A New Counterculture?
Yesterday’s New York Times had a review of a new book by Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. The book apparently traces the impact between counterculture (as typified by The Whole Earth Catalog) and the development of the internet.
The reviewer, Edward Rothstein makes a terrific point:
It might be argued that so prevalent was the counterculture, and so experimental and energetic were its most vocal proponents, that it would have been surprising had many of them not found their way to the computer revolution.
But Mr. Turner demonstrates something more essential in the continuity.First, he suggests, we are mistaken in thinking that the postwar technological world was dominated by hierarchies and rigid categories. Under the influence of the mathematician Norbert Wiener, it became increasingly common to think of humans and machines as interacting elements of “cybernetic systems” — organisms through which information flowed. This also led to a different way of thinking about living organisms and their networks of interaction.
This struck me as so right in line with what some of us are hoping for by using the Read/Write web in our classrooms.
Blogged with Flock
