to grow. For example, in 1964, there were 163,802 students enroled as full-time students at the undergraduate or first cycle level, and this had grown to an estimated 504,500 in 1994. This increase is, however, almost completely due to the influx of female students, for in 1964, while there were 113.378 male students enroled and only 50,424 female students, the numbers had increased less considerably for males in 1994 to 230,500, while for females the numbers had increased radically to 274,000. It would seem logical that at some point, the markets will level out and full-time growth will plateau. In fact, a comparison of figures for the period 1990-1994 suggests that this leveling may already have been reached (Mouelhi, "Enrolment Trends," 37). Part-time enrolment would seem to be the direction of the future.

Part time growth, which has also experienced similar gender growth, continues to grow more quickly for a combined number of men and women, as well as for the two genders independently. Thus, for example, in 1964, there were only 56,481 students enroled part-time at the undergraduate level in Canada, of which 33,472 were men and 23,009 were women. By 1994, the estimated population of the total part-time, undergraduate population had reached 245,000, with 92,000 men and 153,000 women. In fact, as the Statistics Canada report shows, "since 1962, full-time and part-time enrolments have increased by 337% and 548% respectively ("Mouelhi, "Enrolment Trends," 39). The report goes on to note that since 1970 both groups have increased by about 85%. The suggestion is made elsewhere in the article that the increase in full-time students may indicate not that there are more undergraduate students, but that students are lengthening their programs and staying in university longer, thus leading to the statistical picture of more university students (Mouelhi, "Enrolment Trends," 36; see also D. Lynd, "Increases in University Enrolment: Increased Access or Increased Retention?" Education Quarterly Review 1.1 (1994) 12-21).

What this will mean for universities will be further financial difficulties, on top of existing funding cuts faced by certain universities. It could mean cuts in university offerings, whether faculty and administrators wish to face the cuts or not. At the November, 1994 SSHRCC conference "Shaping the future", none of the university administrators wanted to admit the possibility that their institutions might be able to get by with less direct government funding. The February, 1995 Federal budget and subsequent provincial budgets, however, have ensured that they will have to!

Such cuts will make the continuation of certain departments or programs difficult or impossible. At the University of Ottawa, as different programs as the Visual Arts, Classics, Religious Studies, and Geology departments and the varsity football team were threatened with closure.

In some cases, this fiscal crisis may even threaten the existence of the university or college itself. Furthermore, in some areas of the US and Canada, universities are faced with collapse for other reasons, namely, the regulatory pressure brought to bear upon them by regional and federal regulatory bodies, or by special interest groups within the university. The recent attempt by the Ontario government to impose restrictions on what could be considered harassment by some but free-speech by others is a classic example.

Accordingly, the shape of the North American university, as we have known it in the 20th century, will doubtless change by 2010, even as all the PICO panelists seemed to realise. The pressures are causing those involved in university-education to question whether the present system is the most suitable hermeneutical context for the discernment of, reflection on, and practice of humanistic meaning.

There are those who, like our panelist, Ronald Bond, are willing to confront these changes with both eyes open. Bond, as is clear from his comments, sees that information technology will not be the only answer to ensure that education play its proper role as a communications link. Nevertheless, he also sees that it will be an important element of the link, for it will allow the kind of continuing learning that is, like strategic alliances, adaptable to new situations.

I believe that information technology will assist in the creation of a new educational environment that we might call "hyperlearning". Such an approach will carry us beyond the "paleotronic" stage to which the WWW and its access tools have now brought us and will lead us to a "mesotronic" stage (the terms were coined by Paul Evan Peters, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, cited in Wilson, "Navigating the Web," A29. For an example of what is already being done in a hyperlearning-style environment at the Universities of Guelph, Waterloo, and McMaster, see the note on "Electronic classroom links three campuses," University Affairs, October, 1994) which will arise from developments carried out on the basis of present WWW and access designs. Hyperlearning will assist in the creation of social and communicative interactivity, through which knowledge is not only disseminated -- as in present WWW activity -- but also constructed. Hyperlearning, unlike present WWW activity, will allow for "negotiating with others' orientations" (See the review by Kathryn A. Murphy-Judy, Sociomedia, Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Knowledge, ed. by Edward Barrett, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), in Offline 47: Religious Studies News, November, 1994, 33)in some way other than the creation of multiple WWW sites, all staking out positions in "culture wars".

