Hi all
   Due to some reason the attachment is not going through... I am pasting the
reqs. in the mail itself

   regards
   ..deepak

   Senior, Human Factors Engineer (User Interface Design)

   Location: This position is based in Bangalore
   This posting will expire on March 24, 2006

   SUMMARY:
   Co-ordinates the development of User Interface Specifications for mobile
phones and mobile phone  applications/features.  Specifies the user interface
design for the features of the phone. Utilizes marketing data, usability
studies, heuristic analysis and other interaction design techniques to create
meaningful user experiences.

   REQUIREMENTS:
   ·         Bachelors or Masters degree in Human Computer Interaction, Science,
Engineering, Architecture, Art, Product Design, Graphic Design, Industrial
Design.
   ·         2 to 4+ years of interaction design experience; overall professional
experience of 4+ years.
   ·         Good technical writing skills – ability to document designs clearly
and concisely is a MUST
   ·         Strong visualization/conceptualization abilities, creativity and
extreme detail-orientedness
   ·         Excellent interpersonal, communication and teaming skills
   ·         Strong organizational, multi-tasking and time management skills
   ·         Must be a self-starter with strong initiative and a sense of humor
   ·         Must be proficient with common tools and technologies such as MS
Office, MS Visio

   KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
   ·         Creates use cases, UI design task lists and user interface
specifications that lay out the user’s interface with the phone in great detail.
   ·         Researches and develops new generation user interface paradigms and
implement best practices in process and project execution.
   ·         Co-ordinates with graphic designers to produce graphics for the
mobile phones
   ·         Interacts with software and product test engineers to provide
clarifications to UI specification related questions
   ·         Work actively to comply with team processes
   ·         Work with software product management and development teams to
deliver work products on time in iterative development cycles.

   PROBLEM SOLVING:
   ·         Works on complex design issues where analysis of situations or data
requires an in-depth evaluation of variable factors
   ·         Exercises judgment in selecting methods, techniques and evaluation
criteria for obtaining results
   ·         Determines methods and procedures on new assignments.

   WORK ENVIRONMENT/PHYSICAL DEMANDS/SAFETY CONSIDERATIONS:
   ·         Works in an office environment with rare travel to customer sites.



   Note: Candidate will need to go through a written screening test via email and
on-site design exercises as part of the interview process.



Rit <rit4you@...> wrote:
   Hi Deepak,
We still can’t see the attachments. I think Sudhir has
blocked the attachment feature because of recent virus
attach on the mailing list.

It would be good if you could put the attachment as a
mail text.


-Rit


---------------------------
Interaction Designer
New Delhi, India
www.ritwithfireworks.com
---------------------------

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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Dear Raja
ram ram
what a wonderful and apt way to 'welcome' Jinan!!
where do you find such beautiful poems.
its always a pleasure reading what you have to say.
your poems (and you, if i may take the liberty!) keep
that bit of ephemerality and compassion which i
sometimes think is probably the 'soul' of design and
in life beautiful.

regards
vaibhav kaley
SID 94, CEPT
Germany

--- Raja Mohanty <rajam@...> wrote:

> Hi Jinan!
> So, the sage breaketh a silence
> and speaketh through the spirits of
> Illich and Postman!
>
> Welcome to the matrix
> Welcome to the maya
> Where we all make our fumblings
> And stumblings; grumblings
> and Rumblings
>
> In the deluge about to come
> The Real world shall drown
> So climb on, while there is time
> Onto Noah's Ark of cyberspace selves
> But remember the Himalayan spring
> That
> Still drips onto the deadwood
> and weaves green poems
>
> - Hope you are doing well!
>
>
> Raja
>
>
>
> > Informing Ourselves To DeathBy Neil Postman
> > ---------------------------------
> >  The following speech was given at a meeting of
> the German Informatics
> > Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October
> 11, 1990 in Stuttgart,
> > sponsored by IBM-Germany.
> > ---------------------------------
> >   The great English playwright and social
> philosopher George Bernard Shaw
> > once  remarked that all professions are
> conspiracies against the common
> > folk. He meant  that those who belong to elite
> trades -- physicians,
> > lawyers, teachers, and  scientists -- protect
> their special status by
> > creating vocabularies that are  incomprehensible
> to the general public.
> > This process prevents outsiders from
> understanding what the profession
> > is doing and why -- and protects the insiders
> from close examination
> > and criticism. Professions, in other words, build
> forbidding walls of
> > technical gobbledegook over which the prying and
> alien eye  cannot see.
> > Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint
> against this, for I
> > consider  myself a professional teacher and
> appreciate technical
> > gobbledegook as much as  anyone. But I do not
> object if occasionally
> > someone who does not know the  secrets of my trade
> is allowed entry to the
> > inner halls to express an untutored  point of
> view. Such a person may
> > sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even
> better, see something in a
> > way that the professionals have overlooked.
> > I believe I have been invited to speak at this
> conference for just such a
> > purpose. I do not know very much more about
> computer technology than the
> > average  person -- which isn't very much. I have
> little understanding of
> > what excites a  computer programmer or scientist,
> and in examining the
> > descriptions of the  presentations at this
> conference, I found each one
> > more mysterious than the  next. So, I clearly
> qualify as an outsider.
> > But I think that what you want here is not merely
> an outsider but an
> > outsider  who has a point of view that might be
> useful to the insiders.
> > And that is why I  accepted the invitation to
> speak. I believe I know
> > something about what  technologies do to culture,
> and I know even more
> > about what technologies undo in  a culture. In
> fact, I might say, at the
> > start, that what a technology undoes is  a subject
> that computer experts
> > apparently know very little about. I have heard
> many experts in computer
> > technology speak about the advantages that
> computers  will bring. With one
> > exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have
> never  heard anyone speak
> > seriously and comprehensively about the
> disadvantages of  computer
> > technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me
> wonder if the
> > profession is hiding something important. That is
> to say, what seems to be
> >  lacking among computer experts is a sense of
> technological modesty.
> > After all, anyone who has studied the history of
> technology knows that
> > technological change is always a Faustian bargain:
> Technology giveth and
> > technology taketh away, and not always in equal
> measure. A new technology
> > sometimes creates more than it destroys.
> Sometimes, it destroys more than
> > it  creates. But it is never one-sided.
> > The invention of the printing press is an
> excellent example. Printing
> > fostered the modern idea of individuality but it
> destroyed the medieval
> > sense of  community and social integration.
> Printing created prose but
> > made poetry into an  exotic and elitist form of
> expression. Printing made
> > modern science possible but  transformed religious
> sensibility into an
> > exercise in superstition. Printing  assisted in
> the growth of the
> > nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism
> into a sordid if not a
> > murderous emotion.
> > Another way of saying this is that a new
> technology tends to favor some
> > groups of people and harms other groups. School
> teachers, for example,
> > will, in  the long run, probably be made obsolete
> by television, as
> > blacksmiths were made  obsolete by the automobile,
> as balladeers were made
> > obsolete by the printing  press. Technological
> change, in other words,
> > always results in winners and  losers.
> > In the case of computer technology, there can be
> no disputing that the
> > computer has increased the power of large-scale
> organizations like
> > military  establishments or airline companies or
> banks or tax collecting
> > agencies. And it  is equally clear that the
> computer is now indispensable
> > to high-level  researchers in physics and other
> natural sciences. But to
> > what extent has  computer technology been an
> advantage to the masses of
> > people? To steel workers,  vegetable store owners,
> teachers, automobile
> > mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick  layers,
> dentists and most of the rest
> > into whose lives the computer now  intrudes? These
> people have had their
> > private matters made more accessible to  powerful
> institutions. They are
> > more easily tracked and controlled; they are
> subjected to more
> > examinations, and are increasingly mystified by
> the decisions  made about
> > them. They are more often reduced to mere
> numerical objects. They are
> > being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets
> for advertising
> >  agencies and  political organizations. The
> schools teach their children
> > to operate  computerized systems instead of
> teaching things that are more
> > valuable to  children. In a word, almost nothing
> happens to the losers
> > that they need, which  is why they are losers.
> > It is to be expected that the winners -- for
> example, most of the speakers
> > at  this conference -- will encourage the losers
> to be enthusiastic about
> > computer  technology. That is the way of winners,
> and so they sometimes
> > tell the losers  that with personal computers the
> average person can
> > balance a checkbook more  neatly, keep better
> track of recipes, and make
> > more logical shopping lists. They  also tell them
> that they can vote at
> > home, shop at home, get all the information  they
> wish at home, and thus
> > make community life unnecessary. They tell them
> that  their lives will be
> > conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting
> to say  from whose point
> > of view or what might be the costs of such
> efficiency.
> > Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners
> dazzle them with the
> > wondrous  feats of computers, many of which have
> only marginal relevance
> > to the quality of  the losers' lives but which are
> nonetheless impressive.
> > Eventually, the losers  succumb, in part because
> they
=== message truncated ===


__________________________________________________
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this is a post from Sudhir.

Hi all,

last few weeks my Yahoo id seems to be not working, so i am unable to
access the group or mail on yahoo account.

Hopefully it is a temporary problem with yahoo.
In the meanwhile mail me on sudhir@....

regards

Sudhir Sharma
1983-89 NID
Elephant
Pune

 
hey arghya,

i need the contacts in bangalore.
can u send it on my rediff id.

maha



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Ad for Chief Designer for Textile design studio
We are looking for a chief designer to head our Noida office.
Should have min 4 to 5 years of experience (in Home furnishings exports).
Remunerations 4 to 6 lakha pa

Please contact
send your e mail to Vaishali Design Studio at :-
vds@...
vaishali@...

OR

call - 09821899388
         0120 4311864

Vaishali Sinha
Vaishali Design Studio



----- Original Message -----
From: "Ravi Poovaiah" <ravi@...>
To: <designindia@...>
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 1:09 PM
Subject: [designindia] Fwd: ad for creative head


> Please reply to Sonali, if you are interested
>
>
>
> Dear Prof Ravi,
>
> This is with reference to my discussion with you yesterday. I would
> like to thank you for all the help you are extending
>
> Pls find below the job description and job profile of candidate I am
> interested in meeting.
>
> Position: Creative head for a US retail chain store, office near
> churchgate, Mumbai
> Job responsilibity: Heading a team of 16-20 employees. Manage
> complete creative work for the chain store i.e leaflets, brochures,
> press ads, labels, tags, promotions, signages, pop's, web site  etc
> Remuneration: 5-8 lakh p.a
> Course done: VC
> No.of years of experience- 5-8 yrs
> Should have work experience in an ad agency in both print and web
> media.
> Some work done in fashion field/ exp of illustrating/printing press
> would be an added advantage
> Good Communication skills, ability to lead a team are extremely
> important.
>
> Opening is top urgent. Request the interested to contact the
> undersigned at the earliest.
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> Sonali (Gurnani) Dalwani,
> ARS- APPAREL RESOURCE SOLUTIONS- Placement agency managed by a NIFT
> Alumni
> Tribute, Rajkamal Studio Compound,
> Behind Gandhi Hospital, Parel (E),
> Mumbai- 400012
> Ph: 9323734302 (Mob), 24171899
> Email: sonali_d@..., s_dalwani@...
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Thanks Oona

Looks like the hyperlink got stripped the first time. I feel really
foolish posting a blind message like that. my apologies

Anyway, the real article had pictures etc. you'll be able to download
this and other articles from our website soon. will msg you...

(Just as soon as i find the time to upload them :))

for those who came in late, this article by himalini is accessible from
the infochange website...
http://www.infochangeindia.org/agenda4_20.jsp

santayan sengupta
NID PD 94, kolkata
www.thoughtshopfoundation.org

Hi Raja and Ranjan,

   So far only red dots are talking to red ones and blue with blue ones! I am yet
another color..Let me also bathe under the showering of reds and blues.

   I think the analogy of red and blue dots doesn't work with Indian society as
it is not so organized and formatted or should I say simple?, as in the west.
Our society is far too complex.

   I think the evolvution of design is not the creation of designers alone. It is
the entire space/socio-geo-political situation within which the reds, blues,
greens, yellows and what not exist. The Darwinian or behaviorist doctrine of the
environment being responsible for the evolution of species, seems more logical
and relevant in design as well. In one case, the change of design is natural and
in other it is a proactive / conscious effort.

   For example, the high tech seurity systems could not have been dreamt until
the fear of terrerism forced you to design them. Shouldn't terrorists also be
considered red dots?

   It may not be complete to assume that the world is influenced by crazy
designer's alone...

   Dinesh
   ----



Raja Mohanty <rajam@...> wrote:
   Hi Jinan!
So, the sage breaketh a silence
and speaketh through the spirits of
Illich and Postman!

Welcome to the matrix
Welcome to the maya
Where we all make our fumblings
And stumblings; grumblings
and Rumblings

In the deluge about to come
The Real world shall drown
So climb on, while there is time
Onto Noah's Ark of cyberspace selves
But remember the Himalayan spring
That
Still drips onto the deadwood
and weaves green poems

- Hope you are doing well!


Raja



> Informing Ourselves To DeathBy Neil Postman
> ---------------------------------
> The following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics
> Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart,
> sponsored by IBM-Germany.
> ---------------------------------
> The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw
> once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common
> folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians,
> lawyers, teachers, and scientists -- protect their special status by
> creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public.
> This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession
> is doing and why -- and protects the insiders from close examination
> and criticism. Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of
> technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see.
> Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I
> consider myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical
> gobbledegook as much as anyone. But I do not object if occasionally
> someone who does not know the secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the
> inner halls to express an untutored point of view. Such a person may
> sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even better, see something in a
> way that the professionals have overlooked.
> I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just such a
> purpose. I do not know very much more about computer technology than the
> average person -- which isn't very much. I have little understanding of
> what excites a computer programmer or scientist, and in examining the
> descriptions of the presentations at this conference, I found each one
> more mysterious than the next. So, I clearly qualify as an outsider.
> But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but an
> outsider who has a point of view that might be useful to the insiders.
> And that is why I accepted the invitation to speak. I believe I know
> something about what technologies do to culture, and I know even more
> about what technologies undo in a culture. In fact, I might say, at the
> start, that what a technology undoes is a subject that computer experts
> apparently know very little about. I have heard many experts in computer
> technology speak about the advantages that computers will bring. With one
> exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have never heard anyone speak
> seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of computer
> technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the
> profession is hiding something important. That is to say, what seems to be
> lacking among computer experts is a sense of technological modesty.
> After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that
> technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and
> technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology
> sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than
> it creates. But it is never one-sided.
> The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing
> fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval
> sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but
> made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made
> modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an
> exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the
> nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a
> murderous emotion.
> Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some
> groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example,
> will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as
> blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made
> obsolete by the printing press. Technological change, in other words,
> always results in winners and losers.
> In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the
> computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like
> military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting
> agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable
> to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to
> what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of
> people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile
> mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest
> into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their
> private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are
> more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more
> examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about
> them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are
> being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising
> agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children
> to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more
> valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers
> that they need, which is why they are losers.
> It is to be expected that the winners -- for example, most of the speakers
> at this conference -- will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about
> computer technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes
> tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can
> balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make
> more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that they can vote at
> home, shop at home, get all the information they wish at home, and thus
> make community life unnecessary. They tell them that their lives will be
> conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from whose point
> of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.
> Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the
> wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance
> to the quality of the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive.
> Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe that the
> specialized knowledge of the masters of a computer technology is a form
> of wisdom. The masters, of course, come to believe this as well. The
> result is that certain questions do not arise, such as, to whom will the
> computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will
> be reduced?
> Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned conspiracy,
> as if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. But
> this is not quite how it happens, for the winners do not always know what
> they are doing, and where it will all lead. The Benedictine monks who
> invented the mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed
> that such a clock would provide a precise regularity to the seven periods
> of devotion they were required to observe during the course of the day.
> As a matter of fact, it did. But what the monks did not realize is that
> the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours but also of
> synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And so, by the middle
> of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls of the
> monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the
> workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of
> regular production, regular working hours, and a
> standardized product. Without the clock, capitalism would have been
> quite impossible. And so, here is a great paradox: the clock was
> invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God;
> and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to
> devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has
> unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning,
> who or what will win, and who or what will lose.
> I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann Gutenberg
> was by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to
> hear Martin Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is "God's
> highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven
> forward." Gutenberg thought his invention would advance the cause of the
> Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it turned out to bring a revolution
> which destroyed the monopoly of the Church.
> We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of
> computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have
> reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of
> my talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death." In the time remaining, I will
> try to explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust
> you will be open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I
> can begin to get at this by telling you of a small experiment I have been
> conducting, on and off, for the past several years. There are some people
> who describe the experiment as an exercise in deceit and exploitation but
> I will rely on your sense of humor to pull me through.
> Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague
> who appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York Times.
> "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague says yes,
> there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the experiment
> can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a
> fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really?
> What's it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are
> limited only by my imagination. But I might say something like this:
> "Well, they did this study to find out what foods are best to eat for
> losing weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by
> chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the best approach. It seems
> that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs -- encomial dioxin --
> that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."
> Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to
> be health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about
> this," I say. "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart
> have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence.
> They tested more than 1200 people over a period of five years, and found
> that as the number of hours people jogged increased, there was a
> corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They don't know exactly why
> but there it is."
> I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to
> report something that is quite ridiculous -- one might say, beyond
> belief. Let me tell you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the
> second or third time I've tried this on the same person, most people will
> believe or at least not disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they
> say: "Really? Is that possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and
> reply, "Where'd you say that study was done?" And sometimes they say,
> "You know, I've heard something like that."
> Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results,
> one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said,
> there is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will
> believe it. This is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any
> case I have tried this experiment on non-professors and get roughly the
> same results. Another possible conclusion is one expressed by George
> Orwell -- also about 50 years ago -- when he remarked that the average
> person today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle
> Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their
> religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our
> science, no matter what.
> But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be
> drawn, related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I
> am referring to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly
> incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact -- whether actual
> or imagined -- that will surprise us for very long, since we have no
> comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the
> fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is
> no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical,
> logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, for the most part,
> makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean to try my
> experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about it,
> but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were
> actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark
> herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For
> all you know -- indeed, for all I know -- the skin of a Bismark herring
> could have made the seats on which you sit. And if I could get an
> industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing some
> incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell
> someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring.
> Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an
> analogy: If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the
> cards over, one by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their
> order is. After you had gone from the ace of spades through the nine of
> spades, you would expect a ten of spades to come up next. And if a three
> of diamonds showed up instead, you would be surprised and wonder what
> kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave you a deck that had been
> shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the cards over, you
> would not expect any card in particular -- a three of diamonds would be
> just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given
> order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise
> to whatever card turns up.
> The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order,
> nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing
> comes as a particular surprise.
> In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average person
> in the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like
> my brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible
> world-view, beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come
> from God. What the priests had to say about the world was derived from
> the logic of their theology. There was nothing arbitrary about the things
> people were asked to believe, including the fact that the world itself
> was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C. That could be
> explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the satisfaction of anyone. So
> could the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the head of a pin. It
> made quite good sense, if you believed that the Bible is the revealed
> word of God and that the universe is populated with angels. The medieval
> world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was not
> without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might
> not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the
> grand and benevolent design, but they had no doubt that there was such a
> design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of
> principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.
> The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say,
> sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather
> like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent,
> integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on
> which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore, in a sense, we are more
> naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be
> made to believe almost anything. The skin of a Bismark herring makes
> about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.
> Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of
> Cassius on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost literally
> in the stars. When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and
> allowed Kepler to look as well, they found no enchantment or
> authorization in the stars, only geometric patterns and equations. God,
> it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a master mathematician.
> This discovery helped to give impetus to the development of physics but
> did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it was
> possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe,
> and that God took a special interest in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth
> became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the
> universe, and we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at
> all. The ordered, comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to
> unravel because people no longer saw in the stars the face of a
> friend.
> And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well.
> I refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource
> that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their
> environment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a
> scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and
> usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century
> when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press
> into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an
> information explosion. Forty years after the invention of the press,
> there were printing machines in 110 cities in six different countries; 50
> years after, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all
> of them filled with information that had previously not been available to
> the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that
> computer technology introduced the age of
> information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been
> free of it since.
> But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of
> chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are
> faced with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers;
> 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million
> TV sets; and over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles
> published every year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41
> million photographs are taken, and just for the record, over 60 billion
> pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year.
> Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the
> silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until
> matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person,
> information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.
> The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is

=== message truncated ===


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Hi Deepak,
We still can’t see the attachments. I think Sudhir has
blocked the attachment feature because of recent virus
attach on the mailing list.

It would be good if you could put the attachment as a
mail text.


-Rit


---------------------------
Interaction Designer
New Delhi, India
www.ritwithfireworks.com
---------------------------

__________________________________________________
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Guys I am attaching the req. doc again


   regards
   deepak saini

deepak saini <depksani@...> wrote:
   Dear all
   Attached is the requirement document for a senior int. designer at Kyocera
   Interested people may mail there resumes for further consideration

   Thanks and Regards
   Deepak Saini


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hi all,

to introduce myself I did my M Des from IITD , 2002 currenly working with
VIP. earlier to this I had worke for Satyam -GE Applianes,hyd..

it's nice to be part of this group..

