I first used a personal computer 10 years ago this winter, borrowing an early Apple from the school where I taught. I spent Christmas break in my attic pulling together the script for a play that my eighth-grade students were writing-a job made much easier by a word processor. It was a new experience for someone who had always composed in longhand on yellow legal pads, and it was several years before I drafted anything more important than a business letter on a computer.
Of course I now write nearly everything on my Macintosh. We produce this magazine entirely on computer, sending only electronic files to our printer in Vermont. And with this issue, we are bringing the Bulletin to the World Wide Web at http://www. swarthmore.edu/Admin/publications/bulletin/. I'm no Luddite when it comes to technology, so why am I uneasy?
As our staff's resident science buff, I was eager to meet Neil Gershenfeld '81 and learn about his work at the MIT Media Lab. He describes a world of "ubiquitous computing," where microchips embedded in everyday objects will create a linked electronic world that most of us can barely conceive. When I asked him whether there was a downside to this world, Gershenfeld asserted that the ethics of computing are a social decision, not a technological one. His solution is not to "stop and write a lot of papers about what it means," but to develop ever-better technology. But will computer networks, wireless communications, and "intelligent" objects merely reduce our lives and our relationships to so much binary code?
Several months ago Barbara Haddad Ryan '59 and I were working late in our Parrish Hall offices. E-mail messages were flying back and forth between us about various topics until I finally walked the 10 yards to her desk and laughed, "Do you realize that you and I are the only people in this building-and we're communicating by e-mail?"
I'm afraid it's the same in the College's residence halls, where students plugged into their PCs type messages to friends rather than walk across campus for a visit. Bull sessions often take place on-line, without personal contact. In his book Silicon Snake Oil, Clifford Stoll laments: "We need deal with only one side of an individual over the net. And if we don't like what we see, we just pull the plug. Or flame them. There's no need to tolerate the imperfections of real people."
For better or worse, Neil Gershenfeld-and the next generation of computer whiz kids now at Swarthmore-will make "being digital" a reality. But let's not take for granted the human and social consequences of this revolution.
-Jeffrey Lott
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Swarthmore College. All rights reserved. 1996