Furthermore, unlike distance education, as it is still being practiced by many universities, hyperlearning will recognise the need for a multiplicity of fora for learning. This will include lectures -- live, via satellite, on tape, etc. --, seminars -- with a leader present, via distance formats, unled --, individual appropriation -- through reading --, computer-networking involving discussion of topics, local-networking whereby individuals will meet together to discuss topics of interest. This is true multi-media. In a review of John Slatin, "Is There a Class in This Text?," in Sociomedia, Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Knowledge, ed. by Edward Barrett, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), Murphy-Judy argues that in these more self-directed contexts, students may not "know enough to ask important questions or to form a self-directing learning community." She points to Slatin's students' lack of critical thinking and unchallenged assumptions. She thinks that, though revolutionary aims were the target, "there is no evidence (in the article) that the students considered where their attitudes came from, how consensus operates in the construction of knowledge, how power is established and what relationship they have to bureaucratic institutions." She concludes that while computer-mediated communication may lead to a new learning-environment, it need not necessarily do so. If it does not, it may in fact lead to greater estrangement and alienation (Murphy-Judy, Review of Sociomedia, 34).

True, there are questions in all of this.

In the end, what I am suggesting is that we may have to abandon some notions, cherished especially by statist academics of the right and the left, that the preserve of education is the government-funded academy as it now exists. (Though she is right to call for their discussion, Murphy-Judy's fundamental questions of value cannot be answered a priori. See Murphy-Judy, review of Sociomedia, 33-34.)

While this position does fit the modernist nation-state context of previous generations, it does not respond adequately to the shifts that reveal a new socio-economic and political configuration.

A good example of how education is breaking out of the academic context is found in the way hyperlearning is already being introduced in business. The Ford Motor Co. in Burlington, Ontario, through the satellite connections provided by CANCOM, can now connect with dealerships all around Ontario in order to provide on the spot training for new products, maintenance courses for mechanics.

Of course, the possibilities are endless, once one realises that the satellite connection to Ford dealerships essentially makes them distance education points for their local communities. Hyperlearning will be able to address not only elements of the crisis facing universities, but also learning needs according to gender, business, background, economic status, etc. In this way, hyperlearning will allow us to learn more about individual learning styles, even as these same styles, largely socially constructed, change. (This question specifically will be pursued in 1996 during the Canadian Learned Societies congress to be held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. At that time, various companies, universities, and representatives of various levels of government will get together not only to showcase information technology, but to discuss the intersection of interests precisely as these are made realisable through information technology).

*The Prerequisite of Hyperlearning: Leisure

The demographic and student shift in secondary schools and university, the cry of parents of children in primary schools for better and yet more flexible primary education, and the possibilities of hyperlearning have made a more reasonable and humane approach to the way learning is carried out a priority and a possibility. There is a greater realisation that present educational philosophies, which are based on modern understandings of personal worth in terms of a person's work, are inadequate and that schools based on those philosophies may not be the best place to ensure an education.

Humanities scholars should be in the forefront of those who would argue for an education in the truest sense of the word, that is, a liberal education, and for the appropriate atmosphere for that education to take place, namely, an atmosphere of leisure. The industrial or factory model, within which humanities scholars have laboured, is ill-suited to their needs. Not surprisingly, the atmosphere of assembly line work in which most schools or universities have long tried to impart the universe of knowledge is both unrealistic and unhealthy.

Not surprisingly, business has begun to argue for a similar shift. In a recent article in the New York Times, Leonard Sloane reported companies that were providing opportunities for executives to read works they normally would not otherwise read, to engage in analysis of and discussion about those works, and to include physical exercise as a key component of the reflective time ("Setting Aside the Time for Intellectual Growth," New York Times, March 5, 1995, F21). They perceived that something more than training programs, or even training in a particular task, was necessary.

Seeing what really counts, what really matters, takes time. It is a task that one does not simply set out to do in a regular day's work. It is sometimes disconnected and free-wheeling, sometimes disciplined and cautious; sometimes the answer hits you in a dream, sometimes after hours of concentrated reflection. In fact, because this is so, leisure is in fact the highest aim that anyone can pursue (Aristotle, Politics 1334a11-1334b27 and 1337b23-1338b7).

How paradoxical this sounds in our Canadian context, where we have been taught that leisure is the dessert, the end result of work, and that "work" itself and a job well-done are the highest aims. But, while it is true that, because of the democratic make-up of our society, all members of society are considered to contribute through work to the building of our society, it is not true that work as such is the goal of our labours; rather, it is the opportunity to enjoy and profit from the country that is built through those labours. In fact, in our post-modern society we are coming full circle to re-discover the classical truth that education must first be about leisure before it can be about work. For, unless we wish to descend into anarchy, we need as a first priority to learn how to enjoy the fruits of our labours through intellectual culture, temperance, and justice, a joyful pursuit of human development through formation`of the body, the appetites, and the intellect (Aristotle, Politics 1334a11-1334b27).

