Almost all educated people today, know a lot about very little. I try to know a little about a lot of things. I am responding to this quote publicly from a private conversation. One of the major insights from Marshal McLuhan's work that has not been fully explored is the concept that "print" creates specialization. This leads to the syndrome of the specialist, i.e. "Almost all educated people today, know a lot about very little." If one was writing a science fiction novel to extrapolate the concept of a specialist society, perhaps, this is the society an author would envision. Specialization leads to self interest, the need to keep your specialty protected and to make your skills valuable is one of the guiding principles of most of our educated people. Nothing new here. While you and I, and many others bemoan the results of this effect, the bottom line is that all power is held by specialists, even the rich are specialists in money. It might be hoped that things like the Internet and WWW would broaden the views of at least some of the specialists within the system, but what they find, is that outside of their little cave of knowledge, the world is bigger, wider and deeper than they ever thought possible. The response seems to be like the groundhogs, go back into their hole and protect their domain. I have been reading a little Andre Gorz recently and he is pretty far out. One of his statements, written in the early 80's made the observation that big business sees government control over education as a new market to be exploited by intelligent mentor software programs in which students at all levels can interact with these robotic entities and self educate themselves. The idea being, that math and science and grammar can all be taught through individual interaction with intelligent technology. In Ontario, we have seen a government which is taking financial and course content control away from local authorities and placing control in the hands of Provincial authorities. Just recently, 1997, a report surfaced that indicated that, indeed, the Ontario government had plans in this direction as indicated by the words of the previous Education Minister, "We can give every student a notebook computer and an Internet connection and educate them without as many teachers." Initially, my reaction was, "those dirty rotten SOB's", and I ranted about governments, business and hidden agendas. However on reflection, this may very well create the new electronic citizen who is comfortable with computers and who develops new skills other than literacy. One thing that happens in the privacy of your room, with a computer and Internet connection is that you start to use "search engines" which throw up a wide variety of information. Secondly, lists and groups and chat lines provide direction to follow interests in ways that cannot be done in a classroom in which everyone has to deal with the same information. Third, from what I have read about self learning computer programs, one can see that programs of this nature can enhance the learning process, because not only is the student learning from the computer, but the computer in a manner of speaking is learning from the student. As I observe my growing abilities and the widening of my horizons, I can see this being duplicated and speeded up through having an intelligent mentor cum friend on my own desktop. As with your Diehard WWW page, I find that by reading the papers you have chosen to list, I get a lot of specialized knowledge very quickly, in fact a nephew of mine who is in second year Geology was way behind me in a discussion we had over Thanksgiving dinner. You did not get this information from your University specialty, you got it, I assume, from following your interests. The other thing I am noticing about myself, is that the computer is giving me more opportunity to express myself than I had precomputer days. It allows me to eliminate spelling errors. It allows me to built specialized files to hold items of interest that would have been very cumbersome in the paper age of files and typing. Another thing is that I am learning from others who are expressing themselves and are open to a question or private communication which before I would have had to be in a physical environment with those individuals to benefit from their knowledge and style. As I watch my daughters trudge off to school everyday, it seems very much like they are going to work rather than going to school. I am not putting down teachers, but it may very well be that they are about to become obsolete and it may very well be that the age of print in books is going to disappear to the essay and specific topics and electronic conversations. I wonder if this is going to lead in twenty or thirty years to individuals who are two - their computer mentor program which has been with them most of their lives and the electronic highway that will provide the pathway to the Global Village that Marshal foresaw. What happens to world society that becomes interest driven rather than specialist driven? What happens when translator programs allow me to ask my mentor program to translate a Russian paper into English and my English answer into Russian? What happens when I ask my Mentor to review and synthesize something like petroleum projections and it literally searches the data bases, conversations, essays and graphs of the whole world and comes back with a small essay that summarizes all that information against the known patterns of my current knowledge and interests? What happens if my Mentor program can talk to your Mentor program and flag both of us to the fact that we have similar interests? Well, one of the answers may be the death of specialists. As more and more, intelligence is put into silicon, there is less and less need for people to become specialists. What is left? I would postulate that what is left is curiosity and interest. Business is blindly looking for markets and in the course of doing that, they may create a society that eliminates markets - at least as we know them.
