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Thoughtful Citizenship in the Information Age
This article was adapted from a speech that was originally given in from of the Zeta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa last May.
Related Links:
•
Gary
Kornblith's Home Page
• The
Electronic Oberlin Group: Oberlin Through History
FEBRUARY 12 , 2003--Historians, everyone knows, study "change over time." That notion seems pretty simple, but it is sometimes hard to convey. So at the risk of sounding maudlin, I want to start by noting that my father died 10 years ago this summer, and I want to discuss the cultural gap that has already opened up between his experience of American society in 1992 and our world today.
Were my dad to return today he would certainly recognize much about early 21st century American life. He knew about rap music, George Bush (senior, that is), CDs, the end of the Cold War, CNN, the chain bookstore, and the ubiquitous fast-food franchise. He also knew about personal computers, though he didn't use one, and he knew that information technology was increasingly critical to all sorts of activities. But, if I recall correctly, he didn't know about e-mail, though it existed, and he certainly didn't know about the World Wide Web. He would have been mystified to hear me advise him to click on a hotlink, surf the Web, or do a keyword search on Google.
Ten years may seem like a lot when you're in your early 20s, so let's cut that down a few years, to when many of you were in middle school. In 1995 I still had to teach Oberlin students how to use a web browser; now I would feel ridiculous if I devoted class time to such a task. The Internet, especially the Web, has changed our social environment in a very short period of time, and we must begin to ponder the implications for your generation's future.
Historians are trained to study the past, not to predict the future. Moreover, we learn early on in our training that history does not unfold in a linear fashion. Consequently I do not pretend that I can extrapolate lessons from the past into reliable maxims for the future. Yet in my moments of middle-aged hubris, I aspire to "position" myself in regard to the current Information Revolution in the way that Alexis de Tocqueville "positioned" himself in regard to the Democratic Revolution of the early 19th century. In his introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America, published in 1835, Tocqueville explained that he was not himself a champion of democracy. As the scion of an aristocratic French family, he made clear that he preferred a more hierarchical social order. But he felt compelled to study the workings of democracy in the United States to get a better sense of the kind of society that was emerging in his native France and the rest of the Western world whether he liked it our not. "The gradual development of the equality of conditions is… a providential fact," he wrote, "and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree: it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress" (Bantam ed., pp. 6-7).
I am no Tocqueville, but I do believe that the Information Revolution is a "providential fact" with "all the characteristics of a divine decree" that cannot be reversed. Which leads me to the question: what will this transformation mean for thoughtful individuals, especially thoughtful individuals with values long embedded in the Oberlin tradition--concern for social justice and the public good?
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