Digital Promises
Arun Kumar Tripathi,
Ubiquity,
Oct 02, 2002
Discussion of Hubert Dreyfus's article "As Educators Rush to Embrace, a Coterie of Skeptics Seeks to Be Heard." A cyber-sceptic, Dreyfus argues that "The risk-free anonymity of the Internet, he says, makes it a good medium for slander, innuendo, endless gossip, and ultimately, boredom. Without some way of telling the relevant from the irrelevant and the significant from the insignificant, everything becomes equally interesting and equally boring." I think this can be answered by pointing out that life online is as real in any meaningful sense as life offline (See my article Education and Embodiment). Tripathi responds, "if we spend most our time looking at a screen, without knowing why, but convinced that this is the new step in human evolution, then we clearly have missed the point of why we exist." But that presupposes that the meaning of existence lies in our bodies. It may lie in our minds and our ideas. It may be that the purpose of existence is to link together via computers to create collectively, perhaps, an Ãœbermind.
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