A follow up to Gary’s post on 3D printers, and the implications and uses thereof, including for learning and Multitask de Ville.
The New Yorker Jan 13. 2014 issue has an article going into these matters of personal empowerment through latest technology. Describes some of the larger economic, social, and political implications of a hopeful stream in history…one that promises personal tech bringing liberation from all sorts of strictures and entanglements of modern man.
Evgeny Morozov traces this thread from the Arts and Crafts movement, through the DIY “hobbyist” of the 50’s to the Whole Earth Catalog, to the personal computer movement, and now the “Maker” movement, which includes present enthusiasms for 3D printing.
He finds a lack of awareness of how, in every instance, the political and economic structures in place were as significant as the innovations and new ways of doing things themselves.
The money quote:
Society is always in flux, and the designer can’t predict how various political, social, and economic systems will come to blunt, augment, or redirect the power of the tool that is being designed.
Instead of deinstitutionalizing society, the radicals would have done better to advocate re-institutionalizing it: pushing for political and legal reforms to secure the transparency and decentralization of power they associated with their favorite technology. (the author likes Murray Bookchin’s approach)
One POV anyway, and one perhaps relevant when one looks at the concentration of control of internet access, and the monopolization of telecom and media companies in US.
OTOH, there’s a whole lot of individual empowerment going on too. PSA hopes to be on that side of the equation, and sees DIY collaborative education and healthcare as empowering trends. Morozov pans the seminal visions of Ivan Illich, “Deschooling Society”…etc…as being hopelessly naive. PSA doesn’t find Illich so useless:
Ivan Illich quotes from “Deschooling Society”
“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society