Rajeh Sangewar
M Des 2002
IIT D


On 27 Feb 2006 00:36:43 -0000, designindia@... <
designindia@...> wrote:
>
>
> hi,
>
> welcome to design india egroup. I am sudhir sharma and i moderate this
> group.
> I was in NID during 1983-1989 time and then started elephant design with
> four other graduates.
>
> It will be very nice if u can post a brief introduction of yr self on the
> group as yr first message. Where are u, what are u doing, where did u study
> and any issues u may want to disscuss. this will help others and friends to
> know that u are there and to know u.
>
> Also chk out pictures, update yr address in database phonebook as well as
> take part in Polls. You have a choice of not recieving mails in yr mailbox
> and chk them online...if u need any help on this count let me know.
>
> the membership to this group is through invitation only...only u can
> invite yr friend, or whomever u think worthy of being on a professional
> designers group. DO send me a mail if you want someone to be invited on the
> group.
>
> thank you once again and keep posting messages.
>
> regards
> sudhir sharma
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *Yahoo! Groups Links*
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Dear Dipanker
The open ended enquiry is what all children irrespectice of race,culture,class
and gender are engaed in till they are schooled by their parents.The more tragic
in this case is for children of the affluent and the so called educated.
To add more mess to the already poluted conceptual world I am proposing a
different way of looking at cognition/knowledge.
Can product precede  process?
  Can known precede  unknown?
  Can knowledge precede knowing ?
This cardinal rule of natural learning is reversed by our dependence on codified
knowledge.
Dependences on  codified knowledge – memory, text, digital - has supplanted
our spontaneous  creative nature. It  makes us distrustful of own body,
insights, intuition,  nature and even our children. Our tragedy today is that
even our needs,  need to be taught.
  Our process of knowing and hence knowledge has  undergone four fundamental
cognitive shifts:
  Experience as the means of knowing led to the  experiential paradigm.
  Memory as a source of knowledge led to the  memorizing paradigm
  Text as a source of knowledge led to the  textual  paradigm
  And in our more recent history a new paradigm has  entered: the digital 
paradigm.
  Each shift has dramatically effected not only  content of the knowledge but
also the knower.
I began exploring with de- intellectualising beauty/knowledge which took me to
the impact on us by the textual mediation of knowledge.
West is a result of something else that went wrong earlier.Textualisation is
maximum in western culture.

An interesting outcome of this study is the relation between the rise of
patriarchy/masculinisation and textual knowledge.Gender issues are the result of
this cognitive crisis.
What we need to relook is the role of modern institutions in disempowering us
from being independend and autonomous.



Deepankar Bhattacharyya <deepankar_bhatta@...> wrote:     Dear Jinan,
Raja,

  We have reduced education from being an open ended enquiry based on
  attempting to understand our universe to a set of training modules
  to facilitate survival in an economic paradigm.

  There are many alternate and internally consistent ways of looking
  at the world and our place in it, as has been practised in diverse
  societies for centuries. The success of the world view that
  developed in Europe and spawned the colonisations of much of the
  world in an unprecedented scale and on which rests most of the
  tenets of 'modern' ways of thinking and dealing with 'reality' has
  all but obiliterated everything else.

  Literacy is not an 'a priori' requirement as is made out to be, it
  is policy that has determined that all citizens within such and such
  geographical boundaries will via 'literacy' become educated. This,
  unfortunately propogates a myth that education is devoid of
  cultural, social and mythological contexts, and is objective.
  Nothing can be more untrue, because all formal modes of education
  needs a set of agreed upon rules that provide the edifice with
  internal consistency and therefore make it logical.

  A unified, all encompassing system of education that we have today
  rests on the premise that everyone needs to 'learn' to emerge from
  areas of darkness and superstition, which may, in my view be read as
  belief systems that are divergent with those professed by an
  influential group that defines what 'development' means. All of this
  is intimately connected with economic pressures that a globally
  integrated economy faces.

  It is up to us to recognise the 'contexts' of such an education and
  not get conned into beleiving that it is the only possible way,
  notwithstanding the sophisticated brainwashing that we as children
  go through as we pass through the education system and the actions
  that we are rewarded for in our working lives.

  Ideally the paradigms need to be made clear as part of the education
  process, so that conflicting arguments need no resolution, but can
  be held as true in differnt systems or ways of seeing. An education
  which sees scientific logic in the same way as it sees another
  scenario where seemingly conflicting viewpoints coexist as part of a
  spectrum of possibilities, all devised by our unique ways of making
  sense of our universe.

  Wearing blinkers that turn us into the case of the blind men trying
  to describe an elephant is what most seminars and discussions have
  been reduced to, mainly because they need to be consistent with an
  accepted way of doing things that is fast losing relevance as the
  impact of our actions come to us in ever quickening cycles.

  Alternatives are being practised all over the world, it is necessary
  to open up to them and consider them sufficiently mainstream to
  merit equal consideration, however unpalatable this may be to the
  established institutions so keen to protect their turf.

  regards

  Deepankar Bhattacharyya
  NID 1970-76
  Images Communications
  New Delhi





  --- In designindia@..., jinan kodapully <jinankb@y...>
  wrote:
  >
  > Dear Raja
  > Beautiful poem.
  > Some how the idea about red dots and blue dots seems preposterous.
  My life with rural tribal non literate communities have shown me a
  different picture.
  > Also if you interact with children on equal footing they will show
  u a different picture.My past 20 years was spent exploring the
  issues of creativity, aesthetic sense etc and if any of you are
  interested could see my website
  http://pantoto.org/home/jinan/paradigms.Each modern invention is
  anti child especially the ones meant for them.Most ridiculus being
  the so called toys for children. If the purpose is to quickly fit
  them in to modernty then that is good job.
  > Every child is a born designer,an artist and a scientist.But the
  schooling process make sure that they loose all abilities and depend
  on the experts to tell them how to live.
  > Offcource we are all victims of this process and the only way to
  get out of this is to break all the shells/ frames that block our
  perception. Our fragmented perception only shows only one side.
  > More over do not forget the ecological/enviormental crisis we are
  in and as designers our contribution to that stae of affairs.
  > Jinan












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Dear all
   Attached is the requirement document for a senior int. designer at Kyocera
   Interested people may mail there resumes for further consideration

   Thanks and Regards
   Deepak Saini


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NEBRIJA ENGINEERS THE  ARTIFACT: AUGUST 18, 1492
  Let me now move from the reasonably well known to the  unreasonably overlooked
- from Columbus, immediately associated with 1492, to  Elio Antonio de Nebrija,
outside of Spain almost forgotten. During the time  Columbus cruised southwest
through recognizable Portuguese waters and harbors,  in Spain the fundamental
engineering of a new social reality was proposed to the  queen. While Columbus
sailed for foreign lands to seek the familiar - gold,  subjects, nightingales -
in Spain Nebrija advocates the reduction of the queen's  subjects to an entirely
new type of dependence. He presents her with a new  weapon, grammar, to be
wielded by a new kind of mercenary, the  letrado.
  I was deeply moved when I felt Nebrija's Gramatica  Castellana in my hands - a
quarto volume of five signatures set in Gothic  letters. The epigraphy is
printed in red, and a blank page precedes the  Introduction:
   A la muy alta e assi esclarecida princesa dona Isabela la  tercera deste
nombre Reina i senora natural de espana e las islas de nuestro  mar. Comienza la
gramática que nuevamenta hizo el maestro Antonio de Nebrixa  sobre la lengua
castellana, e pone primero el prólogo. Léelo en buena  hora.
  The Conqueror of Granada receives a petition, similar to  many others. But
unlike the request of Columbus, who wanted resources to  establish a new route
to the China of Marco Polo, that of Nebrija urges the  queen to invade a new
domain at home. He offers Isabella a tool to colonize the  language spoken by
her own subjects; he wants her to replace the people's speech  by the imposition
of the queen's lengua - her language, her  tongue.
  EMPIRE NEEDS "LANGUAGE" AS  CONSORT
  I shall translate and comment on sections of the six-page  introduction to
Nebrija's grammar. Remember, then, that the colophon of the  Gramática
Castellana notes that it came off the press in Salamanca on the  18th of August,
just fifteen days after Columbus had  sailed.
   My lllustrious Queen. Whenever I ponder over the tokens of  the past that have
been preserved in writing, I am forced to the very same  conclusion. Language
has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall  remain its mate.
Together they come into being, together they grow and flower,  and together they
decline.
  To understand what la lengua, "language," meant for  Nebrija, it is necessary
to know who he was. Antonio Martinez de la Cala, a  converso, descendant of
Jewish converts, had decided at age nineteen that  Latin, at least on the
Iberian peninsula, had become so corrupted that one could  say it had died of
neglect. Thus Spain was left without a language (una  lengua) worthy of the
name. The languages of Scripture - Greek,  Latin, Hebrew - clearly were
something other than the speech of the  people. Nebrija then went to Italy
where, in his opinion, Latin was least  corrupted. When he returned to Spain,
his contemporary Herñan Nunez wrote that  it was like Orpheus bringing Euridice
back from Hades. During the next twenty  years, Nebrija dedicated himself to the
renewal of classical grammar and  rhetoric. The first full book printed in
Salamanca was his Latin grammar  (1482).
  When he reached his forties and began to age -as he puts it  - he discovered
that he could make a language out of the speech forms he daily  encountered in
Spain - to engineer, to synthesize chemically, a language. He  then wrote his
Spanish grammar, the first in any modern European tongue. The  converso uses his
classical formation to extend the juridic category of  consuetudo hispaniae to
the realm of language. Throughout the Iberian  peninsula, crowds speaking
various languages gather for pogroms against the  Jewish outsider at the very
moment when the cosmopolitan converso offers  his services to the Crown - the
creation of one language suitable for use  wherever the sword could carry it.
  Nebrija created two rule books, both at the service of the  queen's regime.
First, he wrote a grammar. Now grammars were not new. The most  perfect of them,
unknown to Nebrija, was already two thousand years old -  Panini's grammar of
Sanskrit. This was an attempt to describe a dead language,  to be taught only to
a very few. This is the goal pursued by Prakrit grammarians  in India, and Latin
or Greek grammarians in the West. Nebrija's work, however,  was written as a
tool for conquest abroad and a weapon to suppress untutored  speech at home.
  While he worked on his grammar, Nebrija also wrote a  dictionary that, to this
day, remains the single best source on Old Spanish. The  two attempts made in
our lifetime to supersede him both failed. Gili Gaya's  Tesauro Lexicográfico,
begun in 1947, foundered on the letter E, and R.S.  Boggs (Tentative Dictionary
of Medieval Spanish) remains, since 1946, an  often copied draft. Nebrija's
dictionary appeared the year after his grammar,  and already contained evidence
of the New World - the first Americanism,  canoa (canoe), appeared.
  CASTILIAN PASSES THROUGH ITS  INFANCY
  Now note what Nebrija thinks about Castilian.
   Castilian went through its infancy at the time of the  judges... it waxed in
strength under Alfonso the Learned. It was he who  collected law and history
books in Greek and Latin and had them  translated.
  Indeed, Alfonso (1221 - 1284) was the first European monarch  to use the vulgar
or vernacular tongue of the scribes as his chancery language.  His intent was to
demonstrate that he was not one of the Latin kings. Like a  caliph, he ordered
his courtiers to undertake pilgrimages through Muslim and  Christian books, and
transform them into treasures that, because of their very  language, would be a
valuable inheritance to leave his kingdom. Incidentally,  most of his
translators were Jews from Toledo. And these Jews - whose own  language was Old
Castilian - preferred to translate the oriental languages into  the vernacular
rather than into Latin, the sacred language of the  Church.
  Nebrija points out to the queen that Alfonso had left solid  tokens of Old
Spanish; in addition, he had worked toward the transformation of  vernacular
speech into language proper through using it to make laws, to record  history,
and to translate from the classics.
  He continues:
   This our language followed our soldiers whom we sent abroad  to rule. It
spread to Aragon, to Navarra, even to Italy ... the scattered bits  and pieces
of Spain were thus gathered and joined into one single  kingdom.
  Nebrija here reminds the queen of the new pact possible  between sword and
book. He proposes a covenant between two spheres, both  within the secular realm
of the Crown, a covenant distinct from the medieval  pact between Emperor and
Pope, which had been a covenant bridging the secular  and the sacred. He
proposes a pact, not of sword and cloth - each sovereign in  its own sphere -
but of sword and expertise, encompassing the engine of conquest  abroad and a
system of scientific control of diversity within the entire  kingdom. And he
knows well whom he addresses: the wife of Ferdinand of Aragon, a  woman he once
praised as the most enlightened of all men (sic). He is aware that  she reads
Cicero, Seneca, and Livy in the original for her own pleasure; and  that she
possesses a sensibility that unites the physical and spiritual into  what she
herself called "good taste." Indeed, historians claim that she is the  first to
use this expression. Together with Ferdinand, she was trying to
  give  shape to the chaotic Castile they had inherited; together they were
creating  Renaissance institutions of government, institutions apt for the
making of a  modern state, and yet, something better than a nation of lawyers.
Nebrija calls  to their minds a concept that, to this day, is powerful in
Spanish - armas  y letras. He speaks about the marriage of empire and language, 
addressing the sovereign who had just recently - and for a painfully short time 
- seized from the Church the Inquisition, in order to use it as a secular 
instrument of royal power. The monarchy used it to gain economic control of the 
grandees, and to replace noblemen by the letrados of Nebrija on the  governing
councils of the kingdom. This was the monarchy that transformed the  older
advisory bodies into bureaucratic organizations of civil servants,  institutions
fit only for the execution of royal policies. These secretaries or  ministries
of "experts," under the court ceremonial of the Hapsburgs, were
  later  assigned a ritual role in processions and receptions incomparable to any
other  secular bureaucracy since the times of Byzantium.
  LANGUAGE NOW NEEDS  TUTORS
  Very astutely, Nebrija's argument reminds the queen that a  new union of armas
y letras, complementary to that of church and state,  was essential to gather
and join the scattered pieces of Spain into a single  absolute kingdom.
    This unified and sovereign body will be of such shape and  inner cohesion
that centuries will be unable to undo it. Now that the Church has  been
purified, and we are thus reconciled to God [does he think of the work of  his
contemporary, Torquemada?] , now that the enemies of the Faith have been 
subdued by our arms [he refers to the apogee of the Reconquista], now  that just
laws are being enforced, enabling all of us to live as equals [perhaps  having
in mind the Hermandades] , what else remains but the flowering of  the peaceful
arts. And among the arts, foremost are those of language, which  sets us apart
from wild animals; language, which is the unique distinction of  man, the means
for the kind of understanding which can be surpassed only by  contemplation.
  Here, we distinctly hear the appeal of the humanist to the  prince, requesting
him to defend the realm of civilized Christians against the  domain of the wild.
"The wild man's inability to speak is part of the Wild Man  Myth whenever we
meet him during the middle ages....... in a morally ordered  world, to be wild
is to be incoherent mute ... sinful and accursed." Formerly,  the heathen was to
be brought into the fold through baptism; henceforth, through  language.
Language now needs tutors.

