Introduction

• Computer is a cultural mediating and thus transforming technology.
• experts view the computer "in a more messianic light, as the technology that will create new markets and thus reduce proverty and so-called backwardness in the seemingly undeveloped parts of the world."
• ...but will also contribute to the disappearance of traditional cultures - just as the interstate highway system led to the demise of local communities that could not join the new economic order.
• Because a double bind encompasses both benefits and drawbacks, and because we usually focus only on the benefits.
• ...will help us recognize the danger of thinking of computers only within the framework of their personal use and within the myth of progress that surrounds them.

Chapter 3

• He (Ellison) further predicted that computers will so radically change our world in the next twenty years 'that people will scarcely be able to remember what life was like before'
• ..that none of them mention the radically diverging trends between the world population growth and the quality of our environment.
• note that the average 'ecological footprint' in the US is 5.1 hectares per person, while in India it is 0.4 hectares, and worldwide it is 1.9 hectares.
• if the enire world's population were to adopt the consumer lifestyle of the average North American, ' it would need two additional planets to produce the resources, absorb the wastes, and otherwise maintain life support.
• At some point the scientific studies of changes in natural systems, as well as media coverage of environmental disruptions, will lead us all to ask whether the technological approach to progress is a key part of the problem.
• the increasing status accorded to technologically mediated data; how this form of knowledge undermines the importance and existence of local knowledge; and how the displacement of local knowledge with data and other decontextualized, electronically communicated symbol systems contributes to the consumer lifestyle that harms the environment.
• if we use the word ideology to refer to culturally based interpretative framework that influences how we think, value, perceive, and manipulate the world...
• myth - scientifically produced commodities represent the highest measure of human achievement
• the modern educational system is simultaneously the repository of the society's myths, the institutionalization of the myth's contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.
• as the study of the declining condition of ecosystems shows, is that the values and forms of knowledge learned in universities contribute to the spread of consuerism, to the loss of knowledge that focuses more on relationships than economics, and to the acceleration of environmental decline.
• cultural bioconservatism - representing culture as inseparable from its impact on natural systems and suggests the transformations that must occur if we are to separate ourselves from the deep and still unconscious legacy of the industral revolution.
• cb - the individual is not autonomous and self=directing, but is better understood as possessing a self-identity, a way of knowing and valuing, and a set of culturally influenced behavioral patterns that are reproduced through the everyday use of language.
• human communities are best understood as a network of implicit relationships rather than as an aggregate of individuals.
• mentoring is the practice of passing on to the next generation skills that have their roots in the local knowledge.
• in cyberspace, we do not find the qualities of character formation that are at the core of the mentor relationship.
• 'high context knowledge' in order to distinguish it from the "low context knowledge' learned in academic settings....