Gladwell argues that “Free” is a kind of utopian vision, or at least as it appears in Chris Anderson’s new book: “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” What’s being overlooked is the cost of actually gathering news and information, and the infrastructure required to do so:
“This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.”
Yet, aside from this utopianism, should we go so far as to have the law step in…protecting news-gathering organizations to some degree?
Gladwell finishes with:
“The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws”
It’s still up in the air.
See Also: Walter Isaacson’s piece in Time a while back: ”How To Save Your Newspaper,” that is, if it isn’t already a shell of it’s former self.
That’s a VC, or Fred Wilson, venture capitalist (comments are definitely worth a read).
As Christensen argues in the startupgrind video below, universities have competed together to move upmarket, with rock walls, high-end facilities, and more and more amenities. All the while, they’ve been getting heavier on management and administration. Christensen suggests that newer business models are utilizing technology at their core, and training people on the job for specific skills. This is seriously undercutting the old university model.
I find myself thinking of this misalignment (straying from the core educational mission, overpromising, the end of an era?) when I see splashy diversity-laden brochure photos, and huge athletic programs hyped as the faces of university life. Costs keep going up and the value of many degrees keeps going down.
Perhaps there is a correlation with other overall trends in our society to run museums like businesses, the competition between the private and public sectors, the growth of the ‘meritocracy’ and Washington D.C. and our continually growing government as well. Perhaps I’m overhyping it myself, but the ‘greatness’ model is under serious stress.
Will half of universities be in bankruptcy in a few decades? How much will technology disrupt education?
——————————–
Interesting times. What have venture capitalists got right, and what might they be missing?
His post expands on ideas explored in the book, and is well worth a read:
‘What I am suggesting is that our crisis of governance, which is reflected but only partly expressed by the mess our political class has made in Washington, is ultimately anchored in a cultural shift that is both a source for and a consequence of revolutionary technological change. Increasing numbers of young and well-educated Americans love the gadgets that help isolate them from one another because they do not wish to be obligated by civilities, do not wish to be constrained by responsibilities to others, do not wish to be limited in any way. We are witnessing the eternal temptation to self-indulgence raised to both principle and art.’
And:
‘Why should we be concerned about this? Because if the individuating tendencies inherent in the technology are not offset by creative balances that can restock social trust, or social capital, in America, it means that we will drift ever further from a high-trust social equilibrium conducive to liberty to a kind of order that needs ever more government to make it work. We will have to face what David Brooks has called “brutality cascades”, a kind of positional arms race to the bottom that ensues when it becomes difficult to impossible for standards of behavior to form out of interpersonal relationships.’
I’m sympathetic to the theme because this blog is animated by a notion of how to conserve tradition, and maintain civic virtue enough to maintain to a smaller, more responsive government on all levels.
Also, it’s a blog, my own little digital piece of the public square and my ticket for a few hours a week of self-indulgent utopia free of social interaction.
Generally, I approach this issue from a more conservative/libertarian perspective. I feel I’ve gone on a bit of a journey to explore both some of the anarchy of libertarianism, the problems with anarchy/hierarchy in Europe, and the possibility of classical liberalism.
In my experience, there are many reasons why libertarians and conservatives unite. The primary one is on full display now: Libertarians are anti-collectivist and anti-statist, drawing a ring around the individual and proceeding from there. The progressive pursuit of virtue through collectivist principles and the big government required to do it is a call-to-arms for most libertarians (they’re no fans of legislated religious morality either). While both groups have strong disagreements on where our rights come from, and who has the moral legitimacy to be in charge, conservatives and libertarians can usually agree on this much during a progressive administration.
Another reason for the alliance (more beneficial to conservatives, perhaps) is that libertarians tend to be much hipper to the sciences and technology, having a broad fan base in science fiction and usually more accustomed to arriving at truth and pursuing knowledge through the sciences and similar products of the Enlightenment.
We’ve already seen a huge shift in wealth and social influence to tech money in our society, and this will continue. Many traditionalist and religious conservatives tend not to be as hip to the sciences and technology, and increasingly run the risk of being seen to be as relevant to ‘modern’ life as a group of Amish, dutifully and communally raising a barn, gazed at from passersby on the road. Well, perhaps that’s a bit much, but some technorati no doubt see things that way.
Now, libertarianism can be accompanied by attendant utopianism and grand visions of the future (as strong as the progressive and collectivist love of technocracy). Yet, as for predictions about the future, here’s Jerry Pournelle describing his own home computer and how publishing might look in a few decades time.