  A LOOSE AND UNRULY  LANGUAGE
  Nebrija then points out:
   So far, this our language has been left loose and unruly  and, therefore, in
just a few centuries this language has changed beyond  recognition. If we were
to compare what we speak today with the language spoken  five hundred years ago,
we would notice a difference and a diversity that could  not be any greater if
these were two alien tongues.
  Nebrija describes the evolution and extension of vernacular  tongues, of the
lengua vulgar, through time. He refers to the untutored  speech of Castile -
different from that of Aragon and Navarra, regions where  soldiers had recently
introduced Castilian - but a speech also different from  the older Castilian
into which Alfonso's monks and Jews had translated the Greek  classics from
their Arabic versions. In the fifteenth century people felt and  lived their
languages otherwise than we do today. The study of Columbus’  language made by
Menendez Pidal helps us to understand this. Columbus,  originally a cloth
merchant from Genoa, had as his first language Genovese, a  dialect still not
standardized today. He learned to write business letters in  Latin, albeit a
barbarous variety. After being shipwrecked in Portugal, he  married a Portuguese
and probably forgot most of his Italian. He spoke, but  never wrote a word of
Portuguese . During his nine years in Lisbon, he took up
  writing in Spanish. But, he never used his brilliant mind to learn Spanish
well,  and always wrote it in a hybrid, Portuguese-mannered style. His Spanish
is not  Castillan but is rich in simple words picked up all over the peninsula.
In spite  of some syntactical monstrosities, he handles this language in a
lively,  expressive, and precise fashion. Columbus, then, wrote in two languages
he did  not speak, and spoke several. None of this seems to have been
problematic for  his contemporaries. However, it is also true that none of these
were languages  in the eyes of Nebrija.
  UNBOUND AND UNGOVERNED SPEECH  FINDS A NEW ALLY IN PRINTING
  Continuing to develop his petition, he introduces the  crucial element of his
argument: La lengua suelta y fuera de regla, the  unbound and ungoverned speech
in which people actually live and manage their  lives, has become a challenge to
the Crown. He now interprets an unproblematic  historical fact as a problem for
the architects of a new kind of polity - the  modern state.
   Your Majesty, it has been my constant desire to see our  nation become great,
and to provide the men of my tongue with books worthy of  their leisure.
Presently, they waste their time on novels and fancy stories full  of lies.
  Nebrija proposes to regularize language to stop people from  wasting time on
frivolous reading, "quando la emprenta aun no informaba la  lengua de los
libros." And Nebrija is not the only late fifteenth-century  person concerned
with the "waste" of leisure time made possible through the  inventions of paper
and movable type. Ignatius of Loyola, twenty-nine years  later, while
convalescing in Pamplona with a leg shattered by a cannonball, came  to believe
that he had disastrously wasted his youth. At thirty, he looked back  on his
life as one filled with "the vanities of the world", whose leisure had  included
the reading of vernacular trash.
  ...AND MUST BE REPRESSED
  Nebrija argues for standardizing a living language for the  benefit of its
printed form. This argument is also made in our generation, but  the end now is
different. Our contemporaries believe that standardized language  is a necessary
condition to teach people to read, indispensable for the  distribution of
printed books. The argument in 1492 is the opposite: Nebrija is  upset because
people who speak in dozens of distinct vernacular tongues have  become the
victims of a reading epidemic. They waste their leisure, throwing  away their
time on books that circulate outside of any possible bureaucratic  control. A
manuscript was so precious and rare that authorities could often  suppress the
work of an author by literally seizing all the copies.  Manuscripts could
sometimes be extirpated by the roots. Not so books. Even with  the small
editions of two hundred to less than a thousand copies - typical for  the first
generation of print - it would never be possible to confiscate an
  entire run. Printed books called for the exercise of censorship through an 
Index of Forbidden Books. Books could only be proscribed, not destroyed.  But
Nebrija's proposal appeared more than fifty years before the Index  was
published in 1559. And he wishes to achieve control over the printed  word on a
much deeper level than what the Church later attempted through  proscription. He
wants to replace the people's vernacular by the grammarian's  language. The
humanist proposes the standardization of colloquial language to  remove the new
technology of printing from the vernacular domain - to prevent  people from
printing and reading in the various languages that, up to that time,  they had
only spoken. By this monopoly over an official and taught language, he  proposes
to suppress wild, untaught vernacular reading.
  VERNACULAR ALLIED TO  PRINTING WOULD CHALLENGE THE NATION STATE
  To grasp the full significance of Nebrija's argument - the  argument that
compulsory education in a standardized national tongue is  necessary to stop
people from wanton reading that gives them an easy pleasure -  one must remember
the status of print at that time. Nebrija was born before the  appearance of
movable type. He was thirteen when the first movable stock came  into use. His
conscious adult life coincides with the Incunabula. When printing  was in its
twenty-fifth year, he published his Latin grammar; when it was in its 
thirty-fifth year, his Spanish grammar. Nebrija could recall the time before 
print, as I can the time before television. Nebrija's text, on which I am 
commenting, was by coincidence published the year Thomas Caxton died. And 
Caxton's work itself furthers our understanding of the vernacular  book.
  Thomas Caxton was an English cloth merchant living in the  Netherlands. He took
up translating, and then apprentice himself to a printer.  After publishing a
few books in English, he took his press to England in 1476.  By the time, he
died (1491), he had published forty translations into English,  and nearly
everything available in English vernacular literature, with the  notable
exception of William Langland's Piers Plowman. I have often  wondered if he left
this important work off his list because of the challenge it  might present to
one of his best sellers - The Art and Crafte to Knowe  Well to Dye. This volume
of his Westminster Press belongs to the first  series of self-help books.
Whatever would train for a society well informed and  well mannered, whatever
would lead to behavior gentle and devout, was gathered  in small folios and
quartos of neat Gothic print - instructions on everything  from manipulating a
knife to conducting a conversation, from the art of weeping  to the
  art of playing chess to that of dying. Before 1500, no less than 100  editions
of this last book appeared. It is a self-instruction manual, showing  one how to
prepare to die with dignity and without the intervention of physician  or
clergy.
  Four categories of books first appeared in the peoples'  languages: vernacular,
native literature; translations from French and Latin;  devotional books; and
already there were the how-to-do-it manuals that made  teachers unnecessary.
Printed books in Latin were of a different sort,  comprising textbooks, rituals,
and lawbooks - books at the service of  professional clergymen and teachers.
From the very beginning, printed books were  of two kinds: those which readers
independently chose for their pleasure, and  those professionally prescribed for
the reader's own good. It is estimated that  before 1500, more than seventeen
hundred presses in almost three hundred  European towns had produced one or more
books. Almost forty thousand editions  were published during the fifteenth
century, comprising somewhere between  fifteen and twenty million copies. About
one-third of these were published in  the various vernacular languages of
Europe. This portion of printed books is the  source of
  Nebrija's concern.
  BOOKS HENCEFORTH SHALL BE SEEN  AND NOT HEARD
  To appreciate more fully his worry about the freedom to  read, one must
remember that reading in his time was not silent. Silent reading  is a recent
invention. Augustine was already a great author and the Bishop of  Hippo when he
found that it could be done. In his Confessions he  describes the discovery.
During the night, charity forbade him to disturb his  fellow monks with noises
he made while reading. But curiosity impelled him to  pick up a book. So, he
learned to read in silence, an art that he had observed  in only one man, his
teacher, Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose practiced the art of  silent reading because
otherwise people would have gathered around him and would  have interrupted him
with their queries on the text. Loud reading was the link  between classical
learning and popular culture.
  Habitual reading in a loud voice produces social effects. It  is an
extraordinarily effective way of teaching the art to those who look over  the
reader's shoulder; rather than being confined to a sublime or sublimated  form
of self-satisfaction, it promotes community intercourse; it actively leads  to
common digestion of and comment on the passages read. In most of the  languages
of India, the verb that translates into "reading" has a meaning close  to
"sounding." The same verb makes the book and the vina sound. To read and to 
play a musical instrument are perceived as parallel activities. The current, 
simpleminded, internationally accepted definition of literacy obscures an 
alternate approach to book, print, and reading. If reading were conceived 
primarily as a social activity as, for example, competence in playing the 
guitar, fewer readers could mean a much broader access to books and  literature.
  Reading aloud was common in Europe before Nebrija's time.  Print multiplied and
spread opportunities for this infectious reading in an  epidemic manner.
Further, the line between literate and illiterate was different  from what we
recognize now. Literate was he who had been taught Latin. The great  mass of
people, thoroughly conversant with the vernacular literature of their  region,
either did not know how to read and write, had picked it up on their  own, had
been instructed as accountants, had left the clergy or, even if they  knew it,
hardly used their Latin. This held true for the poor and for many  nobles,
especially women. And we sometimes forget that even today the rich, many 
professionals, and high-level bureaucrats have assistants report a verbal digest
of documents and information, while they call on secretaries to write what they 
dictate.
  To the queen, Nebrija's proposed enterprise must have seemed  even more
improbable than Columbus' project. But, ultimately, it turned out to  be more
fundamental than the New World for the rise of the Hapsburg Empire.  Nebrija
clearly showed the way to prevent the free and anarchic development of  printing
technology, and exactly how to transform it into the evolving national  state's
instrument of bureaucratic control.
  AT THE QUEEN'S SERVICE,  SYNTHETIC CASTILIAN SHALL REPLACE THE PEOPLE'S SPEECH
  Today, we generally act on the assumption that books could  not be printed and
would not be read in any number if they were written in a  vernacular language
free from the constraints of an official grammar. Equally,  we assume that
people could not learn to read and write their own tongue unless  they are
taught in the same manner as students were traditionally taught Latin.  Let us
listen again to Nebrija.
    By means of my grammar, they shall learn artificial  Castilian, not difficult
to do, since it is built up on the base of a language  they know; and, then,
Latin will come  easily…
  Nebrija already considers the vernacular as a raw material  from which his
Castilian art can be produced, a resource to be mined, not unlike  the
Brazilwood and human chattel that, Columbus sadly concluded, were the only 
resources of value or importance in Cuba.
  SPEECH NURTURED FROM ROOTS IS  REPLACED BY LANGUAGE DISPENSED FROM THE CROWN
  Nebrija does not seek to teach grammar that people learn to  read. Rather, he
implores Isabella to give him the power and authority to stem  the anarchic
spread of reading by the use of his grammar.
    Presently, they waste their leisure on novels and fancy  stories full of
lies. I have decided, therefore, that my most urgent task is to  transform
Castilian speech into an artifact so that whatever henceforth shall be  written
in this language may be of one standard  tenor.
  Nebrija frankly states what he wants to do and even provides  the outline of
his incredible project. He deliberately turns the mate of empire  into its
slave. Here the first modern language expert advises the Crown on the  way to
make, out of a people's speech and lives, tools that befit the state and  its
pursuits. Nebrija's grammar is conceived by him as a pillar of the 
nation-state. Through it, the state is seen, from its very beginning, as an 
aggressively productive agency.
  The new state takes from people the words on which they  subsist, and
transforms them into the standardized language which henceforth  they are
compelled to use, each one at the level of education that has been 
institutionally imputed to him. Henceforth, people will have to rely on the 
language they receive from above, rather than to develop a tongue in common with
one another. The switch from the vernacular to an officially taught mother 
tongue is perhaps the most significant - and, therefore, least researched - 
event in the coming of a commodity-intensive society.
  The radical change from the vernacular to taught language  foreshadows the
switch from breast to bottle, from subsistence to welfare, from  production for
use to production for market, from expectations divided between  state and
church to a world where the Church is marginal, religion is  privatized, and the
state assumes the maternal functions heretofore claimed only  by the Church.
Formerly, there had been no salvation outside the Church;  now, there would be
no reading, no writing - if possible, no speaking - outside  the educational
sphere. People would have to be reborn out of the monarch's  womb, and be
nourished at her breast. Both the citizen of the modern state and  his
state-provided language come into being for the first time - both are  without
precedent anywhere in history.
  THE BOSOM OF ALMA  MATER
  But dependence on a formal, bureaucratic institution to  obtain for every
individual a service that is as necessary as breast milk for  human subsistence,
while radically new and without parallel outside of Europe,  was not a break
with Europe's past. Rather, this was a logical step forward - a  process first
legitimated in the Christian Church evolved into an accepted and  expected
temporal function of the secular state. Institutional maternity has a  unique
European history since the third century. In this sense, it is indeed  true that
Europe is the Church and the Church is Europe. Nebrija and universal  education
in the modern state cannot be understood without a close knowledge of  the
Church, insofar as this institution is represented as a mother.
  From the very earliest days, the Church is called "mother".  Marcion the
Gnostic uses this designation in 144. At first, the community of the  faithful
is meant to be mother to the new members whom communion, that is, the  fact of
celebrating community, engenders. Soon, however, the Church becomes a  mother
outside of whose bosom it is hardly worthwhile to be called human or to  be
alive. But the origins of the Church's self-understanding as mother have been 
little researched. One can often find comments about the role of mother 
goddesses in the various religions scattered throughout the Roman Empire at the 
time Christianity began to spread. But the fact that no previous community had 
ever been called mother has yet to be noticed and studied. We know that the 
image of the Church as mother comes from Syria, and that it flourished in the 
third century in North Africa. On a beautiful mosaic near Tripoli, where the 
claim is first expressed, both the invisible community and the
  visible building  are represented as mother. And Rome is the last place where
the metaphor is  applied to the Church. The female personification of an
institution did not fit  the Roman style; the idea is first taken up only late
in the fourth century in a  poem by Pope Damasus.
  This early Christian notion of the Church as mother has no  historical
precedent. No direct gnostic or pagan influence, nor any direct  relationship to
the Roman mother cult has thus far been proven. The description  of the Church's
maternity is, however, quite explicit. The Church conceives,  bears, and gives
birth to her sons and daughters. She may have a miscarriage.  She raises her
children to her breast to nourish them with the milk of faith. In  this early
period, the institutional trait is clearly present, but the maternal  authority
exercised by the Church through her bishops and the ritual treatment  of the
Church building as a female entity are still balanced by the insistence  on the
motherly quality of God's love, and of the mutual love of His children in 
baptism. Later, the image of the Church as a prototype of the authoritarian and 
possessive mother becomes dominant in the middle ages. The popes then insist on 
an understanding of the Church as Mater, Magistra, and
  Domina -  mother, authoritative teacher, sovereign. Thus Gregory VII
(1073-1085) names  her in the struggle with the emperor Henry IV.
  Nebrija's introduction is addressed to a queen intent on  building a modern
state. And his argument implies that, institutionally, the  state must now
assume the universally maternal functions heretofore claimed only  by the
Church. Educatio, as a function first institutionalized at the  bosom of Mother
Church, becomes a function of the Crown in the process of the  modern state's
formation.
  Educatio prolis is a term that in Latin grammar calls  for a female subject. It
designates the feeding and nurturing in which mothers  engage, be they bitch,
sow, or woman. Among humans only women educate. And they  educate only infants,
which etymologically means those who are yet without  speech. To educate has
etymologically nothing to do with "drawing out" as  pedagogical folklore would
have it. Pestalozzi should have heeded Cicero: educit  obstetrix - educat
nutrix:
  the midwife draws - the nurse nurtures, because men do  neither in Latin. They
engage in docentia (teaching) and instructio  (instruction). The first men who
attributed to themselves educational  functions were early bishops who led their
flocks to the alma ubera  (milk-brimming breasts) of Mother Church from which
they were never to be  weaned. This is why they, like their secular successors,
call the faithful  alumni - which means sucklings or suckers, and nothing else.
It is this  transfer of woman's functions to specialized institutional spheres
governed by  clergies that Nebrija helped to bring about. In the process the
state acquired  the function of a many-uddered provider of distinct forms of
sustenance, each  corresponding to a separate basic need, and each guarded and
managed by the  clergy, always male in the higher reaches of the hierarchy.
  BUREAUCRATIC CONTROL AS  THE STONE OF WISDOM
  Actually, when Nebrija proposes to transform Castilian into  an artifact, as
necessary for the queen's subjects as faith for the Christian,  he appeals to
the hermetic tradition. In the language of his time, the two words  he uses -
reducir and artificio have both an ordinary and a  technical meaning. In the
latter case, they belong to a language of  alchemy.
  According to Nebrija's own dictionary, reducir in  fifteenth-century Spanish
means "to change", "to bring into obeisance," and "to  civilize." In this last
sense, the Jesuits later understood the Reducciones  de Paraguay. In addition,
reductio -throughout the fifteenth and  sixteenth centuries - means one of the
seven stages by which ordinary elements  of nature are transmuted into the
philosopher's stone, into the panacea that, by  touch, turns everything into
gold. Here, reductio designates the fourth  of seven grades of sublimation. It
designates the crucial test that must be  passed by grey matter to be promoted
from the primary to the secondary grades of  enlightenment. In the first four
grades, raw nature is successively liquefied,  purified, and evaporated. In the
fourth grade, that of reductio, it is  nourished on philosopher's milk. If it
takes to this substance, which will occur  only if the first three processes
have completely voided its unruly and raw  nature, the
  chrysosperm, the sperm of gold hidden in its depth, can be brought  forth. This
is educatio. During the following three stages, the alchemist  can coagulate his
alumnus - the substance he has fed with his milk - into  the philosopher's
stone.
  The precise language used here is a bit posterior to  Nebrija. It is taken
almost literally from Paracelsus, another man born within a  year of the
publication of the Gramatica Castellana.
  THE EXPERT NEEDED BY THE  CROWN
  Now let us return to the text. Nebrija develops his  argument:
   I have decided to transform Castilian into an artifact so  that whatever shall
be written henceforth in this language shall be of one  standard tenor, one
coinage that can outlast the times. Greek and Latin have  been governed by art,
and thus have kept their uniformity throughout the ages.  Unless the like of
this be done for our language, in vain Your Majesty's  chroniclers … shall
praise your deeds. Your labor will not last more than a few  years, and we shall
continue to feed on Castilian translations of foreign tales  about our own
kings. Either your feats will fade with the language or they will  roam among
aliens abroad, homeless, without a dwelling in which they can  settle.
  The Roman Empire could be governed through the Latin of  its elite. But the
traditional, separate elite language used in former  empires for keeping
records, maintaining international relations, and advancing  learning - like
Persian, Arabic, Latin, or Frankish - is insufficient to realize  the
aspirations of nationalistic monarchies. The modern European state cannot 
function in the world of the vernacular. The new national state needs an 
artificio, unlike the perennial Latin of diplomacy and the perishable  Castilian
of Alfonso the Learned. This kind of polity requires a standard  language
understood by all those subject to its laws and for whom the tales  written at
the monarch's behest (that is, propaganda) are destined.
  SOCIAL STATUS FROM TAUGHT  LANGUAGE RATHER THAN BLOOD
  However, Nebrija does not suggest that Latin be abandoned.  On the contrary,
the neo-Latin renaissance in Spain owed its existence largely  to his grammar,
dictionary, and textbooks. But his important innovation was to  lay the
foundation for a linguistic ideal without precedent: the creation of a  society
in which the universal ruler's bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and  peasants
all pretend to speak one language, a language the poor are presumed to 
understand and to obey. Nebrija established the notion of a kind of ordinary 
language that itself is sufficient to place each man in his assigned place on 
the pyramid that education in a mother tongue necessarily constructs. In his 
argument, he insists that Isabella's claim to historical fame depends on forging
a language of propaganda - universal and fixed like Latin, yet capable of 
penetrating every village and farm, to reduce subjects into modern  citizens.
  How times had changed since Dante! For Dante, a language  that had to be
learned, to be spoken according to a grammar, was inevitably a  dead tongue. For
him, such a language was fit only for schoolmen, whom he  cynically called
inventores grammaticae facultatis. What for Dante was  dead and useless, Nebrija
recommends as a tool. One was interested in vital  exchange, the other in
universal conquest, in a language that by rule would coin  words as
incorruptible as the stones of a palace:
    Your Majesty, I want to lay the foundations for the dwelling  in which your
fame can settle. I want to do for our language what Zeno has done  for Greek,
and Crates for Latin. I do not doubt that their betters have come to  succeed
them. But the fact that their pupils have improved on them does not  detract
from their or, I should say, from our glory - to be the inventors of a 
necessary craft just when the time for such invention was ripe. Trust me, Your 
Majesty, no craft has ever arrived more timely than grammar for the Castilian 
tongue at this time.
  The expert is always in a hurry, but his belief in progress  gives him the
language of humility. The academic adventurer pushes his  government to adopt
his idea now, under threat of failure to achieve its  imperial designs. This is
the time!
   Our language has indeed just now reached a height from which  we must fear
more that we sink, than we can ever hope to  rise.
  THE EXPERT AS TUTOR OF  THE SUBJECT'S INTEREST
  Nebrija's last paragraph in the introduction exudes  eloquence. Evidently the
teacher of rhetoric knew what he taught. Nebrija has  explained his project;
given the queen logical reasons to accept it; frightened  her with what would
happen if she were not to heed him; now, finally, like  Columbus, he appeals to
her sense of a manifest destiny.
   Now, Your Majesty, let me come to the last advantage that  you shall gain from
my grammar. For the purpose, recall the time when I  presented you with a draft
of this book earlier this year in Salamanca. At this  time, you asked me what
end such a grammar could possibly serve. Upon this, the  Bishop of Avila
interrupted to answer in my stead. What he said was  this:
  "Soon Your Majesty will have placed her yoke upon many  barbarians who speak
outlandish tongues. By this, your victory, these people  shall stand in a new
need; the need for the laws the victor owes to the  vanquished, and the need for
the language we shall bring with us." My grammar  shall serve to impart to them
the Castilian tongue, as we have used grammar to  teach Latin to our young.
  NEBRIJA'S PROJECT  SCANDALIZES HER MAJESTY
  We can attempt a reconstruction of what happened at  Salamanca when Nebrija
handed the queen a draft of his forthcoming book. The  queen praised the
humanist for having provided the Castilian tongue with what  had been reserved
to the languages of Scripture - Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. (It  is surprising and
significant that the converso, in the year of Granada,  does not mention the
Arabic of the Koran!) But while Isabella was able to grasp  the achievement of
her letrado - the description of a living tongue as  rules of grammar - she was
unable to see any practical purpose in such an  undertaking. For her, grammar
was an instrument designed solely for use by  teachers. She believed, however,
that the vernacular simply could not be taught.  In her royal view of
linguistics, every subject of her many kingdoms was so made  by nature that
during his life time he would reach perfect dominion over his  tongue on his
own. In this version of "majestic linguistics," the  vernacular is the
  subject's domain. By the very nature of things, the vernacular  is beyond the
reach of the Spanish Monarch's authority. But the ruler forging  the nation
state is unable to see the logic inherent in the project. Isabella's  initial
rejection underscores the originality of Nebrija's proposal.
  This discussion of Nebrija's draft about the need for  instruction to speak
one's mother tongue must have taken place in the months  around March, 1492, the
same time Columbus argued his project with the queen. At  first, Isabella
refused Columbus on the advice of technical counsel - he had  miscalculated the
circumference of the globe. But Nebrija's proposal she  rejected out of a
different motive: from royal respect for the autonomy of her  subject's tongues.
This respect of the Crown for the juridic autonomy of each  village, of the
fuero del pueblo, the judgement by peers, was perceived  by people and sovereign
as the fundamental freedom of Christians engaged in the  reconquest of Spain.
Nebrija argues against this traditional and typically  Iberic prejudice of
Isabella - the notion that the Crown cannot encroach on the  variety of customs
in the kingdoms - and calls up the image of a new, universal  mission for a
modern Crown.
  Ultimately, Columbus won out because his Franciscan friends  presented him to
the queen as a man driven by God to serve her mystical mission.  Nebrija
proceeds in the same fashion. First, he argues that the vernacular must  be
replaced by an artificio to give the monarch's power increased range  and
duration; then, to cultivate the arts by decision of the court; also, to  guard
the established order against the threat presented by wanton reading and 
printing. But he concludes his petition with an appeal to "the Grace of Granada"
- the queen's destiny, not just to conquer, but to civilize the whole  world.
  Both Columbus and Nebrija offer their services to a new kind  of empire
builder. But Columbus proposes only to use the recently created  caravels to the
limit of their range for the expansion of royal power in what  would become New
Spain. Nebrija is more basic - he argues the use of his grammar  for the
expansion of the queen's power in a totally new sphere: state control  over the
shape of people's everyday subsistence. In effect, Nebrija drafts the 
declaration of war against subsistence which the new state was organizing to 
fight. He intends the teaching of a mother tongue - the first invented part of 
universal education.