It is in the context of leisure that education as hyperlearning will enable us to develop the new skills of communication, so essential in an age of globalisation and change. Another word for these communication skills that go beyond techniques of communication to a true reflection on communication and the ability to communicate is rhetoric. In essence, then, what we need is a new rhetoric, or hyper-rhetoric.

As we know, classical rhetoric was essentially a competitive, rigorous, and, in the fullest sense of the word, agonistic discipline. Various schools arose within the context of rhetorical address: the Sophists, their critics -- like Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Cynics -- who spoke aphoristically and denied the value of rhetoric, all the while using rhetoric. Their task was the same one we have noted above is the task that is presented to us today in a conflictual world: to come to the point of true disagreement (rather than hiding from arguments) and thus, and only thus, if possible to come to some agreement.

I believe that what we are now seeing is the creation of the kind of plethora of rhetorical models familiar to us from classical Greek and Hellenistic models. I believe that we shall also witness some of the same battles. So, in spite of the very positive suggestions made by`Murphy-Judy in her overview of the work being done, then, there is a failure to see that thinking other than critical thinking is crucial. What we need to attend to is first of all new forms of rhetorical, and not just logical and philosophical, argumentation.

*A Practical Scenario

If, as pointed out by Kenneth Melchin, "technologies penetrate in to the full range of meanings, values, customs, beliefs, and the expectations of a culture, shaping the hopes, the aspirations, and the sense of identity of their participants (Kenneth R. Melchin, "The Challenges of Technological Society for the Understanding of Christian Faith," in Défis présents et à venir de l'université catholique: Actes du colloque international du centenaire de l'Université Saint-Paul, ed. by Jacques Croteau, (Ottawa: Saint Paul University, 1989), 130),then these new forms of argumentation will arise, at least in part, through information technology. Information technology will make possible new reading approaches that shift the balance of power from the text to the reader, breaking down the status of an individual printed text (The Digital Word: Text-based Computing in the Humanities, ed. by George P. Landow and Paul Delany (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), reviewed by Jean-Claude Guédon, Offline 47: Religious Studies News, November, 1994, 35).They will create new ways in which we can find out about our past, our present and our future. For these new relationships will create a "synthetic reconstruction (beyond the 'natural' limits of historically experienced modes of communication) of time, space and subject" (Guédon, review of Digital Word, 35). And, as pointed out above and by various authors, such a new rhetoric will be one that reshapes and expands community rather than doing away with it (See, for example, Stevan Alburty's op-ed column, "It's a Buyer's Marketplace," New York Times, March 20, 1995).

In order to suggest how this might become reality outside the present boundaries of the industry, government, and the academy, let me suggest a future scenario.

In a refurbished warehouse within an existing GM auto-plant in the US, a group of workers prepares to go on an 8-hour shift. But this shift is different. A group of the workers has been selected to do an hour of cultural studies. Today this group is going to reflect on religious diversity in the origins of the American republic.

They will be asked to identify their own religious background and to type out a brief statement of that background. Using special interactive software, they will then proceed to highlight some of the most outstanding words in their text. For example, one worker is from a Ukrainian Catholic background, and grew up in Pennsylvania. He highlights all three proper substantives. Another work is a new Evangelical convert from a Swedish family. She highlights all the proper substantives and on an additional clip-board, provided for extra words, types "born-again", "Christian", and "Jesus". And so on.

Then, each of the workers proceeds through their own text, clicking on their own highlighted words, which were interactively, through the software, tagged to WWW sights containing information on each of these words. (If a word was highlighted for which there was no information -- for example, Finnish Buddhism -- the software sent an immediate message to the preparation centre, located in a small room in Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, indicating that information had been requested on this "text" and that such information needed to be input before the next session (Brock was chosen as the sight of this experiment and financed by a grant from GM because of the huge numbers of workers in the St. Catharines area who had been laid off work).

As the hour-long session comes to a close, the workers have a better understanding of their own religious backgrounds. These texts will all be logged, and at the next session, they will be invited to call up anonymously the religious picture of one of their peers, which they will then examine. They will be allowed to pursue further the questions of religious distinctions among their peers, depending on the perception of the trainer as to the value of such an investigation.