Keep in mind he was saying this in 1979:
——————
That’s pretty damned accurate and reasonable. Perhaps his chart could be useful, as he was a sci-fi writer who likely ended up closer to Burkean conservativsm. Conservatives, take note.
The obligatory blog questions:
-How do you see technology affecting your life?
-What are your duties to the people around you, and to the common good?
-Do you ever get the urge to hit that guy talking loudly on his bluetooth, or push that prepossessed, couldn’t be bothered girl at the bus stop into oncoming traffic as she texts away with her earbuds in?
-Are you that guy or girl?
Addition: Via Instapundit-Huxley vs. Orwell, with Huxley in the lead. Robert Heinlein built his own house. L. Ron Hubbard is a good example of when sci-fi writers become ‘alleged,’ cult/religious figures.
Another Addition: Are we losing volunteerism because more women are working and have less time to volunteer, and work locally, and be engaged civically?
‘You will hear a lot of claims about militants killed and civilians killed and civilians spared. Most likely, neither side will be entitled to its shrillness. If the Al Majalah strike has any value now, it should be to remind us not just of our knowledge but also of our ignorance.’
‘By occupying physical spaces with other people, networks are possible. Long-lasting, meaningful friendships can be forged. Mentoring that passes down a tradition of wisdom is available. Education can be, at its best, deeply and broadly imagined. Students can be encouraged to become in a way that distance-learning simply cannot replicate.
Or I suppose that efficient, cost-effective, and icy cubicles will work just as well.’
Well, that last part is a false choice.
As I’ve said, I don’t think that a solid majority of colleges and universities are going anywhere, they’ll simply have to adapt to new technology and more challenging economic circumstances. Change is coming. It won’t all be in the form of distance learning either, nor students in efficient, icy cubicles, isolated from one another while staring into a tablet of some kind. It will be full of trial and error, and experimentation.
Now some people, of course, will want to focus on the “customer experience,” maximizing efficiency and profit, and managing the university like a business, or worse, a bureaucracy. Others will want to depersonalize the educational experience and create an online database of information alone. Others still will want it to serve ideals of diversity, meritocracy and too often serve as safe harbor for all sorts of their own preferred ideological and personal interests. I think all of these approaches can get in the way.
The argument above is that education should speak to the higher things: The soul, the use and expansion of the imagination, the pursuit of truth and knowledge in deep meditations and conservations with the past. These higher things are fostered by not only the culture and traditions on campus, but by necessary interactions with the environment: the gothic spires, the dorms, the library, and the manicured lawns.
One problem is that we’re at the end of what I consider to be the “greatness” model. We cannot expect ever more groups of people to be included into higher education under the current economic model. We can’t and shouldn’t keep pumping student loan money in and burdening individuals with the consequences. There’s a large psychological buy-in that attending college is the only way to get ahead.
Maintaining the higher things also takes much care and concern in the daily, “lower” things. Behind the gothic spires and manicured lawns are budgets, boards, politics, fundraising, marketing, student loans and taxpayer money amidst fierce competition. Behind the admissions process is a strange mixture of art and science, meritocratic and diversity requirements, money, legacy considerations, and some political pressure.
——————————
For the sake of the argument, maybe we could see private and public universities as public goods, even if such broad definitions of public goods don’t properly account for human nature nor ultimately economic sustainability. Colleges are too important to fail. Losing sight of the higher things may have consequences for all of us, and nearly everyone sees some worth in having great institutions of higher learning.
We could even compare college campus buildings to courtrooms, Houses of Congress, and the marble of many a municipal building. There is something hallowed about the architecture of such places and the interactions going on within them, beyond considerations of utility, economic efficiency, and faceless information exchanges on the web.
If you accept this argument, then it’s all the more reason to re-examine the core educational mission, accepting and taking advantage of the changes necessary to sustain it economically due to the bubble, and technologically due to the revolution we seem to be undergoing. This will likely best protect and carry forward the higher things and the campus experience, however they may be defined.
‘But for all the advantages China gains from its approach to the Internet, Schmidt and Cohen still seem to think its hollow political center is unsustainable. “This mix of active citizens armed with technological devices and tight government control is exceptionally volatile,” they write, warning this could lead to “widespread instability.”
Do U.S. companies need to work closer with the government in order to look out for American interests as Chinese state-run companies extend their reach?
Addition: Are tech companies and other Americans pulling out of the liberal internationalist ideas of the current President, seeing the need to project American interests in a dangerous world?