  3RD PART
  THE IMPOSITION OF TAUGHT MOTHER TONGUE
  Historians have chosen Columbus' voyage from Palos as a date  convenient for
marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modem times, a  point useful for
changing editors of textbooks. But the world of Ptolemy did not  become the
world of Mercator in one year, nor did the world of the vernacular  become the
age of education overnight. Rather, traditional cosmography was  gradually
adjusted in the light of widening experience. Columbus was followed by  Cortéz,
Copernicus by Kepler, Nebrija by Comenius. Unlike personal insight, the  change
in world view that generated our dependence on goods and services took  500
years.
  THE RISE OF  COMMODITY-INTENSIVE SOCIETY
  How often the hand of the clock advances depends on the  language of the
ciphers on the quadrant. The Chinese speak of five stages in  sprouting, and
dawn approaches in seven steps for the Arabs. If I were to  describe the
evolution of homo economicus from Mandeville to Marx or  Galbraith, I would come
to a different view of epochs than if I had a mind to  outline the stages in
which the ideology of homo educandus developed from  Nebrija through Radke to
Comenius. And again, within this same paradigm, a  different set of turning
points would best describe the decay of untutored  learning and the route toward
the inescapable miseducation that educational  institutions necessarily
dispense.
  It took a good decade to recognize that Columbus had found a  new hemisphere,
not just a new route. It took much longer to invent the concept  "New World" for
the continent whose existence he had denied.
  A full century and a half separated the claim of Nebrija -  in the queen's
service he had to teach all her subjects to speak - and  the claim of John Amos
Comenius - the possession of a method by which an army of  schoolteachers would
teach everybody everything perfectly.
  By the time of Comenius (1592 - 1670), the ruling  groups of both the Old and
New Worlds were deeply convinced of the need for such  a method. An incident in
the history of Harvard College aptly illustrates the  point. On the one hundred
and fiftieth birthday of Nebrija's grammar, John  Winthrop, Jr., was on his way
to Europe searching for a theologian and educator  to accept the presidency of
Harvard. One of the first persons he approached was  the Czech Comenius, leader
and last bishop of the Moravian Church. Winthrop  found him in London, where he
was organizing the Royal Society and advising the  government on public schools.
In Magna Didactica, vel Ars Omnibus Omnia  Omnino Docendi, Comenius had
succinctly defined the goals of his profession.  Education begins in the womb,
and does not end until death. Whatever is worth  knowing is worth teaching by a
special method appropriate to the subject. The  preferred world is the one so
organized that it functions as a school for all.
  Only if learning is the result of teaching can individuals be raised to the 
fullness of their humanity. People who learn without being taught are more like 
animals than men. And the school system must be so organized that all, old and 
young, rich and poor, noble and low, men and women, be taught effectively, not 
just symbolically and ostentatiously.
  These are the thoughts written by the potential president of  Harvard. But he
never crossed the Atlantic. By the time Winthrop met him, he had  already
accepted the invitation of the Swedish government to organize a national  system
of schools for Queen Christina. Unlike Nebrija, he never had to argue for  the
need of his services - they were always in great demand. The domain of the 
vernacular, considered untouchable by Isabella, had become the hunting ground 
for job-seeking Spanish letrados, Jesuits, and Massachusetts divines. A  sphere
of formal education had been disembedded. Formally taught mother tongue 
professionally handled according to abstract rules had begun to compare with and
encroach upon the vernacular. This gradual replacement and degradation of the 
vernacular by its costly counterfeit heralds the coming of the market-intensive 
society in which we now live.
  THE DECLINE OF  VERNACULAR VALUES
  Vernacular comes from an Indo-Germanic root that  implies "rootedness" and
"abode." Vernaculum as a Latin word was used for  whatever was homebred,
homespun, homegrown, homemade, as opposed to what was  obtained in formal
exchange. The child of one's slave and of one's wife, the  donkey born of one's
own beast, were vernacular beings, as was the staple that  came from the garden
or the commons. If Karl Polanyi had adverted to this fact,  he might have used
the term in the meaning accepted by the ancient Romans:  sustenance derived from
reciprocity patterns imbedded in every aspect of life,  as distinguished from
sustenance that comes from exchange or from vertical  distribution.
  Vernacular was used in this general sense from  preclassical times down to the
technical formulations found in the Codex of  Theodosius. It was Varro who
picked the term to introduce the same distinction  in language. For him,
vernacular speech is made up of the words and  patterns grown on the speaker's
own ground, as opposed to what is grown  elsewhere and then transported. And
since Varro's authority was widely  recognized, his definition stuck. He was the
librarian of both Caesar and  Augustus and the first Roman to attempt a thorough
and critical study of the  Latin language. His Lingua Latina was a basic
reference book for  centuries. Quintillian admired him as the most learned of
all Romans. And  Quintillian, the Spanish-born drill master for the future
senators of Rome, is  always proposed to normal students as one of the founders
of their profession.  But neither can be compared to Nebrija. Both Varro and
Quintillian were  concerned with shaping the speech of senators and
  scribes, the speech of the  forum; Nebrija with the language of the common man
who could read and listen to  readings. Simply, Nebrija proposed to substitute a
mother tongue for the  vernacular.
  Vernacular came into English in the one restricted  sense to which Varro had
confined its meaning. Just now, I would like to  resuscitate some of its old
breath. We need a simple, straightforward word to  designate the activities of
people when they are not motivated by thoughts of  exchange, a word that denotes
autonomous, non-market related actions through  which people satisfy everyday
needs - the actions that by their very nature  escape bureaucratic control,
satisfying needs to which, in the very process,  they give specific shape.
Vernacular seems a good old word for this purpose, and  should be acceptable to
many contemporaries. There are technical words that  designate the satisfaction
of needs that economists do not or cannot measure -  social production as
opposed to economic production, the generation of  use-values as opposed to the
production of commodities, household economics as  opposed to market economics.
But these terms are specialized, tainted with some
  ideological prejudice, and each, in a different way, badly limps. Each 
contrasting pair of terms, in its own way, also fosters the confusion that 
assigns vernacular undertakings to unpaid, standardized, formalized activities. 
It is this kind of confusion I wish to clarify. We need a simple adjective to 
name those acts of competence, lust, or concern that we want to defend from 
measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys and Socialist Commissars. The  term
must be broad enough to fit the preparation of food and the shaping of 
language, childbirth, and recreation, without implying either a privatized 
activity akin to the housework of modern women, a hobby or an irrational and 
primitive procedure. Such an adjective is not at hand. But vernacular might 
serve. By speaking about vernacular language and the possibility of its 
recuperation, I am trying to bring into awareness and discussion the existence 
of a vernacular mode of being, doing, and making that in a desirable future
  society might again expand in all aspects of life.
  Mother tongue, since the term was first used, has  never meant the vernacular,
but rather its contrary. The term was first used by  Catholic monks to designate
a particular language they used, instead of Latin,  when speaking from the
pulpit. No Indo-Germanic culture before had used the  term. The word was
introduced into Sanskrit in the eighteenth century as a  translation from the
English. The term has no roots in the other major language  families now spoken
on which I could check. The only classical people who viewed  their homeland as
a kind of mother were the Cretans. Bachofen suggests that  memories of an old
matriarchal order still lingered in their culture. But even  in Crete, there was
no equivalent to "mother" tongue. To trace the association  which led to the
term mother tongue, I shall first have to look at what  happened at the court of
Charlemagne, and then what happened later in the Abbey  of Gorz.
  THE FIRST UNIVERSAL  NEED FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
  The idea that humans are born in such fashion that they need  institutional
service from professional agents in order to reach that humanity  for which by
birth all people are destined can be traced down to Carolingian  times. It was
then that, for the first time in history, it was discovered that  there are
certain basic needs, needs that are universal to mankind and that cry  out for
satisfaction in a standard fashion that cannot be met in a vernacular  way. The
discovery is perhaps best associated with the Church reform that took  place in
the eighth century. The Scottish monk Alcuin, the former chancellor of  York
University who became the court philosopher of Charles the Great, played a 
prominent role in this reform. Up to that time the Church had considered its 
ministers primarily as priests, that is, as men selected and invested with 
special powers to meet communitary, liturgical, public needs. They were engaged 
in preaching at ritual occasions and had to preside at
  functions. They acted as  public officials, analogous to those others through
whom the state provided for  the administration of justice, or, in Roman times,
for public work. To think of  these kinds of magistrates as if they were
"service professionals" would be an  anachronistic projection of our
contemporary categories.
  But then, from the eighth century on, the classical priest  rooted in Roman and
Helenistic models began to be transmogrified into the  precursor of the service
professional: the teacher, social worker, or educator.  Church ministers began
to cater to the personal needs of parishioners, and to  equip themselves with a
sacramental and pastoral theology that defined and  established these needs for
their regular service. The institutionally defined  care of the individual, the
family, the village community, acquires  unprecedented prominence. The term
"holy mother the church" ceases almost  totally to mean the actual assembly of
the faithful whose love, under the  impulse of the Holy Spirit, engenders new
life in the very act of meeting. The  term mother henceforth refers to an
invisible, mystical reality from  which alone those services absolutely
necessary for salvation can be obtained.  Henceforth, access to the good graces
of this mother on whom universally  necessary salvation
  depends is entirely controlled by a hierarchy of ordained  males. This
gender-specific mythology of male hierarchies mediating access to  the
institutional source of life is without precedent. From the ninth to the 
eleventh century, the idea took shape that there are some needs common to all 
human beings that can be satisfied only through service from professional 
agents. Thus the definition of needs in terms of professionally defined 
commodities in the service sector precedes by a millennium the industrial 
production of universally needed basic goods.
  Thirty-five years ago, Lewis Mumford tried to make this  point. When I first
read his statement that the monastic reform of the ninth  century created some
of the basic assumptions on which the industrial system is  founded, I could not
be convinced by something I considered more of an intuition  than a proof. In
the meantime, though, I have found a host of converging  arguments - most of
which Mumford does not seem to suspect - for rooting the  ideologies of the
industrial age in the earlier Carolingian Renaissance. The  idea that there is
no salvation without personal services provided by  professionals in the name of
an institutional Mother Church is one of these  formerly unnoticed developments
without which, again, our own age would be  unthinkable. True, it took five
hundred years of medieval theology to elaborate  on this concept. Only by the
end of the Middle Ages would the pastoral  self-image of the Church be fully
rounded. And only in the Council of Trent  (1545) would
  this self-image of the Church as a mother milked by clerical  hierarchies
become formally defined. Then, in the Constitution of the  Second Vatican
Council (1964), the Catholic Church, which had served in the past  as the prime
model for the evolution of secular service organizations, aligns  itself
explicitly in the image of its secular imitations.
  PROFESSIONAL CONTROL OVER  THE NATURE OF NEEDED SERVICE
  The important point here is the notion that the clergy can  define its services
as needs of human nature, and make this service-commodity  the kind of necessity
that cannot be forgone without jeopardy to eternal life.  It is in this ability
of a nonhereditary elite that we ought to locate the  foundation without which
the contemporary service or welfare state would not be  conceivable.
Surprisingly little research has been done on the religious  concepts that
fundamentally distinguish the industrial age from all other  epochs. The
official decline of the vernacular conception of Christian life in  favor of one
organized around pastoral care is complex and drawn-out process  constituting
the background for a set of consistent shifts in the language and  institutional
development of the West.
  THE ORIGINS OF "MOTHER  TONGUE"
  When Europe first began to take shape as an idea and as a  political reality,
between Merovingian times and the High Middle Ages, what  people spoke was
unproblematic. It was called "romance" or "theodisc" -  peoplish. Only somewhat
later, lingua vulgaris became the common  denominator distinguishing popular
speech from the Latin of administration and  doctrine. Since Roman times, a
person's first language was the patrius sermo,  the language of the male head of
the household. Each such sermo or  speech was perceived as a separate language.
Neither in ancient Greece nor in  the Middle Ages did people make the modern
distinction between mutually  understandable dialects and different languages.
The same holds true today, for  example, at the grass roots in India. What we
know today as monolingual  communities were and, in fact, are exceptions. From
the Balkans to Indochina's  western frontiers, it is still rare to find a
village in which one cannot get  along in more than two or
  three tongues. While it is assumed that each person  has his patrius sermo, it
is equally taken for granted that most persons  speak several "vulgar" tongues,
each in a vernacular, untaught way. Thus the  vernacular, in opposition to
specialized, learned language - Latin for the  Church, Frankish for the Court -
was as obvious in its variety as the taste of  local wines and food, as the
shapes of house and hoe, down to the eleventh  century. It is at this moment,
quite suddenly, that the term mother  tongue appears. It shows up in the sermons
of some monks from the Abbey of  Gorz. The process by which this phenomenon
turns vernacular speech into a moral  issue can only be touched upon here.
  Gorz was a mother abbey in Lorrain, not far from Verdun.  Benedictine monks had
founded the monastery in the eighth century, around bones  believed to belong to
Saint Gorgonius. During the ninth century, a time of  widespread decay in
ecclesiastical discipline, Gorz, too, suffered a notorious  decline. But only
three generations after such scandalous dissolution Gorz  became the center of
monastic reform in the Germanic areas of the Empire. Its  reinvigoration of
Cistercian life paralleled the work of the reform abbey of  Cluny. Within a
century, 160 daughter abbeys throughout the northeastern parts  of central
Europe were established from Gorz.
  It seems quite probable that Gorz was then at the center of  the diffusion of a
new technology that was crucial for the later imperial  expansion of the
European powers. The transformation of the horse into the  tractor of choice.
Four Asiastic inventions - the horseshoe, the fixed saddle  and stirrup, the
bit, and the cummett (the collar resting on the shoulder) -  permitted important
and extensive changes. One horse could replace six oxen.  While supplying the
same traction, and more speed, a horse could be fed on the  acreage needed for
one yoke of oxen. Because of its speed, the horse permitted a  more extensive
cultivation of the wet, northern soils, in spite of the short  summers. Also,
greater rotation of crops was possible. But even more  importantly, the peasant
could now tend fields twice as far away from his  dwelling. A new pattern of
life became possible. Formerly, people had lived in  clusters of homesteads; now
they could form villages large enough to support a
  parish and, later, a school. Through dozens of abbeys, monastic learning and 
discipline, together with the reorganization of settlement patterns, spread 
throughout this part of Europe.
  Gorz lies close to the line that divides Frankish from  Romance types of
vernacular, and some monks from Cluny began to cross this line.  In these
circumstances, the monks of Gorz made language, vernacular language,  into an
issue to defend their territorial claims. The monks began to preach in 
Frankish, and spoke specifically about the value of the Frankish tongue. They 
began to use the pulpit as a forum to stress the importance of language itself, 
perhaps even to teach it. From the little we know, they used at least two 
approaches. First, Frankish was the language spoken by the women, even in those 
areas where the men were already beginning to use a Romance vernacular. Second, 
it was the language now used by Mother Church.
  How charged with sacred meanings motherhood was in the  religiosity of the
twelfth century one can grasp through contemplating the  contemporary statues of
the Virgin Mary, or from reading the liturgical  Sequences, the poetry of the
time. The term mother tongue, from its very first  use, instrumentalizes
everyday language in the service of an institutional  cause. The word was
translated from Frankish into Latin. Then, as a rare Latin  term, it incubated
for several centuries. In the decades before Luther, quite  suddenly and
dramatically, mother tongue acquired a strong meaning. It came to  mean the
language created by Luther in order to translate the Hebrew Bible, the  language
taught by schoolmasters to read that book, and then the language that  justified
the existence of nation states.
  THE AGE OF  COMMODITY-DEFINED NEEDS
  Today, "mother tongue" means several things: the first  language learned by the
child, and the language which the authorities of the  state have decided ought
to be one's first language. Thus, mother tongue can  mean the first language
picked up at random, generally a very different speech  than the one taught by
paid educators and by parents who act as if they were  such educators.
  We see, then, that people are considered as creatures who  need to be taught to
speak properly in order "to communicate" in the modern  world - as they need to
be wheeled about in motorized carriages in order to move  in modern landscapes -
their feet no longer fit. Dependence on taught mother  tongue can be taken as
the paradigm of all other dependencies typical of humans  in an age of
commodity-defined needs. And the ideology of this dependence was  formulated by
Nebrija. The ideology which claims that human mobility depends not  on feet and
open frontiers, but on the availability of "transportation" is only  slightly
more than a hundred years old. Language teaching created employment  long ago;
macadam and the suspended coach made the conveyance of people a big  business
only from about the middle of the l8th century.
  THE COST OF TAUGHT MOTHER  TONGUE
  As language teaching has become a job, it has begun to  cost a lot of money.
Words are now one of the two largest categories of  marketed values that make up
the gross national product (GNP). Money decides  what shall be said, who shall
say it, when and what kind of people shall be  targeted for the messages. The
higher the cost of each uttered word, the more  determined the echo demanded. In
schools people learn to speak as they should.  Money is spent to make the poor
speak more like the wealthy, the sick more like  the healthy, and the minority
more like the majority. We pay to improve,  correct, enrich, update the language
of children and of their teachers. We spend  more on the professional jargons
that are taught in college, and more yet in  high schools to give teenagers a
smattering of these jargons; but just enough to  make them feel dependent on the
psychologist, druggist, or librarian who is  fluent in some special kind of
English. We go even further: we first allow
  standard language to degrade ethnic, black, or hillbilly language, and then 
spend money to teach their counterfeits as academic subjects. Administrators and
entertainers, admen and newsmen, ethnic politicians and "radical" professionals,
form powerful interest groups, each fighting for a larger slice of the language 
pie.
  I do not really know how much is spent in the United States  to make words. But
soon someone will provide us with the necessary statistical  tables. Ten years
ago, energy accounting was almost unthinkable. Now it has  become an established
practice. Today you can easily look up how many "energy  units" have gone into
growing, harvesting, packaging, transporting, and  merchandising one edible
calory of bread. The difference between the bread  produced and eaten in a
village in Greece and that found in an American  supermarket is enormous - about
forty times more energy units are contained in  each edible calory of the
latter. Bicycle traffic in cities permits one to move  four times as fast as on
foot for one-fourth of the energy expended - while  cars, for the same progress,
need 150 times as many calories per  passenger mile. Information of this kind
was available ten years ago, but no one  thought about it. Today, it is recorded
and will soon lead to a change in  people's outlook
  on the need for fuels. It would now be interesting to know what  language
accounting looks like, since the linguistic analysis of contemporary  language
is certainly not complete, unless for each group of speakers we know  the amount
of money spent on shaping the speech of the average person. Just as  social
energy accounts are only approximate and at best allow us to identify the 
orders of magnitude within which the relative values are found, so language 
accounting would provide us with data on the relative prevalence of 
standardized, taught language in a population - sufficient, however, for the 
argument I want to make.
  CLASS-SPECIFIC DESTRUCTION OF  VERNACULAR SPEECH
  But mere per capita expenditure employed to mold the  language of a group of
speakers does not tell us enough. No doubt we would learn  that each paid word
addressed to the rich costs, per capita, much more than  words addressed to the
poor. Watts are actually more democratic than words. But  taught language comes
in a vast range of qualities. The poor, for instance, are  much more blared at
than the rich, who can buy tutoring and, what is more  precious, hedge on their
own high class vernacular by purchasing silence. The  educator, politician and
entertainer now come with a loudspeaker to Oaxaca, to  Travancore, to the
Chinese commune, and the poor immediately forfeit the claim  to that
indispensable luxury, the silence out of which vernacular language  arises.
  THE "PRODUCTION" OF  MOTHER TONGUE
  Yet even without putting a price tag on silence, even  without the more
detailed language economics on which I would like to draw, I  can still estimate
that the dollars spent to power any nation's motors pale  before those that are
now expended on prostituting speech in the mouth of paid  speakers. In rich
nations, language has become incredibly spongy, absorbing huge  investments.
High expenditures to cultivate the language of the mandarin, the  author, the
actor, or the charmer have always been a mark of high civilization.  But these
were efforts to teach elites special codes. Even the cost of making  some people
learn secret languages in traditional societies is incomparably  lower than the
capitalization of language in industrial societies.
  In poor countries today, people still speak to each other  without the
experience of capitalized language, although such countries always  contain a
tiny elite who manage very well to allocate a larger proportion of the  national
income for their prestige language. Let me ask: What is different in  the
everyday speech of groups whose language has received - or shall I say 
absorbed? resisted? survived? suffered? enjoyed? - huge investments, and the 
speech of people whose language has remained outside the market? Comparing these
two worlds of language, I want to focus my curiosity on just one issue that 
arises in this context. Does the structure and function of the language itself 
change with the rate of investment? Are these alterations such that all 
languages that absorb funds show changes in the same direction? In this 
introductory exploration of the subject, I cannot demonstrate that this is the 
case. But I do believe my arguments make both propositions highly probable,
  and  show that structurally oriented language economics are worth  exploring.
  Taught everyday language is without precedent in  pre-industrial cultures. The
current dependence on paid teachers and models of  ordinary speech is just as
much a unique characteristic of industrial economies  as dependence on fossil
fuels. The need for taught mother tongue was discovered  four centuries earlier,
but only in our generation have both language and  energy been effectively
treated as world wide needs to be satisfied for all  people by planned,
programmed production and distribution. Because, unlike  the vernacular of
capitalized language we can reasonably say that it results  from production.
  VERNACULAR LEARNING AS SUBSISTENCE ACTIVITY
  Traditional cultures subsisted on sunshine, which was  captured mostly though
agriculture. The hoe, the ditch, the yoke, were basic  means to harness the sun.
Large sails or waterwheels were known, but rare. These  cultures that lived
mostly on the sun subsisted basically on vernacular values.  In such societies,
tools were essentially the prolongation of arms, fingers, and  legs. There was
no need for the production of power in centralized plants and  its distant
distribution to clients. Equally, in these essentially sun-powered  cultures,
there was no need for language production. Language was drawn by each  one from
the cultural environment, learned from the encounter with people whom  the
learner could smell and touch, love or hate. The vernacular spread just  as most
things and services were shared, namely, by multiple forms of mutual 
reciprocity, rather than clientage to the appointed teacher or professional. 
Just as fuel was not delivered, so the vernacular was never
  taught. Taught  tongues did exist, but they were rare, as rare as sails and
sills. In most  cultures, we know that speech resulted from conversation
embedded in everyday  life, from listening to fights and lullabies, gossip,
stories, and dreams. Even  today, the majority of people in poor countries learn
all their language skills  without any paid tutorship, without any attempt
whatsoever to teach them how to  speak. And they learn to speak in a way that
nowhere compares with the  self-conscious, self-important, colorless mumbling
that, after a long stay in  villages in South America and Southeast Asia, always
shocks me when I visit an  American college. I feel sorrow for those students
whom education has made tone  deaf; they have lost the faculty for hearing the
difference between the  dessicated utterance of standard television English and
the living speech of the  unschooled. What else can I expect, though, from
people who are not brought up  at a mother's breast, but on
  formula? - on tinned milk, if they are from poor  families, and on a brew
prepared under the nose of Ralph Nader if they are born  among the enlightened?
For people trained to choose between packaged formulas,  mother's breast appears
as just one more option. And in the same way, for people  who were intentionally
taught to listen and to speak, untutored  vernacular seems just like another,
albeit less developed, model among  many.
  TAUGHT MOTHER TONGUE AS A COMMODITY
  But this is simply false. Language exempt from rational  tutorship is a
different kind of social phenomenon from language that is  purposefully taught.
Where untutored language is the predominant marker of a  shared world, a sense
of power within the group exists, and this sense cannot be  duplicated by
language that is delivered. One way this difference shows is the  sense of power
over language itself, over its acquisition. Even today, the poor  in
non-industrial countries all over the world are polyglot. My friend, the 
goldsmith in Timbuktu, speaks Songhay at home, listens to Bambara on the radio, 
devotedly and with some understanding says his prayers five times a day in 
Arabic, gets along in two trade languages on the Souk, converses in passable 
French that he picked up in the army - and none of these languages was formally 
taught him. He did not set out to learn these tongues; each is one style in 
which he remembers a peculiar set of experiences that fits into the frame
  of  that language. Communities in which monolingual people prevail are rare
except  in three kinds of settings: tribal communities that have not really
experienced  the late neolithic, communities that for a long time lived through
exceptional  forms of discrimination, and among the citizens of nation-states
that, for  several generations, have enjoyed the benefits of compulsory
schooling. To take  it for granted that most people are monolingual is typical
of the members of the  middle class. Admiration for the vernacular polyglot
unfailingly exposes the  social climber.
  VERNACULAR CULTURE  ENHANCED BY TAUGHT LANGUAGE
  Throughout history, untutored language was prevalent, but  hardly ever the only
kind of language known. Just as in traditional cultures  some energy was
captured through windmills and canals, and those who had large  boats or those
who cornered the right spot on the brook could use their tool for  a net
transfer of power to their own advantage, so some people have always used  a
taught language to corner some privilege. But such additional codes remained 
either rare and special, or served very narrow purposes. The ordinary language, 
until Nebrija, was prevalently vernacular. And this vernacular, be it the 
ordinary colloquial, a trade idiom, the language of prayer, the craft jargon, 
the language of basic accounts, the language of venery or of age (for example, 
baby talk) was learned on the side, as part of meaningful everyday life. Of 
course, Latin or Sanskrit were formally taught to the priest, court languages 
such as Frankish or Persian or Turkish were taught to the future
  scribe.  Neophytes were formally initiated into the language of astronomy,
alchemy, or  late masonry. And, clearly, the knowledge of such formally taught
languages  raised a man above others, somewhat like the saddle lifts the free
man above the  serf in the infantry, or the bridge lifts the captain above the
crew. But even  when access to some elite language was unlocked by a formal
initiation, it did  not necessarily mean that language was being taught. Quite
frequently, the  process of formal initiation did not transfer to the initiate a
new language  skill, but simply exempted him henceforth from a tabu that forbade
others to use  certain words, or to speak out on certain occasions. Male
initiation in the  language of the hunt or of sex is probably the most
widespread example of such a  ritually selective language detabuization.
  But, in traditional societies, no matter how much or how  little language was
taught, the taught language rarely rubbed off on vernacular  speech. Neither the
existence of some language teaching at all times nor the  spread of some
language through professional preachers or comedians weakens my  main point:
Outside of those societies that we now call Modern European, no  attempt was
made to impose on entire populations an everyday language that would  be subject
to the control of paid teachers or announcers. Everyday language,  until
recently, was nowhere the product of design; it was nowhere paid for and 
delivered like a commodity. And while every historian who deals with the origins
of nation-states pays attention to the imposition of a national tongue, 
economists generally overlook the fact that this taught mother tongue is the 
earliest of specifically modem commodities, the model of all "basic needs" to 
come.
  COUNTERFEIT VERNACULAR AND  OTHER DESTRUCTIONS
  Before I can go on to contrast taught colloquial speech and  vernacular speech,
costly language and that which comes at no cost, I must  clarify one more
distinction. Between taught mother tongue and the vernacular I  draw the line of
demarcation somewhere else than linguists when they distinguish  the high
language of an elite from the dialect spoken in lower classes,  somewhere other
than the frontier that separates regional and superregional  languages,
somewhere else than restricted and corrected code, and somewhere else  than at
the line between the language of the literate and the illiterate. No  matter how
restricted within geographic boundaries, no matter how distinctive  for a social
level, no matter how specialized for one sex role or one Caste,  language can be
either vernacular (in the sense in which I here use the term) or  of the taught
variety. Elite language, trade language, second language, local  idiom, are
nothing new. But each of these can be formally taught and
  the taught  counterfeit of the vernacular comes as a commodity and is something
entirely  new.
  The contrast between these two complementary forms is most  marked and
important in taught everyday language, that is, taught colloquial,  taught
standardized everyday speech. But here again we must avoid confusion. Not  all
standard language is either grammar-ridden or taught. In all of history, one 
mutually understandable dialect has tended toward predominance in a given 
region. This kind of principal dialect was often accepted as the standard form. 
It was indeed written more frequently than other dialects, but not, for that 
reason, was it taught. Rather, diffusion occurred through a much more complex 
and subtle process. Midland English, for example, slowly emerged as that second,
common style in which people born into any English dialect could also speak 
their own tongue. Quite suddenly, the language of Mogul hordes (Urdu) came into 
being in northern India. Within two generations, it became the standard in 
Hindustan, the trade language in a vast area, and the medium for
  exquisite  poetry written in the Arabic and Sanskrit alphabets. Not only was
this language  not taught for several generations, but poets who wanted to
perfect their  competence explicitly avoided the study of Hindu-Urdu; they
explored the  Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit sources that had originally
contributed to its  being. In Indonesia, in half a generation of resistance to
Japanese and Dutch,  the militant fraternal and combative slogans, posters, and
secret radios of the  freedom struggle spread Malay competence into every
village, and did so much  more effectively than the later efforts of the
ministry of Language Control that  was established after independence.
  TECHNICAL INNOVATION AND THE  VERNACULAR
  It is true that the dominant position of elite or standard  language was always
bolstered by the technique of writing. Printing enormously  enhanced the
colonizing power of elite language. But to say that because  printing was
invented elite language is destined to supplant vernacular variety  results from
a debilitated imagination - like saying that after the atom bomb  only super
powers shall be sovereign. The historical monopoly of educational  bureaucracies
over the printing press is no argument that printing techniques  cannot be used
to give new vitality to written expression and new literary  opportunity to
thousands of vernacular forms. The fact that the printing press  could augment
the extent and power of ungovernable vernacular readings was the  source of
Nebrija's greatest concern and of his argument against the  vernacular. The fact
that printing was used since the early l6th  century (but not during the first
forty years of its existence) primarily for  the imposition
  of standard colloquials does not mean that printed language must  always be a
taught form. The commercial status of taught mother tongue, call it  national
language, literary standard, or television language, rests largely on 
unexamined axioms, some of which I have already mentioned:
  -that printing implies standardized composition;
  -that books written in the standard language could not be  easily read by
people who have not been schooled in that tongue;
  -that reading is by its very nature a silent activity that  usually should be
conducted in private;
  -that enforcing a universal ability to read a few sentences  and then copy them
in writing increases the access of a population to the  content of libraries:
  these and other such illusions are used to enhance the  standing of teachers,
the sale of rotary presses, the grading of people  according to their language
code and, up to now, an increase in the  GNP.
  THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF  TAUGHT MOTHER TONGUE
  Vernacular spreads by practical use; it is learned from  people who mean what
they say and who say what they mean to the person they  address in the context
of everyday life. This is not so in taught language. With  taught language, the
one from whom I learn is not a person whom I care for or  dislike, but a
professional speaker. The model for taught colloquial is somebody  who does not
say what he means, but who recites what others have contrived. In  this sense, a
street vendor announcing his wares in ritual language is not a  professional
speaker, while the king's herald or the clown on television are the  prototypes.
Taught colloquial is the language of the announcer who follows  the script that
an editor was told by a publicist that a board of directors had  decided should
be said. Taught colloquial is the dead, impersonal rhetoric  of people paid to
declaim with phony conviction texts composed by others, who  themselves are
usually paid only for designing the text. People who
  speak  taught language imitate the announcer of news, the comedian of gag
writers, the  instructor following the teacher's manual to explain the textbook,
the songster  of engineered rhymes, or the ghost-written president. This is
language that  implicitly lies when I use it to say something to your face; it
is meant for the  spectator who watches the scene. It is the language of farce,
not of theater,  the language of the hack, not of the true performer. The
language of media  always seeks the appropriate audience profile that the
sponsor tries to hit and  to hit hard. While the vernacular is engendered in me
by the intercourse between  complete persons locked in conversation with each
other, taught language is  syntonic with loud speakers whose assigned job is
gab.
  The vernacular and taught mother tongue are like the two  extremes on the
spectrum of the colloquial. Language would be totally inhuman if  it were
totally taught. That is what Humboldt meant when he said that real  language is
speech that can only be fostered, never taught like mathematics.  Speech is much
more than communication, and only machines can communicate  without reference to
vernacular roots. Their chatter with one another in New  York now takes up about
three-quarters of the lines that the telephone company  operates under a
franchise that guarantees access by people. This is an obvious  perversion of a
legal privilege that results from political aggrandizement and  the degradation
of vernacular domains to second-class commodities. But even more  embarrassing
and depressing than this abuse of a forum of free speech by robots  is the
incidence of robot-like stock phrases that blight the remaining lines on  which
people presumably "speak" to each other. A growing
  percentage of speech  has become mere formula in content and style. In this
way, the colloquial moves  on the spectrum of language increasingly from
vernacular to capital-intensive  "communication," as if it were nothing more
than the human variety of the  exchange that also goes on between bees, whales,
and computers. True, some  vernacular elements or aspects always survive - but
that is true even for most  computer programs. I do not claim that the
vernacular dies; only that it  withers. The American, French, or German
colloquials have become composites made  up of two kinds of language:
commoditylike taught uniquack and a limping,  ragged, jerky vernacular
struggling to survive. Taught mother tongue has  established a radical monopoly
over speech, just as transportation has over  mobility or, more generally,
commodity over vernacular values.
  TABUS
  A resistance, sometimes as strong as a sacred tabu, prevents  people shaped by
life in industrial society from recognizing the difference with  which we are
dealing - the difference between capitalized language and the  vernacular, which
comes at no economically measurable cost. It is the same kind  of inhibition
that makes it difficult for those who are brought up within the  industrial
system to sense the fundamental distinction between nurture from the  breast and
feeding by bottle, between literature and textbook, between a mile  moved on my
own and a passenger mile - areas where I have discussed this issue  over the
past years.
  Most people would probably be willing to admit that there is  a huge difference
in taste, meaning, and satisfaction between a home-cooked meal  and a TV dinner.
But the examination and understanding of this difference can be  easily blocked,
especially among those committed to equal rights, equity and  service to the
poor. They know how many mothers have no milk in their breasts,  how many
children in the South Bronx suffer protein deficiencies, how many  Mexicans -
surrounded by fruit trees - are crippled by vitamin deficits. As soon  as I
raise the distinction between vernacular values and values susceptible of 
economic measurement and, therefore, of being administered, some self-appointed 
tutor of the so-called proletariat will tell me that I am avoiding the critical 
issue by giving importance to noneconomic niceties. Should we not seek first the
just distribution of commodities that correlate to basic needs? Poetry and 
fishing shall then be added without more thought or
  effort. So goes the reading  of Marx and the Gospel of St. Matthew as
interpreted by the theology of  liberation.
  A laudable intention here attempts an argument that should  have been
recognized as illogical in the nineteenth century, and that countless 
experiences have shown false in the twentieth. So far, every single attempt  to
substitute a universal commodity for a vernacular value has led, not to 
equality, but to a hierarchical modernization of poverty. In the new 
dispensation, the poor are no longer those who survive by their vernacular 
activities because they have only marginal or no access to the market. No, the 
modernized poor are those whose vernacular domain, in speech and in action, is 
most restricted - those who get least satisfaction out of the few vernacular 
activities in which they can still engage.
  THE MUSHROOMING  SHADOW ECONOMY
  The second-level tabu which I have set out to violate is not  constituted by
the distinction between the vernacular and taught mother tongue,  nor by the
destruction of the vernacular through the radical monopoly of taught  mother
tongue over speech, nor even by the class-biased intensity of this  vernacular
paralysis. Although these three matters are far from being clearly  understood
today, they have been widely discussed in the recent past.
  The point at issue which is sedulously overlooked is quite  other: Mother
tongue is taught increasingly, not by paid agents, but by unpaid  parents. These
latter deprive their own children of the last opportunity to  listen to adults
who have something to say to each other. This was brought home  to me clearly,
some time ago, while back in New York City in an area that a few  decades
earlier I had known quite well, the South Bronx. I went there at the  request of
a young college teacher, married to a colleague. This man wanted my  signature
on a petition for compensatory pre-kindergarten language training for  the
inhabitants of a partially burnt-out, high-rise slum. Twice already, quite 
decidedly and yet with deep embarrassment, I had refused. To overcome my 
resistance against this expansion of educational services, he took me on visits 
to brown, white, black, mostly single-parent so-called households. I saw dozens 
of children dashing through uninhabitable cement corridors,
  exposed all day to  blaring television and radio in English, Spanish and even
Yiddish. They seemed  equally lost in language and landscape. As my friend
pressed for my signature, I  tried to argue for the protection of these children
against further castration  and inclusion in the educational sphere. We talked
at cross-purposes, unable to  meet. And then, in the evening, at dinner in my
friend's home, I suddenly  understood why. This man, whom I viewed with awe
because he had chosen to live  in this hell, had ceased to be a parent and had
become a total teacher.  In front of their own children this couple stood in
loco magistri. Their  children had to grow up without parents, because these two
adults, in every word  they addressed to their two sons and one daughter, were
"educating" them - they  were at dinner constantly conscious that they were
modeling the speech of their  children, and asked me to do the same.
  For the professional parent who engenders children as a  professional lover,
who volunteers his semi-professional counselling skills for  neighborhood
organizations, the distinction between his unpaid contribution to  the managed
society and what could be, in contrast, the recovery of vernacular  domains,
remains meaningless. He is fit prey for a new type of growth-oriented  ideology
- the planning and organization of an expanding shadow economy, the  last
frontier of arrogance which homo economicus faces.


