Slashdot Mirror
Disconnected
Are you a cultural isolate? According to Disconnected: Haves and Have Nots in the Information Age, by William Wresch, "isolates" comprise between 27% and 50% of the members of most corporate and private organizations.
"Many individuals," he writes, "have tenuous connections to the organizations they work for. They want no more to do with that organization than their job, or their paycheck, requires. They don't show up at the company picnic, read the company newsletter, or tune in to the company grapevine."
Wresch suggests that this is so because despite the explosion in new information technologies, most companies don't know how to get their employees to communicate with one another. He says it's impossible to imagine any Japanese organization reporting 7% alienated employees, much less 50%. U.S. organizations not only have huge numbers of isolated employees but still manage to survive and prosper.
Wresch cites Lucasfilms which discovered through internal research that there was almost no horizontal communication between editors, cinematographers, and artists, to which it responded by carefully restructuring its softball teams so that no team could have more than one person from the same department.
Curiously, Wresch portrays "isolates" as problem employees in need of curing. (I consider myself an isolate. I am quite happy to belong to an organization, but have no interest in showing up at the company picnic, reading the company newsletter, or wiring into the company grapevine. Nor do I want to join the company softball team (the idea of a Slashdot softball team is pretty amusing) to make me more social or communal. Working alone, or from something of a distance seems to me as valid a choice as being the kind of rah-rah team players the Disney Corporation breeds and encourages.)
But Disconnected is still a thoughtful, provocative study of a world in which there are vast and growing disparities between what people know and how they know it. His portrayals of information realities in other parts of the world are startling, an information context most Americans are losing touch with. He writes of "information exiles" whose culture or geography keep them disconnected from the information age. He also reminds us that our own techno-rich culture is still, in many ways, an anomaly in the world. He contrasts the way information moves around in the info-rich West with the way information moves (or doesn't) in Namibia, where he spent some time working and researching.
What will happen to the disconnected of the information age, he wonders? "As subsistence farming and handicrafts persisted through the industrial age, will the disconnected carry on, barely feeding themselves, producing the primitive and quaint for middle-class coffee tables? Early indications are that the disconnected will fare far worse than their predecessors in previous revolutions. The gap between the rich and the poor, the knowing and the ignorant, will be larger, the room along the margins far smaller."
Disconnected is a reminder that our own information experiences -- especially those in America, Asia and Western Europe -- aren't yet remotely typical of the world, where laborers often stand on street corners for hours, even days,waiting to hear some news about possible jobs. And even in our own hi-tech cultures, there are curious disparities between information haves and have-nots. Wresch, a computing professor at the University of Wisconsin, also raises a number of useful ideas about closing the information divide, from community computing centers to the conversion of civic and public affairs offices to electronic centers of information dissemination.
"Cultures of isolation aren't the only problems of personal information channels," he writes. "Since these channels are largely invisible, they can be filled with myths, lies, and hatreds. Few outsiders even know what is being said, nor do they have opportunities to correct even the most egregious errors. Yet error-prone or not, these are channels that supply much of the world's information."
You might not always agree with Wresch's conclusions, and he raises many more questions than solutions, but "Disconnected" is an interesting book (the writing isn't great but workable) which looks at information technology from an original perspective, especially for a computing academic. The book tells some uncomfortable truths about information and technology, and as happy as we are to play with our information-scarfing new toys and tools, it's an important reality check. Wresch essentially is writing about the forgotten people in the Information Revolution, the info-refugees and exiles, the people who fall between the cracks, unable or unwilling to use technology to collect information in an accessible or beneficial way.
Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
Coming just in time for XMas..."Save JonKatz" (for Win95/98 and Nintendo)
In this exciting computer game adventure, JonKatz is trapped in the socialist-devout readings section of the University of Wisconsin library, forced to write book reviews from nearsited, geek-angst drivel.
Do you help JonKatz excape to the Christian reading room for the salvation of his soul, or seek the Objectivist section for the restoration of his mind? Or let him rot as he reads of hatred for Western civilization and professes the superiority of the uneducated rice-paddy masses.
Only your guidance and your quick reactions gives Katz any hope!
Sure to be an arcade classic. In stores soon.