We need to move well, and deal with China as it is, which will mean some containment, but a light touch and room to grow.
Two quotes on Samuel Huntington:
“Fukuyama wants to see America actively promote democracy abroad. Huntington, on the other hand, ever the realist, warns about the potentially disastrous effects of an arrogant and naïve democratic imperialism.”
and:
“An iconoclast to the core, Huntington never threw his lot in with left or right. He was too statist to be a libertarian, too realist to embrace neoconservatism, and too sympathetic to nationalism, religion and the military to identify with liberal Democrats. As a conservative Democrat, then, he is an intellectual rarity.”
‘The bubble is something else: high demand for education has combined with an inefficient guild structure (guilds were once the dominant form of economic organization in everything from carpentry to textile weaving; today only a handful survive, mostly in the learned professions) and government price subsidies to create an unsustainable method of service delivery.’
There are a few ways of thinking about what may be in store for higher education.
1. The old media/new media analogy and technological dislocation-Basically, individuals can have access to much of the college library, and beyond, on a handheld device for a few hundred dollars. What to do with this access and that knowledge, as well as how and what to think about it will still require pedagogy, rigor, the passing on of knowledge and method, grades, well-ordered minds, time and money. Information and knowledge aren’t “free”, of course, either for the producers of that knowledge individually nor as members of groups and institutions. It’s not free ultimately for the technology itself and the curators and gatekeepers of the technology, but it’s much cheaper and easily accessible than before.
How can we deliver an education more efficiently?
The current curators and gatekeepers in our universities and guild structures will feel increasing pressure (and I think many are finding new opportunities) from this technological dislocation. Professors (publish or perish!) now have greater real time connections with known and previously unknown colleagues, amateurs around the world, past research and thinkers, as well as opportunities to engage students in the classroom. For motivated students, there will be a chance to get more of what they pay for, targeting their studies and getting more feedback from fellow students, perhaps professors, and other materials. They can be graded on what they’ve learned more effectively. It’s a delivery issue.
The old media’s control as gatekeepers and curators of public opinion has been undermined with so much information out there. They often don’t lead the discussion, but find themselves racing to keep up with it (including cat videos and celebrity gossip). It’s a delivery issue, and they’ve had to organize their business models around this new marketplace, and the ad revenue models aren’t working like they used to. Some have got a good thing going and kept it going, while others went down rat holes under bad leadership and disappeared. Most resisted the change. All have had to adapt and think hard about what it’s most important to take with them and their duty to communities of readers if for no other reason than to generate revenue, by continuing to shape public opinion.
It’s still an industry in flux.
The housing bubble/higher ed bubble analogy-I happen to believe that when you strip the cost of an education from the consumers of that education, you tend get more irresponsibility on both sides. There’s a large psychological buy-in that everyone needs to go to college, just like everyone needed to own a home. It represents some of what is best about America, but when you’ve propped up that dream on unsustainable debt levels, well, it’s unsustainable.
A lot of people are borrowing money they can’t afford to go to college. It won’t pay off for all of them, especially in this economy, and the debt is non-dischargeable. Many people don’t even know why they’re in college or aren’t particularly committed to getting an education. Many people are leaving high school unprepared, and sometimes college. Colleges have gotten locked into competitive feedback loops to attract students with amenities, and students have gotten locked into competitive feedback loops amongst themselves to get into the best colleges.
No one wants to be left behind.
It might be worthwhile to think again about the core-educational mission.
Hat tip to Instapundit, and Glenn Reynolds, who’s been following this phenomenon for years.
Cuban lays down some practical advice for high school graduates: Go to college, but be especially smart about it, because a lot of colleges are going to go out of business:
‘The newspaper industry was once deemed indestructible. Then this thing called the internet came along and took away their classified business. The problem wasn’t really that their classifieds disappeared. It was more that they had accumulated a ton of debt and had over invested in physical plant and assets that could not adapt to the new digital world’
Look beyond the rock-climbing walls, expensive dorms and diverse brochures, and ask the right questions. Many colleges have been locked in a competitive feedback loop, partially funded by student loan money.
Harvard will still be there, but it is already in the process of adapting. MIT has unrolled online classes for years now. Others will survive with varying degrees of success.
As for the media, the NY Times is still around, but not all papers are, and many blogs and individual projects have crowded in. Most papers resisted the change, the Times especially, thinking they could coast on their size, depth, and reputation alone. Their size, depth, and reputation have probably helped pull the Times through, but the new advertising isn’t bringing in money like the old advertising did. The industry is still in flux.