Jinan,AEP
NID-1985-88
Kerala



---------------------------------
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hi,

just reminding a small protocol which if followed would make our identification
precise and contextual.

Please end yr post or mail (everytime) as folows:

Your name + surname (now)
school , your discpline
Year of graduating
now at company
city

for example:

Sudhir Sharma
NID, VC (or visual communication)
1989
Elephant Design
Pune

regards

Sudhir Sharma
NID, VC (or visual communication)
1989
Elephant Design
Pune

hi,

welcome to design india egroup. I am sudhir sharma and i moderate this group.
I was in NID during 1983-1989 time and then started elephant design with four
other graduates.

It will be very nice if u can post a brief introduction of yr self on the group
as yr first message. Where are u, what are u doing, where did u study and any
issues u may want to disscuss. this will help others and friends to know that u
are there and to know u.

Also chk out pictures, update yr address in database phonebook as well as take
part in Polls. You have a choice of not recieving mails in yr mailbox and chk
them online...if u need any help on this count let me know.

the membership to this group is through invitation only...only u can invite yr
friend, or whomever u think worthy of being on a professional designers group.
DO send me a mail if you want someone to be invited on the group.

thank you once again and keep posting messages.

regards
sudhir sharma

Get up be counted, Have you casted your Vote?

Visit POLL section of the this yahoo egroup regularily and put in your opinion,
It is surprising ho many of us think of design profession and what it really
is...

You are welcome to debate those issues, but your vote can tilt the poll...

So be there...sign of leadership is that they are always there.....

lets remove some myths from our profession...POLL...and often.

regards
PS: you need a yahoo id for polling. In case you do not want yahoo id...just
mail in your opinion.

Hi Ranjan
   found the champa story in the thoughtshop website.
   http://www.infochangeindia.org/agenda4_20.jsp

   I would love to elaborate on how I found it interesting and inspiring....but
its better to read it.
   I am off to explore and learn more of the thoughtshop website and the work
Santayan and Himalini are doing.
   http://www.thoughtshopfoundation.org/
   Regards
   Upasana



---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Dear Jinan, Raja,

We have reduced education from being an open ended enquiry based on
attempting to understand our universe to a set of training modules
to facilitate survival in an economic paradigm.

There are many alternate and internally consistent ways of looking
at the world and our place in it, as has been practised in diverse
societies for centuries. The success of the world view that
developed in Europe and spawned the colonisations of much of the
world in an unprecedented scale and on which rests most of the
tenets of 'modern' ways of thinking and dealing with 'reality' has
all but obiliterated everything else.

Literacy is not an 'a priori' requirement as is made out to be, it
is policy that has determined that all citizens within such and such
geographical boundaries will via 'literacy' become educated. This,
unfortunately propogates a myth that education is devoid of
cultural, social and mythological contexts, and is objective.
Nothing can be more untrue, because all formal modes of education
needs a set of agreed upon rules that provide the edifice with
internal consistency and therefore make it logical.

A unified, all encompassing system of education that we have today
rests on the premise that everyone needs to 'learn' to emerge from
areas of darkness and superstition, which may, in my view be read as
belief systems that are divergent with those professed by an
influential group that defines what 'development' means. All of this
is intimately connected with economic pressures that a globally
integrated economy faces.

It is up to us to recognise the 'contexts' of such an education and
not get conned into beleiving that it is the only possible way,
notwithstanding the sophisticated brainwashing that we as children
go through as we pass through the education system and the actions
that we are rewarded for in our working lives.

Ideally the paradigms need to be made clear as part of the education
process, so that conflicting arguments need no resolution, but can
be held as true in differnt systems or ways of seeing. An education
which sees scientific logic in the same way as it sees another
scenario where seemingly conflicting viewpoints coexist as part of a
spectrum of possibilities, all devised by our unique ways of making
sense of our universe.

Wearing blinkers that turn us into the case of the blind men trying
to describe an elephant is what most seminars and discussions have
been reduced to, mainly because they need to be consistent with an
accepted way of doing things that is fast losing relevance as the
impact of our actions come to us in ever quickening cycles.

Alternatives are being practised all over the world, it is necessary
to open up to them and consider them sufficiently mainstream to
merit equal consideration, however unpalatable this may be to the
established institutions so keen to protect their turf.

regards

Deepankar Bhattacharyya
NID 1970-76
Images Communications
New Delhi





--- In designindia@..., jinan kodapully <jinankb@y...>
wrote:
>
> Dear Raja
> Beautiful poem.
> Some how the idea about red dots and blue dots seems preposterous.
My life with rural tribal non literate communities have shown me a
different picture.
> Also if you interact with children on equal footing they will show
u a different picture.My past 20 years was spent exploring the
issues of creativity, aesthetic sense etc and if any of you are
interested could see my website
http://pantoto.org/home/jinan/paradigms.Each modern invention is
anti child especially the ones meant for them.Most ridiculus being
the so called toys for children. If the purpose is to quickly fit
them in to modernty then that is good job.
> Every child is a born designer,an artist and a scientist.But the
schooling process make sure that they loose all abilities and depend
on the experts to tell them how to live.
> Offcource we are all victims of this process and the only way to
get out of this is to break all the shells/ frames that block our
perception. Our fragmented perception only shows only one side.
> More over do not forget the ecological/enviormental crisis we are
in and as designers our contribution to that stae of affairs.
> Jinan

Hi!
   Please send me a digital copy if you can or the link as well!
   Regards
   Upasana


---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Dear Santayan

Please send me a digital copy if you can or the web link.

Thanks

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my office at NID
26 February 2006 at 2.20 pm IST


Prof M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, NID Centre for Bamboo Applications
Faculty Member on Governing Council (2003 - 2005)
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Tel: (off) 91 79 26623692 ext 1090 (changed in January 2006)
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
Fax: 91 79 26605242

email: ranjanmp@...
web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp/

On 26-Feb-06, at 12:03 AM, santayan sengupta wrote:

>
>  Hi
>
>  Those interested in developmental communication design might enjoy
> this article by himalini (NID CD 94)
>
>  The Champa Story
>
>  santayan sengupta
>  NID PD 94
>  thoughtshop foundation
>

Dear Raja
Beautiful poem.
Some how the idea about red dots and blue dots seems preposterous. My life with
rural tribal non literate communities have shown me a different picture.
Also if you interact with children on equal footing they will show u a different
picture.My past 20 years was spent exploring the issues of creativity, aesthetic
sense etc and if any of you are interested could see my website
http://pantoto.org/home/jinan/paradigms.Each modern invention is anti child
especially the ones meant for them.Most ridiculus being  the so called toys for
children. If the purpose is to quickly fit them in to modernty then that is good
job.
Every child is a born designer,an artist and a scientist.But the schooling
process make sure that they loose all abilities and depend on the experts to
tell them how to live.
Offcource we are all victims of this process and the only way to get out of this
is to break all the shells/ frames that block our perception. Our fragmented
perception only shows only one side.
More over do not forget the ecological/enviormental crisis we are in and as
designers our contribution to that stae of affairs.
Jinan

Raja Mohanty <rajam@...> wrote:     Hi Jinan!
  So, the sage breaketh a silence
  and speaketh through the spirits of
  Illich and Postman!

  Welcome to the matrix
  Welcome to the maya
  Where we all make our fumblings
  And stumblings; grumblings
  and Rumblings

  In the deluge about to come
  The Real world shall drown
  So climb on, while there is time
  Onto Noah's Ark of cyberspace selves
  But remember the Himalayan spring
  That
  Still drips onto the deadwood
  and weaves green poems

  - Hope you are doing well!