The above is of course fictional. But, I would argue that it is both realistic, possible, and a likely scenario for radically decentralised education in a networked environment. Why, one might ask? What would GM stand to gain in such an experiment? There are various reasons why a company might engage such an experiment. If its workers need an education that goes beyond or corrects what they have received at either the primary or secondary levels, they need to have in place some way to provide that education or to contract the provision. If it is perceived that education can assist the workers either to communicate better or to improve their own working environment or personal lives, a business could, as a good corporate citizen, suggest and provide ways in which that would be possible. Again, they would need to be in such a position to make provision for these ways.

The above has recently been confirmed as to its viability and appropriateness in a study designed by the National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce at the University of Pennsylvania and done by the US Census Bureau for the Department of Education. That study, released in May, 1995, and carried out among ,000 businesses employing 20 workers or more, found that a 10% increase in the educational attainment of a company's workforce resulted in a nearly equivalent increase in productivity. On the other hand, the study also found that a 10% increase in the value of capital stock (e.g., tools, buildings, and machinery) resulted in a productivity increase of less than 4%. The results were found to be greatest among workers in nonmanufacturing and least among retail and wholesale trade workers (See, Peter Appelbome, "Study Ties Educational Gains to More Productivity Growth," New York Times, Sunday, May 14, 1995, 22).

The study supports other findings that indicate that employees gain an 8% average increase in income for each additional year of schooling they receive at secondary, tertiary, or post-graduate level.

This study, however, comes on the heels of an earlier study, also by the Bureau of the Census for the Department of Education, in which it was shown that US employers in overwhelming numbers lack confidence in US schools as they are now structured. According to the earlier study, US employers do not regularly look to US schools for new employees but to other suppliers. These same employers judged as extremely important qualities such as attitude and communication skills but did not see the schools as providing these (Appelbome, "Educational Gains," 22).

What employers want is not a more complacent workforce but one that has a greater self-esteem and understanding, one that allows it to play a fuller role in an ever more demanding world order (See L. Gregory Bloomquist, "Networked Pre-Publication Models: Opportunities, Possibilities, and Outstanding Questions in the "University without Walls"," Journal of Religious and Theological Information 2 (1994) 95-114, for a discussion of the insights to be gained from the economic context.

In order to achieve this, argues the report, is "more direct, substantive and businesslike transactions between" schools and employers(Appelbome, "Educational Gains," 22).

*Conclusion

Some see the post-modern, post-industrial, and post-capitalist world arising deterministically as a result of technology. From this group there are those who embrace that world and those that are willing to do everything to fight it and delay the inevitable as long as possible. Both see technology as having captured reason within its clutches, rather than as being subject to the critique of reason (Benoit Garceau, "La raison à l'épreuve de la technique," Eglise et théolgie 18 (1987) 11-27. One wonders whether Murphy-Judy's critique fits here as well).

But, it is also possible to see technology not as a deterministic motor of history but as affording an opportunity to shape anew our thinking and communication as we move into this post-modern age. Our panelists, for example, appear to see technology and education as having the ability to make such a transition humane and progressive, rather than chaotic and fearful.

Humanities scholars have an essential, Socratic role to play in reflecting on how technology can help to bridge conflicts between existing civilisations and, as midwives, to assist new civilisations to come to birth (See Melchin, "Challenges of Technological Society," 124).

Because of the rapidly changing societal and world orders, information technologies will doubtless have a significant role to play in assisting those involved in education to be able to meet the demands and to help people to communicate rather than to define themselves in terms of narrower and more restricted special-interest groups (See, for example, James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic, 1991)).

If, it is true, that, as Lionel Trilling notes (Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays of Literature and Society (Garden City: Doubleday, 1953)),

liberal persons are those who are able to keep many ideas in play at once and the fanatic who can only keep one in play, then in an age of renewed tribalism and fanaticism, and in age where modernist approaches will fight hard to keep the modern from yielding its hold, humanities scholars ought to count themselves among those who will assist in the creation of new rhetorics that keep many ideas, rather than one dominant idea, in play.

The place where this will happen, "education" in the broadest sense, will be highly flexible and utopic. By the year 2010, schools and universities will no more be the only context for the search for humanistic meaning than the church is today the context for the search for transcendent meaning. Education which lazily attempts to preserve that status-quo relationship is doomed. Humanities scholars may not like the idea of an "information highway" on which to do their work. Perhaps a better picture for the new context of "personal nomadic information access" will in fact be the trade-routes of antiquity (cf the report by L. Gregory Bloomquist, "Pathways for service in the electronic village," In House/Chez Nous: An update for members`of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, January 12, 1994, . The phrase "personal nomadic information access" was used by Peter Sellarius of the STENTOR alliance).

Nevertheless, it will still be an "on-the-road" education in process, rather than the artificially stable and unbending production line that education now too often is. And, it will be education in communication and through communication.