To drive the point home, Matt Drudge, of the Drudge Report, made a website which is basically a clearing house of information that gets billions of views a month. Sure, it’s sensationalistic at times, but Drudge realized early on that everyday people, armed with online access, often know a lot more than a few hundred people sitting in a newsroom do, especially about current events. He aggregates that information and knowledge created by the new technology, updating his site many hundreds of times per day.
—————
So, even if you’re a Luddite, it’s important to understand that technology is allowing individuals access to much in the way of ideas, books, information, news, ideas, current and world events, as well as social connectivity. Successful online endeavors organize around this new reality. This is why colleges are analogous to old media. It once took a few hundred people to gather the cameras, technology, production, field reporting, lighting, a fleet of trucks, distribution, advertising and presenting to deliver information to everyone else.
Now you can gain access to ideas, books, information, news, ideas, current and world events on a handheld device which costs a few hundred dollars, with a plan of about $50 a month and up. Just like some papers, publications, and news stations will stick around, it will be on the strength of the value they deliver to customers and their ability to adapt to the new environment.
Without a doubt, colleges and universities do much more than deliver value to “customers,” and this blog thinks it’s worthwhile to save egalitarianism from the excessive egalitarians, college culture and pedagogical rigor from inflated grades, merit from the political philosophy of many meritocrats, and also keep us from slipping back into a old boys network of the legacy few and well-connected. Higher ed is often for the higher things, a culture of learning, and getting smart people where they need to be (challenged and uncomfortable at times). There is a core educational mission combined with the genuine hopes of most Americans that could be greatly helped by technology.
Well, universities are the longest running institutions in the Western World, so they’re not dead:
‘Two related but separate issues revolve around the inner metabolism of higher education, in particular its astronomical and still escalating costs and—an even bigger reality—the wave of technological innovation that is poised to break over the entire institution of higher education like a tsunami.’
Much like the housing market was sitting atop unsustainable debt levels and questionable lending practices underwritten by our government, so too may be our universities by sitting upon unsustainable debt levels and questionable lending practices, underwritten by our government. The dream of everybody owning a home and everybody going to college and taking out loans to do so is not sustainable, and certainly not in our current economy. The ground has shifted beneath our feet, and our politics is failing to provide decent solutions.
Technology, however, is going to provide many more solutions.
There are also other issues ideological. We’ve seen the rise of the 60′s generation through our universities, the rise of excessive egalitarianism, feminism, and the growth of questionable fields that mostly end with ‘studies.’ Continental philosophies have made deep inroads into higher ed, and into our culture. I believe they can unnecessarily politicize and narrow higher ed and shortchange students.
We’ve also seen more recently the rise of the administrators, who are often overseeing budgets and hiring, and who can easily get in the way of what I would define as the core educational mission:
‘Writing in the current issue of The American Interest, Nathan Harden puts it dramatically but not hyperbolically: “The End of the University As We Know It.” In the space of a few decades, Harden writes, “half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist.”’
Add to that a deeply ailing K-12 public education system, and we’ve got some serious change coming our way.
Many more people will be learning online, and without the brick and mortar classrooms and dorms. The Ivies will do fine but they are also unrolling their own online learning programs to stay ahead of the curve.
‘In speeches, interviews and articles, Thiel decries what he sees as the country’s lack of significant innovations. “When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains,” hewrote last year in National Review. “Consider the most literal instance of nonacceleration: We are no longer moving faster.”
She counters with the idea that while not predicted, we take our innovations for granted:
‘Technologists who lament the “end of the future” are denigrating the decentralized, incremental advances that actually improve everyday life. And they’re promoting a truncated idea of past innovation: economic history with railroads but no department stores, radio but no ready-to-wear apparel, vaccines but no consumer packaged goods, jets but no plastics.’
Splashy innovations may not be necessary, Postrel argues, and could hinder the real progress being made, and that there are many people, for various reasons, who will put up barriers to that progress (there could be some danger in utopianism there, that has political implications as well).
It might be worth mentioning the importance that science and technology have had on our culture through science fiction, too, and how sci-fi writers have handled its relation to political philosophy, from Robert Heinlein to Jerry Pournelle to Paul Krugman via Isaac Asimov, to manifest destiny to colonizing the West etc: Paul Krugman At The Guardian: ‘Asimov’s Foundation Novels Grounded My Economics’