  Raja



  > Informing Ourselves To DeathBy Neil Postman
  > ---------------------------------
  >  The following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics
  > Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart,
  > sponsored by IBM-Germany.
  > ---------------------------------
  >   The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw
  > once  remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common
  > folk. He meant  that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians,
  > lawyers, teachers, and  scientists -- protect their special status by
  > creating vocabularies that are  incomprehensible to the general public.
  > This process prevents outsiders from  understanding what the profession
  > is doing and why -- and protects the insiders  from close examination
  > and criticism. Professions, in other words, build  forbidding walls of
  > technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye  cannot see.
  > Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I
  > consider  myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical
  > gobbledegook as much as  anyone. But I do not object if occasionally
  > someone who does not know the  secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the
  > inner halls to express an untutored  point of view. Such a person may
  > sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even  better, see something in a
  > way that the professionals have overlooked.
  > I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just such a
  > purpose. I do not know very much more about computer technology than the
  > average  person -- which isn't very much. I have little understanding of
  > what excites a  computer programmer or scientist, and in examining the
  > descriptions of the  presentations at this conference, I found each one
  > more mysterious than the  next. So, I clearly qualify as an outsider.
  > But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but an
  > outsider  who has a point of view that might be useful to the insiders.
  > And that is why I  accepted the invitation to speak. I believe I know
  > something about what  technologies do to culture, and I know even more
  > about what technologies undo in  a culture. In fact, I might say, at the
  > start, that what a technology undoes is  a subject that computer experts
  > apparently know very little about. I have heard  many experts in computer
  > technology speak about the advantages that computers  will bring. With one
  > exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have never  heard anyone speak
  > seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of  computer
  > technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the
  > profession is hiding something important. That is to say, what seems to be
  >  lacking among computer experts is a sense of technological modesty.
  > After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that
  > technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and
  > technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology
  > sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than
  > it  creates. But it is never one-sided.
  > The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing
  > fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval
  > sense of  community and social integration. Printing created prose but
  > made poetry into an  exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made
  > modern science possible but  transformed religious sensibility into an
  > exercise in superstition. Printing  assisted in the growth of the
  > nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism  into a sordid if not a
  > murderous emotion.
  > Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some
  > groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example,
  > will, in  the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as
  > blacksmiths were made  obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made
  > obsolete by the printing  press. Technological change, in other words,
  > always results in winners and  losers.
  > In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the
  > computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like
  > military  establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting
  > agencies. And it  is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable
  > to high-level  researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to
  > what extent has  computer technology been an advantage to the masses of
  > people? To steel workers,  vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile
  > mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick  layers, dentists and most of the rest
  > into whose lives the computer now  intrudes? These people have had their
  > private matters made more accessible to  powerful institutions. They are
  > more easily tracked and controlled; they are  subjected to more
  > examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions  made about
  > them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are
  > being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising
  >  agencies and  political organizations. The schools teach their children
  > to operate  computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more
  > valuable to  children. In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers
  > that they need, which  is why they are losers.
  > It is to be expected that the winners -- for example, most of the speakers
  > at  this conference -- will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about
  > computer  technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes
  > tell the losers  that with personal computers the average person can
  > balance a checkbook more  neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make
  > more logical shopping lists. They  also tell them that they can vote at
  > home, shop at home, get all the information  they wish at home, and thus
  > make community life unnecessary. They tell them that  their lives will be
  > conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say  from whose point
  > of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.
  > Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the
  > wondrous  feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance
  > to the quality of  the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive.
  > Eventually, the losers  succumb, in part because they believe that the
  > specialized knowledge of the  masters of a computer technology is a form
  > of wisdom. The masters, of course,  come to believe this as well. The
  > result is that certain questions do not arise,  such as, to whom will the
  > computer give greater power and freedom, and whose  power and freedom will
  > be reduced?
  > Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned conspiracy,
  > as  if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. But
  > this is  not quite how it happens, for the winners do not always know what
  > they are  doing, and where it will all lead. The Benedictine monks who
  > invented the  mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed
  > that such a clock would  provide a precise regularity to the seven periods
  > of devotion they were required  to observe during the course of the day.
  > As a matter of fact, it did. But what  the monks did not realize is that
  > the clock is not merely a means of keeping  track of the hours but also of
  > synchronizing and controlling the actions of men.  And so, by the middle
  > of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls  of the
  > monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the
  > workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of
  > regular  production, regular working hours, and a
  >  standardized product. Without the  clock, capitalism would have been
  > quite impossible. And so, here is a great  paradox: the clock was
  > invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more  rigorously to God;
  > and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who  wished to
  > devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has
  > unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning,
  > who or  what will win, and who or what will lose.
  > I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann Gutenberg
  > was  by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to
  > hear Martin  Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is "God's
  > highest act of  grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven
  > forward." Gutenberg thought  his invention would advance the cause of the
  > Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it  turned out to bring a revolution
  > which destroyed the monopoly of the Church.
  > We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of
  > computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have
  >  reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of
  > my  talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death." In the time remaining, I will
  > try to  explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust
  > you will be  open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I
  > can begin to get at  this by telling you of a small experiment I have been
  > conducting, on and off,  for the past several years. There are some people
  > who describe the experiment as  an exercise in deceit and exploitation but
  > I will rely on your sense of humor to  pull me through.
  > Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague
  >  who appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York  Times.
  > "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague  says yes,
  > there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the  experiment
  > can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a
  > fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really?
  > What's  it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are
  > limited only by my  imagination. But I might say something like this:
  > "Well, they did this study to  find out what foods are best to eat for
  > losing weight, and it turns out that a  normal diet supplemented by
  > chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the  best approach. It seems
  > that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs --  encomial dioxin --
  > that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."
  > Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to
  > be  health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about
  > this," I say.  "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart
  > have uncovered a  connection between jogging and reduced intelligence.
  > They tested more than 1200  people over a period of five years, and found
  > that as the number of hours people  jogged increased, there was a
  > corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They  don't know exactly why
  > but there it is."
  > I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to
  > report  something that is quite ridiculous -- one might say, beyond
  > belief. Let me tell  you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the
  > second or third time I've  tried this on the same person, most people will
  > believe or at least not  disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they
  > say: "Really? Is that  possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and
  > reply, "Where'd you say that  study was done?" And sometimes they say,
  > "You know, I've heard something like  that."
  > Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results,
  >  one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said,
  > there  is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will
  > believe it. This  is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any
  > case I have tried this  experiment on non-professors and get roughly the
  > same results. Another possible  conclusion is one expressed by George
  > Orwell -- also about 50 years ago -- when  he remarked that the average
  > person today is about as naive as was the average  person in the Middle
  > Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority  of their
  > religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our
  > science, no matter what.
  > But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be
  > drawn,  related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I
  > am referring  to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly
  > incomprehensible to  most of us. There is almost no fact -- whether actual
  > or imagined -- that will  surprise us for very long, since we have no
  > comprehensive and consistent picture  of the world which would make the
  > fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.  We believe because there is
  > no reason not to believe. No social, political,  historical, metaphysical,
  > logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that,  for the most part,
  > makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean  to try my
  > experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about  it,
  > but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were
  > actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark
  > herring, on  what grounds would you dispute me? For
  >  all you know -- indeed, for all I know --  the skin of a Bismark herring
  > could have made the seats on which you  sit. And if I could get an
  > industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing  some
  > incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell
  > someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring.
  > Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an
  > analogy:  If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the
  > cards over, one  by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their
  > order is. After you had  gone from the ace of spades through the nine of
  > spades, you would expect a ten  of spades to come up next. And if a three
  > of diamonds showed up instead, you  would be surprised and wonder what
  > kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave  you a deck that had been
  > shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the  cards over, you
  > would not expect any card in particular -- a three of diamonds  would be
  > just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given
  > order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise
  > to  whatever card turns up.
  > The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order,
  > nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing
  > comes as  a particular surprise.
  > In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average person
  > in  the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like
  > my  brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible
  > world-view,  beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come
  > from God. What the  priests had to say about the world was derived from
  > the logic of their theology.  There was nothing arbitrary about the things
  > people were asked to believe,  including the fact that the world itself
  > was created at 9 AM on October 23 in  the year 4004 B.C. That could be
  > explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the  satisfaction of anyone. So
  > could the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the  head of a pin. It
  > made quite good sense, if you believed that the Bible is the  revealed
  > word of God and that the universe is populated with angels. The  medieval
  > world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was  not
  > without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might
  >  not clearly grasp how  the harsh realities of their lives fit into the
  > grand and benevolent design, but  they had no doubt that there was such a
  > design, and their priests were well  able, by deduction from a handful of
  > principles, to make it, if not rational, at  least coherent.
  > The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say,
  > sadder  and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather
  > like the shuffled  deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent,
  > integrated conception of  the world which serves as the foundation on
  > which our edifice of belief rests.  And therefore, in a sense, we are more
  > naive than those of the Middle Ages, and  more frightened, for we can be
  > made to believe almost anything. The skin of a  Bismark herring makes
  > about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.
  > Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of
  > Cassius  on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost literally
  > in the stars.  When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and
  > allowed Kepler to look  as well, they found no enchantment or
  > authorization in the stars, only geometric  patterns and equations. God,
  > it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a  master mathematician.
  > This discovery helped to give impetus to the development  of physics but
  > did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it  was
  > possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe,
  > and that God took a special interest in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth
  > became  a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the
  > universe, and  we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at
  > all. The ordered,  comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to
  > unravel because people no  longer saw in the stars the face of a
  >  friend.
  > And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well.
  > I  refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource
  > that  helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their
  > environment.  It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a
  > scarcity of information  but its very scarcity made it both important and
  > usable. This began to change,  as everyone knows, in the late 15th century
  > when a goldsmith named Gutenberg,  from Mainz, converted an old wine press
  > into a printing machine, and in so  doing, created what we now call an
  > information explosion. Forty years after the  invention of the press,
  > there were printing machines in 110 cities in six  different countries; 50
  > years after, more than eight million books had been  printed, almost all
  > of them filled with information that had previously not been  available to
  > the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea  that
  > computer technology introduced the age of
  >  information. The printing press  began that age, and we have not been
  > free of it since.
  > But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of
  > chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are
  > faced  with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers;
  > 11,556  periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million
  > TV sets; and  over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles
  > published every year  (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41
  > million photographs are taken,  and just for the record, over 60 billion
  > pieces of advertising junk mail come  into our mail boxes every year.
  > Everything from telegraphy and photography in  the 19th century to the
  > silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of  information, until
  > matters have reached such proportions today that for the  average person,
  > information no longer has any relation to the solution of  problems.
  > The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is
  > now a  commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of
  > entertainment, or  worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes
  > indiscriminately, directed  at no one in particular, disconnected from
  > usefulness; we are glutted with  information, drowning in information,
  > have no control over it, don't know what  to do with it.
  > And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as I
  > have  said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our
  > universe,  and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer
  > know, as the Middle  Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going,
  > or why. That is, we don't  know what information is relevant, and what
  > information is irrelevant to our  lives. Second, we have directed all of
  > our energies and intelligence to  inventing machinery that does nothing
  > but increase the supply of information. As  a consequence, our defenses
  > against information glut have broken down; our  information immune system
  > is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we  don't know how to
  > reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of  cultural
  > AIDS.
  > Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has
  > a  quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost
  > infinitely various  but also because computers are commonly integrated
  > into the structure of other  machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me
  > to warn against every conceivable  use of a computer. But there is no
  > denying that the most prominent uses of  computers have to do with
  > information. When people talk about "information  sciences," they are
  > talking about computers -- how to store information, how to  retrieve
  > information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to
  > the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more
  > usable  form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I
  > should like to  put some other questions to you that seem to me more
  > reasonable. Did Iraq invade  Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a
  > hideous war should ensue between  Iraq and the U.S., will it happen
  > because of
  >  a lack of information? If children  die of starvation in Ethiopia, does
  > it occur because of a lack of information?  Does racism in South Africa
  > exist because of a lack of information? If criminals  roam the streets of
  > New York City, do they do so because of a lack of  information?
  > Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are
  > unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because
  > of a  lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to
  > your family,  does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone
  > in your family has a  mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack
  > of information?
  > I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the
  > most  misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has
  > nothing to do  with the sort of information made accessible by computers.
  > The computer and its  information cannot answer any of the fundamental
  > questions we need to address to  make our lives more meaningful and
  > humane. The computer cannot provide an  organizing moral framework. It
  > cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.  It cannot provide a means
  > of understanding why we are here or why we fight each  other or why
  > decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most.  The
  > computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing
  > what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of
  > ourselves,  usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the
  > computer for this?  Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But
  > it is presented to us, with  trumpets blaring, as at this conference,
  >  as a technological messiah.
  > Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better,
  > religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all,
  > ourselves  better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the
  > ignorant or the  foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that
  > computers are not to blame  for this. And that is true, at least in the
  > sense that we do not blame an  elephant for its huge appetite or a stone
  > for being hard or a cloud for hiding  the sun. That is their nature, and
  > we expect nothing different from them. But  the computer has a nature, as
  > well. True, it is only a machine but a machine  designed to manipulate and
  > generate information. That is what computers do, and  therefore they have
  > an agenda and an unmistakable message.
  > The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently
  > packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems.
  > And so  all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create
  > ingenious things  for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will
  > become wiser and more  decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By
  > becoming masters of this  wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige
  > and power and some will even  become famous. In a world populated by
  > people who believe that through more and  more information, paradise is
  > attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I  maintain that all of
  > this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent  and energy.
  > Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were  turned
  > to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to
  > education? Who knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why
  > there  are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and
  >  mental illness and anger.
  > As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star
  >  Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us
  > artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to
  > self-knowledge.  They will give us instantaneous global communication, and
  > tell us this is the  way to mutual understanding. They will give us
  > Virtual Reality and tell us this  is the answer to spiritual poverty. But
  > that is only the way of the technician,  the fact-mongerer, the
  > information junkie, and the technological idiot.
  > Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but
  > improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One
  > should,  each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine
  > picture, and,  if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here
  > is what Socrates told  us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And
  > here is what the prophet  Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of
  > thee but to do justly, and to love  mercy and to walk humbly with thy
  > God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time  (although you all know it
  > well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus,  Mohammed, the Buddha,
  > Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There  is no escaping
  > from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and  we solve
  > nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
  > Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by
  > quoting  the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist, Walt
  > Kelley. I  commend his words to all the technological utopians and
  > messiahs present. "We  have met the enemy," Pogo said, "and he is us."
  >
  > Jinan
  > 1988
  > NID
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
  > ---------------------------------
  >  Yahoo! Mail
  >  Use Photomail to share photos without annoying attachments.
  >
  > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
  > Yahoo! Groups Links
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >










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Please reply to Sonali, if you are interested



Dear Prof Ravi,

This is with reference to my discussion with you yesterday. I would
like to thank you for all the help you are extending

Pls find below the job description and job profile of candidate I am
interested in meeting.

Position: Creative head for a US retail chain store, office near
churchgate, Mumbai
Job responsilibity: Heading a team of 16-20 employees. Manage
complete creative work for the chain store i.e leaflets, brochures,
press ads, labels, tags, promotions, signages, pop's, web site  etc
Remuneration: 5-8 lakh p.a
Course done: VC
No.of years of experience- 5-8 yrs
Should have work experience in an ad agency in both print and web
media.
Some work done in fashion field/ exp of illustrating/printing press
would be an added advantage
Good Communication skills, ability to lead a team are extremely
important.

Opening is top urgent. Request the interested to contact the
undersigned at the earliest.

Thanks & Regards,
Sonali (Gurnani) Dalwani,
ARS- APPAREL RESOURCE SOLUTIONS- Placement agency managed by a NIFT
Alumni
Tribute, Rajkamal Studio Compound,
Behind Gandhi Hospital, Parel (E),
Mumbai- 400012
Ph: 9323734302 (Mob), 24171899
Email: sonali_d@..., s_dalwani@...

raja poem is good but you should not be so hopeless. " ham hai na "
   yes its good to harp on govt. money but their are many other avenues to
accomplished the objectives. for example govt. still controls many services and
public institutions and their products do influences vast majority of our
population. if we collectively  i.e. all design institutes, professionals,
experts come together and plan a concrete programme.  get sponsorship for design
services they can offer.( very ambitious is’t it) this may be the remedy for the
decease you are encountering.
   sleep well
   Regards
   nadkarni


Raja Mohanty <rajam@...> wrote:  Hi Jinan!
So, the sage breaketh a silence
and speaketh through the spirits of
Illich and Postman!

Welcome to the matrix
Welcome to the maya
Where we all make our fumblings
And stumblings; grumblings
and Rumblings

In the deluge about to come
The Real world shall drown
So climb on, while there is time
Onto Noah's Ark of cyberspace selves
But remember the Himalayan spring
That
Still drips onto the deadwood
and weaves green poems

- Hope you are doing well!


Raja



> Informing Ourselves To DeathBy Neil Postman
> ---------------------------------
>  The following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics
> Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart,
> sponsored by IBM-Germany.
> ---------------------------------
>   The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw
> once  remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common
> folk. He meant  that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians,
> lawyers, teachers, and  scientists -- protect their special status by
> creating vocabularies that are  incomprehensible to the general public.
> This process prevents outsiders from  understanding what the profession
> is doing and why -- and protects the insiders  from close examination
> and criticism. Professions, in other words, build  forbidding walls of
> technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye  cannot see.
> Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I
> consider  myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical
> gobbledegook as much as  anyone. But I do not object if occasionally
> someone who does not know the  secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the
> inner halls to express an untutored  point of view. Such a person may
> sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even  better, see something in a
> way that the professionals have overlooked.
> I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just such a
> purpose. I do not know very much more about computer technology than the
> average  person -- which isn't very much. I have little understanding of
> what excites a  computer programmer or scientist, and in examining the
> descriptions of the  presentations at this conference, I found each one
> more mysterious than the  next. So, I clearly qualify as an outsider.
> But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but an
> outsider  who has a point of view that might be useful to the insiders.
> And that is why I  accepted the invitation to speak. I believe I know
> something about what  technologies do to culture, and I know even more
> about what technologies undo in  a culture. In fact, I might say, at the
> start, that what a technology undoes is  a subject that computer experts
> apparently know very little about. I have heard  many experts in computer
> technology speak about the advantages that computers  will bring. With one
> exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have never  heard anyone speak
> seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of  computer
> technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the
> profession is hiding something important. That is to say, what seems to be
>  lacking among computer experts is a sense of technological modesty.
> After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that
> technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and
> technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology
> sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than
> it  creates. But it is never one-sided.
> The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing
> fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval
> sense of  community and social integration. Printing created prose but
> made poetry into an  exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made
> modern science possible but  transformed religious sensibility into an
> exercise in superstition. Printing  assisted in the growth of the
> nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism  into a sordid if not a
> murderous emotion.
> Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some
> groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example,
> will, in  the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as
> blacksmiths were made  obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made
> obsolete by the printing  press. Technological change, in other words,
> always results in winners and  losers.
> In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the
> computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like
> military  establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting
> agencies. And it  is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable
> to high-level  researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to
> what extent has  computer technology been an advantage to the masses of
> people? To steel workers,  vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile
> mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick  layers, dentists and most of the rest
> into whose lives the computer now  intrudes? These people have had their
> private matters made more accessible to  powerful institutions. They are
> more easily tracked and controlled; they are  subjected to more
> examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions  made about
> them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are
> being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising
>  agencies and  political organizations. The schools teach their children
> to operate  computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more
> valuable to  children. In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers
> that they need, which  is why they are losers.
> It is to be expected that the winners -- for example, most of the speakers
> at  this conference -- will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about
> computer  technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes
> tell the losers  that with personal computers the average person can
> balance a checkbook more  neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make
> more logical shopping lists. They  also tell them that they can vote at
> home, shop at home, get all the information  they wish at home, and thus
> make community life unnecessary. They tell them that  their lives will be
> conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say  from whose point
> of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.
> Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the
> wondrous  feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance
> to the quality of  the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive.
> Eventually, the losers  succumb, in part because they believe that the
> specialized knowledge of the  masters of a computer technology is a form
> of wisdom. The masters, of course,  come to believe this as well. The
> result is that certain questions do not arise,  such as, to whom will the
> computer give greater power and freedom, and whose  power and freedom will
> be reduced?
> Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned conspiracy,
> as  if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. But
> this is  not quite how it happens, for the winners do not always know what
> they are  doing, and where it will all lead. The Benedictine monks who
> invented the  mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed
> that such a clock would  provide a precise regularity to the seven periods
> of devotion they were required  to observe during the course of the day.
> As a matter of fact, it did. But what  the monks did not realize is that
> the clock is not merely a means of keeping  track of the hours but also of
> synchronizing and controlling the actions of men.  And so, by the middle
> of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls  of the
> monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the
> workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of
> regular  production, regular working hours, and a
>  standardized product. Without the  clock, capitalism would have been
> quite impossible. And so, here is a great  paradox: the clock was
> invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more  rigorously to God;
> and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who  wished to
> devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has
> unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning,
> who or  what will win, and who or what will lose.
> I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann Gutenberg
> was  by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to
> hear Martin  Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is "God's
> highest act of  grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven
> forward." Gutenberg thought  his invention would advance the cause of the
> Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it  turned out to bring a revolution
> which destroyed the monopoly of the Church.
> We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of
> computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have
>  reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of
> my  talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death." In the time remaining, I will
> try to  explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust
> you will be  open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I
> can begin to get at  this by telling you of a small experiment I have been
> conducting, on and off,  for the past several years. There are some people
> who describe the experiment as  an exercise in deceit and exploitation but
> I will rely on your sense of humor to  pull me through.
> Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague
>  who appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York  Times.
> "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague  says yes,
> there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the  experiment
> can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a
> fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really?
> What's  it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are
> limited only by my  imagination. But I might say something like this:
> "Well, they did this study to  find out what foods are best to eat for
> losing weight, and it turns out that a  normal diet supplemented by
> chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the  best approach. It seems
> that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs --  encomial dioxin --
> that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."
> Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to
> be  health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about
> this," I say.  "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart
> have uncovered a  connection between jogging and reduced intelligence.
> They tested more than 1200  people over a period of five years, and found
> that as the number of hours people  jogged increased, there was a
> corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They  don't know exactly why
> but there it is."
> I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to
> report  something that is quite ridiculous -- one might say, beyond
> belief. Let me tell  you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the
> second or third time I've  tried this on the same person, most people will
> believe or at least not  disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they
> say: "Really? Is that  possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and
> reply, "Where'd you say that  study was done?" And sometimes they say,
> "You know, I've heard something like  that."
> Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results,
>  one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said,
> there  is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will
> believe it. This  is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any
> case I have tried this  experiment on non-professors and get roughly the
> same results. Another possible  conclusion is one expressed by George
> Orwell -- also about 50 years ago -- when  he remarked that the average
> person today is about as naive as was the average  person in the Middle
> Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority  of their
> religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our
> science, no matter what.
> But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be
> drawn,  related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I
> am referring  to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly
> incomprehensible to  most of us. There is almost no fact -- whether actual
> or imagined -- that will  surprise us for very long, since we have no
> comprehensive and consistent picture  of the world which would make the
> fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.  We believe because there is
> no reason not to believe. No social, political,  historical, metaphysical,
> logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that,  for the most part,
> makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean  to try my
> experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about  it,
> but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were
> actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark
> herring, on  what grounds would you dispute me? For
>  all you know -- indeed, for all I know --  the skin of a Bismark herring
> could have made the seats on which you  sit. And if I could get an
> industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing  some
> incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell
> someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring.
> Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an
> analogy:  If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the
> cards over, one  by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their
> order is. After you had  gone from the ace of spades through the nine of
> spades, you would expect a ten  of spades to come up next. And if a three
> of diamonds showed up instead, you  would be surprised and wonder what
> kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave  you a deck that had been
> shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the  cards over, you
> would not expect any card in particular -- a three of diamonds  would be
> just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given
> order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise
> to  whatever card turns up.
> The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order,
> nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing
> comes as  a particular surprise.
> In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average person
> in  the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like
> my  brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible
> world-view,  beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come
> from God. What the  priests had to say about the world was derived from
> the logic of their theology.  There was nothing arbitrary about the things
> people were asked to believe,  including the fact that the world itself
> was created at 9 AM on October 23 in  the year 4004 B.C. That could be
> explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the  satisfaction of anyone. So
> could the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the  head of a pin. It
> made quite good sense, if you believed that the Bible is the  revealed
> word of God and that the universe is populated with angels. The  medieval
> world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was  not
> without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might
>  not clearly grasp how  the harsh realities of their lives fit into the
> grand and benevolent design, but  they had no doubt that there was such a
> design, and their priests were well  able, by deduction from a handful of
> principles, to make it, if not rational, at  least coherent.
> The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say,
> sadder  and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather
> like the shuffled  deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent,
> integrated conception of  the world which serves as the foundation on
> which our edifice of belief rests.  And therefore, in a sense, we are more
> naive than those of the Middle Ages, and  more frightened, for we can be
> made to believe almost anything. The skin of a  Bismark herring makes
> about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.
> Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of
> Cassius  on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost literally
> in the stars.  When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and
> allowed Kepler to look  as well, they found no enchantment or
> authorization in the stars, only geometric  patterns and equations. God,
> it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a  master mathematician.
> This discovery helped to give impetus to the development  of physics but
> did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it  was
> possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe,
> and that God took a special interest in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth
> became  a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the
> universe, and  we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at
> all. The ordered,  comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to
> unravel because people no  longer saw in the stars the face of a
>  friend.
> And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well.
> I  refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource
> that  helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their
> environment.  It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a
> scarcity of information  but its very scarcity made it both important and
> usable. This began to change,  as everyone knows, in the late 15th century
> when a goldsmith named Gutenberg,  from Mainz, converted an old wine press
> into a printing machine, and in so  doing, created what we now call an
> information explosion. Forty years after the  invention of the press,
> there were printing machines in 110 cities in six  different countries; 50
> years after, more than eight million books had been  printed, almost all
> of them filled with information that had previously not been  available to
> the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea  that
> computer technology introduced the age of
>  information. The printing press  began that age, and we have not been
> free of it since.
> But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of
> chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are
> faced  with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers;
> 11,556  periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million
> TV sets; and  over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles
> published every year  (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41
> million photographs are taken,  and just for the record, over 60 billion
> pieces of advertising junk mail come  into our mail boxes every year.
> Everything from telegraphy and photography in  the 19th century to the
> silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of  information, until
> matters have reached such proportions today that for the  average person,
> information no longer has any relation to the solution of  problems.
> The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is
> now a  commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of
> entertainment, or  worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes
> indiscriminately, directed  at no one in particular, disconnected from
> usefulness; we are glutted with  information, drowning in information,
> have no control over it, don't know what  to do with it.
> And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as I
> have  said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our
> universe,  and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer
> know, as the Middle  Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going,
> or why. That is, we don't  know what information is relevant, and what
> information is irrelevant to our  lives. Second, we have directed all of
> our energies and intelligence to  inventing machinery that does nothing
> but increase the supply of information. As  a consequence, our defenses
> against information glut have broken down; our  information immune system
> is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we  don't know how to
> reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of  cultural
> AIDS.
> Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has
> a  quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost
> infinitely various  but also because computers are commonly integrated
> into the structure of other  machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me
> to warn against every conceivable  use of a computer. But there is no
> denying that the most prominent uses of  computers have to do with
> information. When people talk about "information  sciences," they are
> talking about computers -- how to store information, how to  retrieve
> information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to
> the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more
> usable  form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I
> should like to  put some other questions to you that seem to me more
> reasonable. Did Iraq invade  Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a
> hideous war should ensue between  Iraq and the U.S., will it happen
> because of
>  a lack of information? If children  die of starvation in Ethiopia, does
> it occur because of a lack of information?  Does racism in South Africa
> exist because of a lack of information? If criminals  roam the streets of
> New York City, do they do so because of a lack of  information?
> Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are
> unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because
> of a  lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to
> your family,  does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone
> in your family has a  mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack
> of information?
> I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the
> most  misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has
> nothing to do  with the sort of information made accessible by computers.
> The computer and its  information cannot answer any of the fundamental
> questions we need to address to  make our lives more meaningful and
> humane. The computer cannot provide an  organizing moral framework. It
> cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.  It cannot provide a means
> of understanding why we are here or why we fight each  other or why
> decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most.  The
> computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing
> what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of
> ourselves,  usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the
> computer for this?  Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But
> it is presented to us, with  trumpets blaring, as at this conference,
>  as a technological messiah.
> Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better,
> religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all,
> ourselves  better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the
> ignorant or the  foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that
> computers are not to blame  for this. And that is true, at least in the
> sense that we do not blame an  elephant for its huge appetite or a stone
> for being hard or a cloud for hiding  the sun. That is their nature, and
> we expect nothing different from them. But  the computer has a nature, as
> well. True, it is only a machine but a machine  designed to manipulate and
> generate information. That is what computers do, and  therefore they have
> an agenda and an unmistakable message.
> The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently
> packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems.
> And so  all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create
> ingenious things  for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will
> become wiser and more  decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By
> becoming masters of this  wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige
> and power and some will even  become famous. In a world populated by
> people who believe that through more and  more information, paradise is
> attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I  maintain that all of
> this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent  and energy.
> Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were  turned
> to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to
> education? Who knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why
> there  are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and
>  mental illness and anger.
> As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star
>  Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us
> artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to
> self-knowledge.  They will give us instantaneous global communication, and
> tell us this is the  way to mutual understanding. They will give us
> Virtual Reality and tell us this  is the answer to spiritual poverty. But
> that is only the way of the technician,  the fact-mongerer, the
> information junkie, and the technological idiot.
> Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but
> improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One
> should,  each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine
> picture, and,  if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here
> is what Socrates told  us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And
> here is what the prophet  Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of
> thee but to do justly, and to love  mercy and to walk humbly with thy
> God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time  (although you all know it
> well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus,  Mohammed, the Buddha,
> Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There  is no escaping
> from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and  we solve
> nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
> Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by
> quoting  the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist, Walt
> Kelley. I  commend his words to all the technological utopians and
> messiahs present. "We  have met the enemy," Pogo said, "and he is us."
>
> Jinan
> 1988
> NID
>
>
>
>
>
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Hi Jinan!
So, the sage breaketh a silence
and speaketh through the spirits of
Illich and Postman!

Welcome to the matrix
Welcome to the maya
Where we all make our fumblings
And stumblings; grumblings
and Rumblings

In the deluge about to come
The Real world shall drown
So climb on, while there is time
Onto Noah's Ark of cyberspace selves
But remember the Himalayan spring
That
Still drips onto the deadwood
and weaves green poems

- Hope you are doing well!


Raja



> Informing Ourselves To DeathBy Neil Postman
> ---------------------------------
>  The following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics
> Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart,
> sponsored by IBM-Germany.
> ---------------------------------
>   The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw
> once  remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common
> folk. He meant  that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians,
> lawyers, teachers, and  scientists -- protect their special status by
> creating vocabularies that are  incomprehensible to the general public.
> This process prevents outsiders from  understanding what the profession
> is doing and why -- and protects the insiders  from close examination
> and criticism. Professions, in other words, build  forbidding walls of
> technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye  cannot see.
> Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I
> consider  myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical
> gobbledegook as much as  anyone. But I do not object if occasionally
> someone who does not know the  secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the
> inner halls to express an untutored  point of view. Such a person may
> sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even  better, see something in a
> way that the professionals have overlooked.
> I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just such a
> purpose. I do not know very much more about computer technology than the
> average  person -- which isn't very much. I have little understanding of
> what excites a  computer programmer or scientist, and in examining the
> descriptions of the  presentations at this conference, I found each one
> more mysterious than the  next. So, I clearly qualify as an outsider.
> But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but an
> outsider  who has a point of view that might be useful to the insiders.
> And that is why I  accepted the invitation to speak. I believe I know
> something about what  technologies do to culture, and I know even more
> about what technologies undo in  a culture. In fact, I might say, at the
> start, that what a technology undoes is  a subject that computer experts
> apparently know very little about. I have heard  many experts in computer
> technology speak about the advantages that computers  will bring. With one
> exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have never  heard anyone speak
> seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of  computer
> technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the
> profession is hiding something important. That is to say, what seems to be
>  lacking among computer experts is a sense of technological modesty.
> After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that
> technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and
> technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology
> sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than
> it  creates. But it is never one-sided.
> The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing
> fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval
> sense of  community and social integration. Printing created prose but
> made poetry into an  exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made
> modern science possible but  transformed religious sensibility into an
> exercise in superstition. Printing  assisted in the growth of the
> nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism  into a sordid if not a
> murderous emotion.
> Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some
> groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example,
> will, in  the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as
> blacksmiths were made  obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made
> obsolete by the printing  press. Technological change, in other words,
> always results in winners and  losers.
> In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the
> computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like
> military  establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting
> agencies. And it  is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable
> to high-level  researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to
> what extent has  computer technology been an advantage to the masses of
> people? To steel workers,  vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile
> mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick  layers, dentists and most of the rest
> into whose lives the computer now  intrudes? These people have had their
> private matters made more accessible to  powerful institutions. They are
> more easily tracked and controlled; they are  subjected to more
> examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions  made about
> them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are
> being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising
>  agencies and  political organizations. The schools teach their children
> to operate  computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more
> valuable to  children. In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers
> that they need, which  is why they are losers.
> It is to be expected that the winners -- for example, most of the speakers
> at  this conference -- will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about
> computer  technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes
> tell the losers  that with personal computers the average person can
> balance a checkbook more  neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make
> more logical shopping lists. They  also tell them that they can vote at
> home, shop at home, get all the information  they wish at home, and thus
> make community life unnecessary. They tell them that  their lives will be
> conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say  from whose point
> of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.
> Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the
> wondrous  feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance
> to the quality of  the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive.
> Eventually, the losers  succumb, in part because they believe that the
> specialized knowledge of the  masters of a computer technology is a form
> of wisdom. The masters, of course,  come to believe this as well. The
> result is that certain questions do not arise,  such as, to whom will the
> computer give greater power and freedom, and whose  power and freedom will
> be reduced?
> Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned conspiracy,
> as  if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. But
> this is  not quite how it happens, for the winners do not always know what
> they are  doing, and where it will all lead. The Benedictine monks who
> invented the  mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed
> that such a clock would  provide a precise regularity to the seven periods
> of devotion they were required  to observe during the course of the day.
> As a matter of fact, it did. But what  the monks did not realize is that
> the clock is not merely a means of keeping  track of the hours but also of
> synchronizing and controlling the actions of men.  And so, by the middle
> of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls  of the
> monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the
> workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of
> regular  production, regular working hours, and a
>  standardized product. Without the  clock, capitalism would have been
> quite impossible. And so, here is a great  paradox: the clock was
> invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more  rigorously to God;
> and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who  wished to
> devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has
> unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning,
> who or  what will win, and who or what will lose.
> I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann Gutenberg
> was  by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to
> hear Martin  Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is "God's
> highest act of  grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven
> forward." Gutenberg thought  his invention would advance the cause of the
> Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it  turned out to bring a revolution
> which destroyed the monopoly of the Church.
> We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of
> computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have
>  reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of
> my  talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death." In the time remaining, I will
> try to  explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust
> you will be  open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I
> can begin to get at  this by telling you of a small experiment I have been
> conducting, on and off,  for the past several years. There are some people
> who describe the experiment as  an exercise in deceit and exploitation but
> I will rely on your sense of humor to  pull me through.
> Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague
>  who appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York  Times.
> "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague  says yes,
> there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the  experiment
> can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a
> fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really?
> What's  it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are
> limited only by my  imagination. But I might say something like this:
> "Well, they did this study to  find out what foods are best to eat for
> losing weight, and it turns out that a  normal diet supplemented by
> chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the  best approach. It seems
> that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs --  encomial dioxin --
> that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."
> Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to
> be  health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about
> this," I say.  "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart
> have uncovered a  connection between jogging and reduced intelligence.
> They tested more than 1200  people over a period of five years, and found
> that as the number of hours people  jogged increased, there was a
> corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They  don't know exactly why
> but there it is."
> I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to
> report  something that is quite ridiculous -- one might say, beyond
> belief. Let me tell  you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the
> second or third time I've  tried this on the same person, most people will
> believe or at least not  disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they
> say: "Really? Is that  possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and
> reply, "Where'd you say that  study was done?" And sometimes they say,
> "You know, I've heard something like  that."
> Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results,
>  one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said,
> there  is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will
> believe it. This  is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any
> case I have tried this  experiment on non-professors and get roughly the
> same results. Another possible  conclusion is one expressed by George
> Orwell -- also about 50 years ago -- when  he remarked that the average
> person today is about as naive as was the average  person in the Middle
> Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority  of their
> religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our
> science, no matter what.
> But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be
> drawn,  related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I
> am referring  to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly
> incomprehensible to  most of us. There is almost no fact -- whether actual
> or imagined -- that will  surprise us for very long, since we have no
> comprehensive and consistent picture  of the world which would make the
> fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.  We believe because there is
> no reason not to believe. No social, political,  historical, metaphysical,
> logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that,  for the most part,
> makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean  to try my
> experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about  it,
> but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were
> actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark
> herring, on  what grounds would you dispute me? For
>  all you know -- indeed, for all I know --  the skin of a Bismark herring
> could have made the seats on which you  sit. And if I could get an
> industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing  some
> incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell
> someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring.
> Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an
> analogy:  If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the
> cards over, one  by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their
> order is. After you had  gone from the ace of spades through the nine of
> spades, you would expect a ten  of spades to come up next. And if a three
> of diamonds showed up instead, you  would be surprised and wonder what
> kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave  you a deck that had been
> shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the  cards over, you
> would not expect any card in particular -- a three of diamonds  would be
> just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given
> order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise
> to  whatever card turns up.
> The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order,
> nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing
> comes as  a particular surprise.
> In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average person
> in  the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like
> my  brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible
> world-view,  beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come
> from God. What the  priests had to say about the world was derived from
> the logic of their theology.  There was nothing arbitrary about the things
> people were asked to believe,  including the fact that the world itself
> was created at 9 AM on October 23 in  the year 4004 B.C. That could be
> explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the  satisfaction of anyone. So
> could the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the  head of a pin. It
> made quite good sense, if you believed that the Bible is the  revealed
> word of God and that the universe is populated with angels. The  medieval
> world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was  not
> without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might
>  not clearly grasp how  the harsh realities of their lives fit into the
> grand and benevolent design, but  they had no doubt that there was such a
> design, and their priests were well  able, by deduction from a handful of
> principles, to make it, if not rational, at  least coherent.
> The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say,
> sadder  and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather
> like the shuffled  deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent,
> integrated conception of  the world which serves as the foundation on
> which our edifice of belief rests.  And therefore, in a sense, we are more
> naive than those of the Middle Ages, and  more frightened, for we can be
> made to believe almost anything. The skin of a  Bismark herring makes
> about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.
> Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of
> Cassius  on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost literally
> in the stars.  When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and
> allowed Kepler to look  as well, they found no enchantment or
> authorization in the stars, only geometric  patterns and equations. God,
> it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a  master mathematician.
> This discovery helped to give impetus to the development  of physics but
> did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it  was
> possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe,
> and that God took a special interest in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth
> became  a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the
> universe, and  we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at
> all. The ordered,  comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to
> unravel because people no  longer saw in the stars the face of a
>  friend.
> And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well.
> I  refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource
> that  helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their
> environment.  It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a
> scarcity of information  but its very scarcity made it both important and
> usable. This began to change,  as everyone knows, in the late 15th century
> when a goldsmith named Gutenberg,  from Mainz, converted an old wine press
> into a printing machine, and in so  doing, created what we now call an
> information explosion. Forty years after the  invention of the press,
> there were printing machines in 110 cities in six  different countries; 50
> years after, more than eight million books had been  printed, almost all
> of them filled with information that had previously not been  available to
> the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea  that
> computer technology introduced the age of
>  information. The printing press  began that age, and we have not been
> free of it since.
> But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of
> chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are
> faced  with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers;
> 11,556  periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million
> TV sets; and  over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles
> published every year  (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41
> million photographs are taken,  and just for the record, over 60 billion
> pieces of advertising junk mail come  into our mail boxes every year.
> Everything from telegraphy and photography in  the 19th century to the
> silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of  information, until
> matters have reached such proportions today that for the  average person,
> information no longer has any relation to the solution of  problems.
> The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is
> now a  commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of
> entertainment, or  worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes
> indiscriminately, directed  at no one in particular, disconnected from
> usefulness; we are glutted with  information, drowning in information,
> have no control over it, don't know what  to do with it.
> And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as I
> have  said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our
> universe,  and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer
> know, as the Middle  Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going,
> or why. That is, we don't  know what information is relevant, and what
> information is irrelevant to our  lives. Second, we have directed all of
> our energies and intelligence to  inventing machinery that does nothing
> but increase the supply of information. As  a consequence, our defenses
> against information glut have broken down; our  information immune system
> is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we  don't know how to
> reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of  cultural
> AIDS.
> Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has
> a  quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost
> infinitely various  but also because computers are commonly integrated
> into the structure of other  machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me
> to warn against every conceivable  use of a computer. But there is no
> denying that the most prominent uses of  computers have to do with
> information. When people talk about "information  sciences," they are
> talking about computers -- how to store information, how to  retrieve
> information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to
> the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more
> usable  form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I
> should like to  put some other questions to you that seem to me more
> reasonable. Did Iraq invade  Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a
> hideous war should ensue between  Iraq and the U.S., will it happen
> because of
>  a lack of information? If children  die of starvation in Ethiopia, does
> it occur because of a lack of information?  Does racism in South Africa
> exist because of a lack of information? If criminals  roam the streets of
> New York City, do they do so because of a lack of  information?
> Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are
> unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because
> of a  lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to
> your family,  does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone
> in your family has a  mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack
> of information?
> I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the
> most  misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has
> nothing to do  with the sort of information made accessible by computers.
> The computer and its  information cannot answer any of the fundamental
> questions we need to address to  make our lives more meaningful and
> humane. The computer cannot provide an  organizing moral framework. It
> cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.  It cannot provide a means
> of understanding why we are here or why we fight each  other or why
> decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most.  The
> computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing
> what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of
> ourselves,  usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the
> computer for this?  Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But
> it is presented to us, with  trumpets blaring, as at this conference,
>  as a technological messiah.
> Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better,
> religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all,
> ourselves  better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the
> ignorant or the  foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that
> computers are not to blame  for this. And that is true, at least in the
> sense that we do not blame an  elephant for its huge appetite or a stone
> for being hard or a cloud for hiding  the sun. That is their nature, and
> we expect nothing different from them. But  the computer has a nature, as
> well. True, it is only a machine but a machine  designed to manipulate and
> generate information. That is what computers do, and  therefore they have
> an agenda and an unmistakable message.
> The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently
> packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems.
> And so  all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create
> ingenious things  for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will
> become wiser and more  decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By
> becoming masters of this  wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige
> and power and some will even  become famous. In a world populated by
> people who believe that through more and  more information, paradise is
> attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I  maintain that all of
> this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent  and energy.
> Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were  turned
> to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to
> education? Who knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why
> there  are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and
>  mental illness and anger.
> As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star
>  Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us
> artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to
> self-knowledge.  They will give us instantaneous global communication, and
> tell us this is the  way to mutual understanding. They will give us
> Virtual Reality and tell us this  is the answer to spiritual poverty. But
> that is only the way of the technician,  the fact-mongerer, the
> information junkie, and the technological idiot.
> Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but
> improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One
> should,  each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine
> picture, and,  if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here
> is what Socrates told  us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And
> here is what the prophet  Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of
> thee but to do justly, and to love  mercy and to walk humbly with thy
> God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time  (although you all know it
> well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus,  Mohammed, the Buddha,
> Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There  is no escaping
> from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and  we solve
> nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
> Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by
> quoting  the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist, Walt
> Kelley. I  commend his words to all the technological utopians and
> messiahs present. "We  have met the enemy," Pogo said, "and he is us."
>
> Jinan
> 1988
> NID
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
>  Yahoo! Mail
>  Use Photomail to share photos without annoying attachments.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

hi siddharth

i think the problem is that we have been giving away strategy for free
as part of the design exercise. so it is neither paid for nor
appreciated for its own stake. a design exercise can make or break a
business. in recent times, i can think of the real value vacuumiser  as
a real goof up through use of wrong design strategy. i am more and more
convinced that design is not about giving form but about changing
structure. (more about this later - when i am less sleepy)

warm regards.
dinesh korjan . studio korjan . ahmedabad (nid pd 1976)
www.korjan.com   www.korjan.wordpress.com

siddharth Dash wrote:
> --
>
> The other thing which comes to mind is that design is
> time and again limited to the 'visual' or at best
> 'tactile' than providing a strategic content as other
> 'serious business' areas.
>

--
Studio Korjan
15 Sameepam, NarayanNagar Road
Paldi, Ahmedabad 380 007, India
Tel/Fax: +91-79-2661 3188
studio@...   www.korjan.com



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Dear Friends

Design at Davos a la BusinessWeek, see link below.

Regards

M P Ranjan
from my Mac at home on the NID campus
25 February 2006 at 1.10 am IST

http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/jan2006/id20060130_353096.htm

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

yes dott07 ( http://www.dott07.com/home.html ) and transormation design
(
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/mt/red/archives/transformation_design/index.html
) are the more exciting design initiatives one has come across this
year. very inspiring - both.

i wonder if there would be interest in creating informed scenarios for
the country for the next couple of decades? there are so many areas to
look at. education. work. play. transportation. home. family.
relationships. health care. neighbourhoods. shopping. entertainment.
manufacturing. ..... did you say 230 sectors? it seems like much more.
much much more.

warm regards.
dinesh korjan . studio korjan . ahmedabad (nid pd 1976)
www.korjan.com   www.korjan.wordpress.com

Ranjan M P wrote:
> --
>
> John Thackara and the UK Design Council have once again demonstrated
> visionary leadership in design thinking with their DOTT07 initiative in
> the Northeast of UK by getting design into the hands of the community in
> their "bottom-up" mobilisation of design services for education
> (primary, secendary and tertiary) Health Care and community services, as
> well as all forms of public investments in design in the region which
> will be mediated by the community and the design fraternity working
> together while industry will play a supporting role.
<http://www.dott07.com/home.html>
>
>


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Dear Jinan,
Thanks a lot for that hardhitting speech. It just put into clear ,implicit
words that nagging feeling  a lot of people might have at the back of their
heads about benevolent capitalism,planned obsolescence and the reason beauty
pageant contestants all want "world peace".
warm regards
Suvodeep Das
NID PD 2000,PEP


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Informing Ourselves To DeathBy Neil Postman
---------------------------------
  The following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics  Society
(Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart,  sponsored by
IBM-Germany.
---------------------------------
   The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once 
remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant
that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians, lawyers, teachers, and 
scientists -- protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are 
incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from 
understanding what the profession is doing and why -- and protects the insiders 
from close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build 
forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye 
cannot see.
Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I consider 
myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical gobbledegook as much as 
anyone. But I do not object if occasionally someone who does not know the 
secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the inner halls to express an untutored 
point of view. Such a person may sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even 
better, see something in a way that the professionals have overlooked.
I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just such a 
purpose. I do not know very much more about computer technology than the average
person -- which isn't very much. I have little understanding of what excites a 
computer programmer or scientist, and in examining the descriptions of the 
presentations at this conference, I found each one more mysterious than the 
next. So, I clearly qualify as an outsider.
But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but an outsider 
who has a point of view that might be useful to the insiders. And that is why I 
accepted the invitation to speak. I believe I know something about what 
technologies do to culture, and I know even more about what technologies undo in
a culture. In fact, I might say, at the start, that what a technology undoes is 
a subject that computer experts apparently know very little about. I have heard 
many experts in computer technology speak about the advantages that computers 
will bring. With one exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum -- I have never 
heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of 
computer technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the 
profession is hiding something important. That is to say, what seems to be 
lacking among computer experts is a sense of technological modesty.
After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that 
technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and 
technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology 
sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it 
creates. But it is never one-sided.
The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing  fostered
the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of 
community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an
exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but
transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing 
assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism 
into a sordid if not a murderous emotion.
Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some  groups
of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example, will, in  the
long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made 
obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing 
press. Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and 
losers.
In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the  computer
has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military 
establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies. And it 
is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level 
researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has 
computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers,
vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick
layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now 
intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to 
powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are 
subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions 
made about them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are
being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising
  agencies and  political organizations. The schools teach their children to
operate  computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable
to  children. In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers that they need,
which  is why they are losers.
It is to be expected that the winners -- for example, most of the speakers at 
this conference -- will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer 
technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers 
that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more 
neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They
also tell them that they can vote at home, shop at home, get all the information
they wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary. They tell them that
their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say 
from whose point of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.
Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous 
feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of
the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive. Eventually, the losers 
succumb, in part because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the 
masters of a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The masters, of course, 
come to believe this as well. The result is that certain questions do not arise,
such as, to whom will the computer give greater power and freedom, and whose 
power and freedom will be reduced?
Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned conspiracy, as  if
the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. But this is  not
quite how it happens, for the winners do not always know what they are  doing,
and where it will all lead. The Benedictine monks who invented the  mechanical
clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed that such a clock would  provide a
precise regularity to the seven periods of devotion they were required  to
observe during the course of the day. As a matter of fact, it did. But what  the
monks did not realize is that the clock is not merely a means of keeping  track
of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men.  And
so, by the middle of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls  of
the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the 
workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of regular
production, regular working hours, and a
  standardized product. Without the  clock, capitalism would have been quite
impossible. And so, here is a great  paradox: the clock was invented by men who
wanted to devote themselves more  rigorously to God; and it ended as the
technology of greatest use to men who  wished to devote themselves to the
accumulation of money. Technology always has  unforeseen consequences, and it is
not always clear, at the beginning, who or  what will win, and who or what will
lose.
I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann Gutenberg was  by
all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to hear Martin 
Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is "God's highest act of 
grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward." Gutenberg thought 
his invention would advance the cause of the Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it
turned out to bring a revolution which destroyed the monopoly of the Church.
We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of 
computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have 
reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of my 
talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death." In the time remaining, I will try to 
explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust you will be 
open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I can begin to get at 
this by telling you of a small experiment I have been conducting, on and off, 
for the past several years. There are some people who describe the experiment as
an exercise in deceit and exploitation but I will rely on your sense of humor to
pull me through.
Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague  who
appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York  Times. "Did you read
The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague  says yes, there is no
experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the  experiment can proceed. "You
ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a  fascinating article about a study
done at Harvard University." "Really? What's  it about?" is the usual reply. My
choices at this point are limited only by my  imagination. But I might say
something like this: "Well, they did this study to  find out what foods are best
to eat for losing weight, and it turns out that a  normal diet supplemented by
chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the  best approach. It seems that
there's some special nutrient in the eclairs --  encomial dioxin -- that
actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."
Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to be 
health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about this," I say. 
"The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart have uncovered a 
connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than 1200 
people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people
jogged increased, there was a corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They
don't know exactly why but there it is."
I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to report 
something that is quite ridiculous -- one might say, beyond belief. Let me tell 
you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the second or third time I've 
tried this on the same person, most people will believe or at least not 
disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they say: "Really? Is that 
possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and reply, "Where'd you say that 
study was done?" And sometimes they say, "You know, I've heard something like 
that."
Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results,  one
of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said, there  is
no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it. This  is
more of an accusation than an explanation but in any case I have tried this 
experiment on non-professors and get roughly the same results. Another possible 
conclusion is one expressed by George Orwell -- also about 50 years ago -- when 
he remarked that the average person today is about as naive as was the average 
person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority 
of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our 
science, no matter what.
But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be drawn, 
related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I am referring 
to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to 
most of us. There is almost no fact -- whether actual or imagined -- that will 
surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture
of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. 
We believe because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, 
historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, 
for the most part, makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean 
to try my experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about 
it, but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were 
actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark herring, on 
what grounds would you dispute me? For
  all you know -- indeed, for all I know --  the skin of a Bismark herring could
have made the seats on which you  sit. And if I could get an industrial chemist
to confirm this fact by describing  some incomprehensible process by which it
was done, you would probably tell  someone tomorrow that you spent the evening
sitting on a Bismark herring.
Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an analogy:  If
you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the cards over, one 
by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their order is. After you had 
gone from the ace of spades through the nine of spades, you would expect a ten 
of spades to come up next. And if a three of diamonds showed up instead, you 
would be surprised and wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave 
you a deck that had been shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the 
cards over, you would not expect any card in particular -- a three of diamonds 
would be just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given
order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise to 
whatever card turns up.
The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order,  nothing
is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as  a
particular surprise.
In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average person in 
the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like my 
brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible world-view, 
beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come from God. What the 
priests had to say about the world was derived from the logic of their theology.
There was nothing arbitrary about the things people were asked to believe, 
including the fact that the world itself was created at 9 AM on October 23 in 
the year 4004 B.C. That could be explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the 
satisfaction of anyone. So could the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the 
head of a pin. It made quite good sense, if you believed that the Bible is the 
revealed word of God and that the universe is populated with angels. The 
medieval world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was 
not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might
  not clearly grasp how  the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand
and benevolent design, but  they had no doubt that there was such a design, and
their priests were well  able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to
make it, if not rational, at  least coherent.
The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say, sadder 
and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather like the shuffled
deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent, integrated conception of 
the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. 
And therefore, in a sense, we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and 
more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything. The skin of a 
Bismark herring makes about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.
Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of Cassius 
on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost literally in the stars. 
When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and allowed Kepler to look
as well, they found no enchantment or authorization in the stars, only geometric
patterns and equations. God, it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a 
master mathematician. This discovery helped to give impetus to the development 
of physics but did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it 
was possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe, 
and that God took a special interest in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth became
a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the universe, and 
we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. The ordered, 
comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to unravel because people no 
longer saw in the stars the face of a
  friend.
And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I 
refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource that 
helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their environment. 
It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information 
but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, 
as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, 
from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so 
doing, created what we now call an information explosion. Forty years after the 
invention of the press, there were printing machines in 110 cities in six 
different countries; 50 years after, more than eight million books had been 
printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously not been
available to the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea 
that computer technology introduced the age of
  information. The printing press  began that age, and we have not been free of
it since.
But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of  chaos.
If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are faced  with: In
America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556  periodicals;
27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million TV sets; and  over 400
million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year  (300,000
world-wide) and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken,  and just
for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come  into our
mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in  the 19th
century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of 
information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the 
average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of 
problems.
The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a 
commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or 
worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed
at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with 
information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what 
to do with it.
And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as I have 
said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, 
and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle 
Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't 
know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our 
lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to 
inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As
a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our 
information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we 
don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of 
cultural AIDS.
Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has a 
quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost infinitely various
but also because computers are commonly integrated into the structure of other 
machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me to warn against every conceivable 
use of a computer. But there is no denying that the most prominent uses of 
computers have to do with information. When people talk about "information 
sciences," they are talking about computers -- how to store information, how to 
retrieve information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to 
the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more usable 
form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I should like to 
put some other questions to you that seem to me more reasonable. Did Iraq invade
Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a hideous war should ensue between 
Iraq and the U.S., will it happen because of
  a lack of information? If children  die of starvation in Ethiopia, does it
occur because of a lack of information?  Does racism in South Africa exist
because of a lack of information? If criminals  roam the streets of New York
City, do they do so because of a lack of  information?
Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are 
unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because of a 
lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to your family, 
does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a
mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information?
I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most 
misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has nothing to do 
with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its 
information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to
make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an 
organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. 
It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each 
other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. 
The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing 
what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, 
usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this?
Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with
trumpets blaring, as at this conference,
  as a technological messiah.
Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better,  religion
better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all, ourselves  better.
This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the  foolish
could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame  for this.
And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an  elephant for
its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding  the sun. That
is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But  the computer
has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine  designed to
manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and  therefore
they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.
The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently 
packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so
all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things 
for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more 
decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this 
wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even 
become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and 
more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I 
maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent 
and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were 
turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to 
education? Who knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why there 
are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and
  mental illness and anger.
As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star 
Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us 
artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. 
They will give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the 
way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this 
is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, 
the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot.
Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but  improved
means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One should,  each
day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and,  if
it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told 
us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the prophet 
Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love
mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time 
(although you all know it well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, 
Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There
is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and 
we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by quoting 
the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist, Walt Kelley. I 
commend his words to all the technological utopians and messiahs present. "We 
have met the enemy," Pogo said, "and he is us."

Jinan
1988
NID





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To Hell  with Good Intentions
by Ivan  Illich
  An  address by Monsignor Ivan Illich to the Conference on InterAmerican Student
Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968. In his usual biting 
and sometimes sarcastic style, Illich goes to the heart of the deep dangers of 
paternalism inherent in any voluntary service activity, but especially in any 
international service "mission." Parts of the speech are outdated and must be 
viewed in the historical context of 1968 when it was delivered, but the entire 
speech is retained for the full impact of his point and at Ivan Illich's 
request.
  IN  THE CONVERSATIONS WHICH I HAVE HAD TODAY, I was impressed by two things,
and I  want to state them before I launch into my prepared talk.
  I was  impressed by your insight that the motivation of U.S. volunteers
overseas  springs mostly from very alienated feelings and concepts. I was
equally  impressed, by what I interpret as a step forward among would-be
volunteers like  you: openness to the idea that the only thing you can
legitimately volunteer for  in Latin America might be voluntary powerlessness,
voluntary presence as  receivers, as such, as hopefully beloved or adopted ones
without any way of  returning the gift.
  I was  equally impressed by the hypocrisy of most of you: by the hypocrisy of
the  atmosphere prevailing here. I say this as a brother speaking to brothers
and  sisters. I say it against many resistances within me; but it must be said.
Your  very insight, your very openness to evaluations of past programs make you 
hypocrites because you - or at least most of you - have decided to spend this 
next summer in Mexico, and therefore, you are unwilling to go far enough in your
reappraisal of your program. You close your eyes because you want to go ahead 
and could not do so if you looked at some facts.
  It is  quite possible that this hypocrisy is unconscious in most of you. 
Intellectually, you are ready to see that the motivations which could legitimate
volunteer action overseas in 1963 cannot be invoked for the same action in 1968.
"Mission-vacations" among poor Mexicans were "the thing" to do for well-off U.S.
students earlier in this decade: sentimental concern for newly-discovered. 
poverty south of the border combined with total blindness to much worse poverty 
at home justified such benevolent excursions. Intellectual insight into the 
difficulties of fruitful volunteer action had not sobered the spirit of Peace 
Corps Papal-and-Self-Styled Volunteers.
  Today, the existence of  organizations like yours is offensive to Mexico. I
wanted to make this statement  in order to explain why I feel sick about it all
and in order to make you aware  that good intentions have not much to do with
what we are discussing here. To  hell with good intentions. This is a
theological statement. You will not help  anybody by your good intentions. There
is an Irish saying that the road to hell  is paved with good intentions; this
sums up the same theological  insight.
  The  very frustration which participation in CIASP programs might mean for you,
could  lead you to new awareness: the awareness that even North Americans can
receive  the gift of hospitality without the slightest ability to pay for it;
the  awareness that for some gifts one cannot even say "thank  you."
  Now  to my prepared statement.
  Ladies and  Gentlemen:
  For  the past six years I have become known for my increasing opposition to the
presence of any and all North American "dogooders" in Latin America. I am sure 
you know of my present efforts to obtain the voluntary withdrawal of all North 
American volunteer armies from Latin America - missionaries, Peace Corps members
and groups like yours, a "division" organized for the benevolent invasion of 
Mexico. You were aware of these things when you invited me - of all people - to 
be the main speaker at your annual convention. This is amazing! I can only 
conclude that your invitation means one of at least three things:
Some among  you might have reached the conclusion that CIASP should either
dissolve  altogether, or take the promotion of voluntary aid to the Mexican poor
out of  its institutional purpose. Therefore you might have invited me here to
help  others reach this same decision.
  You  might also have invited me because you want to learn how to deal with
people who  think the way I do - how to dispute them successfully. It has now
become quite  common to invite Black Power spokesmen to address Lions Clubs. A
"dove" must  always be included in a public dispute organized to increase U.S. 
belligerence.
  And  finally, you might have invited me here hoping that you would be able to
agree  with most of what I say, and then go ahead in good faith and work this
summer in  Mexican villages. This last possibility is only open to those who do
not listen,  or who cannot understand me.
  I did  not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince
you, and  hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on 
Mexicans.
  I do  have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However,
his  good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive 
delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen 
for the middle-class "American Way of Life," since that is really the only life 
you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United
States had supported it - the belief that any true American must share God's 
blessings with his poorer fellow men. The idea that every American has something
to give, and at all times may, can and should give it, explains why it occurred 
to students that they could help Mexican peasants "develop" by spending a few 
months in their villages.
  Of  course, this surprising conviction was supported by members of a missionary
order, who would have no reason to exist unless they had the same conviction - 
except a much stronger one. It is now high time to cure yourselves of this. You,
like the values you carry, are the products of an American society of achievers 
and consumers, with its two-party system, its universal schooling, and its 
family-car affluence. You are ultimately-consciously or unconsciously - 
"salesmen" for a delusive ballet in the ideas of democracy, equal opportunity 
and free enterprise among people who haven't the possibility of profiting from 
these.
  Next  to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S.
idealist,  who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the
volunteer, the  missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and
the vacationing  do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service.
Actually, they  frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and
weapons, or  "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of
affluence and  achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to
the people of  the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen
simply is not alive  enough to be shared.
  By  now it should be evident to all America that the U.S. is engaged in a
tremendous  struggle to survive. The U.S. cannot survive if the rest of the
world is not  convinced that here we have Heaven-on-Earth. The survival of the
U.S. depends on  the acceptance by all so-called "free" men that the U.S. middle
class has "made  it." The U.S. way of life has become a religion which must be
accepted by all  those who do not want to die by the sword - or napalm. All over
the globe the  U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who
consume what the  U.S. majority can afford. Such is the purpose of the Alliance
for Progress of  the middle-classes which the U.S. signed with Latin America
some years ago. But  increasingly this commercial alliance must be protected by
weapons which allow  the minority who can "make it" to protect their
acquisitions and achievements.
  But  weapons are not enough to permit minority rule. The marginal masses become
rambunctious unless they are given a "Creed," or belief which explains the 
status quo. This task is given to the U.S. volunteer - whether he be a member of
CLASP or a worker in the so-called "Pacification Programs" in Viet  Nam.
  The  United States is currently engaged in a three-front struggle to affirm its
ideals of acquisitive and achievement-oriented "Democracy." I say "three" 
fronts, because three great areas of the world are challenging the validity of a
political and social system which makes the rich ever richer, and the poor 
increasingly marginal to that system.
  In  Asia, the U.S. is threatened by an established power -China. The U.S.
opposes  China with three weapons: the tiny Asian elites who could not have it
any better  than in an alliance with the United States; a huge war machine to
stop the  Chinese from "taking over" as it is usually put in this country, and;
forcible  re-education of the so-called "Pacified" peoples. All three of these
efforts  seem to be failing.
  In  Chicago, poverty funds, the police force and preachers seem to be no more 
successful in their efforts to check the unwillingness of the black community to
wait for graceful integration into the system.
  And  finally, in Latin America the Alliance for Progress has been quite
successful in  increasing the number of people who could not be better off -
meaning the tiny,  middle-class elites - and has created ideal conditions for
military  dictatorships. The dictators were formerly at the service of the
plantation  owners, but now they protect the new industrial complexes. And
finally, you come  to help the underdog accept his destiny within this process!
  All  you will do in a Mexican village is create disorder. At best, you can try
to  convince Mexican girls that they should marry a young man who is self-made, 
rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of you. At worst, in 
your "community development" spirit you might create just enough problems to get
someone shot after your vacation ends_ and you rush back to your middleclass 
neighborhoods where your friends make jokes about "spits" and  "wetbacks."
  You  start on your task without any training. Even the Peace Corps spends
around  $10,000 on each corps member to help him adapt to his new environment
and to  guard him against culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about
spending  money to educate poor Mexicans in order to prevent them from the
culture shock  of meeting you?
In fact, you cannot even meet the majority which you pretend  to serve in Latin
America - even if you could speak their language, which most  of you cannot. You
can only dialogue with those like you - Latin American  imitations of the North
American middle class. There is no way for you to really  meet with the
underprivileged, since there is no common ground whatsoever for  you to meet on.
  Let  me explain this statement, and also let me explain why most Latin
Americans with  whom you might be able to communicate would disagree with me.
  Suppose you went to a U.S.  ghetto this summer and tried to help the poor there
"help themselves." Very soon  you would be either spit upon or laughed at.
People offended by your  pretentiousness would hit or spit. People who
understand that your own bad  consciences push you to this gesture would laugh
condescendingly. Soon you would  be made aware of your irrelevance among the
poor, of your status as middle-class  college students on a summer assignment.
You would be roundly rejected, no  matter if your skin is white-as most of your
faces here are-or brown or black,  as a few exceptions who got in here somehow.
  Your  reports about your work in Mexico, which you so kindly sent me, exude 
self-complacency. Your reports on past summers prove that you are not even 
capable of understanding that your dogooding in a Mexican village is even less 
relevant than it would be in a U.S. ghetto. Not only is there a gulf between 
what you have and what others have which is much greater than the one existing 
between you and the poor in your own country, but there is also a gulf between 
what you feel and what the Mexican people feel that is incomparably greater. 
This gulf is so great that in a Mexican village you, as White Americans (or 
cultural white Americans) can imagine yourselves exactly the way a white 
preacher saw himself when he offered his life preaching to the black slaves on a
plantation in Alabama. The fact that you live in huts and eat tortillas for a 
few weeks renders your well-intentioned group only a bit more  picturesque.
  The  only people with whom you can hope to communicate with are some members of
the  middle class. And here please remember that I said "some" -by which I mean
a  tiny elite in Latin America.
  You  come from a country which industrialized early and which succeeded in 
incorporating the great majority of its citizens into the middle classes. It is 
no social distinction in the U.S. to have graduated from the second year of 
college. Indeed, most Americans now do. Anybody in this country who did not 
finish high school is considered underprivileged.
  In  Latin America the situation is quite different: 75% of all people drop out
of  school before they reach the sixth grade. Thus, people who have finished
high  school are members of a tiny minority. Then, a minority of that minority
goes on  for university training. It is only among these people that you will
find your  educational equals.
  At  the same time, a middle class in the United States is the majority. In
Mexico,  it is a tiny elite. Seven years ago your country began and financed a
so-called  "Alliance for Progress." This was an "Alliance" for the "Progress" of
the middle  class elites. Now. it is among the members of this middle class that
you will  find a few people who are willing to send their time with you_ And
they are  overwhelmingly those "nice kids" who would also like to soothe their
troubled  consciences by "doing something nice for the promotion of the poor
Indians." Of  course, when you and your middleclass Mexican counterparts meet,
you will be  told that you are doing something valuable, that you are
"sacrificing" to help  others.
And it will be the foreign priest who will especially confirm your  self-image
for you. After all, his livelihood and sense of purpose depends on  his firm
belief in a year-round mission which is of the same type as your summer 
vacation-mission.
  There  exists the argument that some returned volunteers have gained insight
into the  damage they have done to others - and thus become more mature people.
Yet it is  less frequently stated that most of them are ridiculously proud of
their "summer  sacrifices." Perhaps there is also something to the argument that
young men  should be promiscuous for awhile in order to find out that sexual
love is most  beautiful in a monogamous relationship. Or that the best way to
leave LSD alone  is to try it for awhile -or even that the best way of
understanding that your  help in the ghetto is neither needed nor wanted is to
try, and fail. I do not  agree with this argument. The damage which volunteers
do willy-nilly is too high  a price for the belated insight that they shouldn't
have been volunteers in the  first place.
  If  you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at
home.  Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you
are  doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will
know  when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your
vocation,  then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It
is  incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so
linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, 
or what people think of you. And it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when 
you define something that you want to do as "good," a "sacrifice" and  "help."
  I am  here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which
being  an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously
and  humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on
Mexico. I  am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your
powerlessness and  your incapacity to do the "good" which you intended to do.
  I am  here to entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to
travel  in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy
our  flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.
  Ivan  Illich is the author of Deschooling Society and other provocative books.
Thanks  to Nick Royal, Tim Stanton, and Steve Babb for helping to find this
speech.




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