Don\'t Travel: Communicate! (2009/2010)

Paper read at the conference Thinking the Future: Philosophy – Sustainability – Global Consciousness, October 14–17, 2010, Graz1

Kristóf Nyíri Don't Travel: Communicate!

Of course you should travel. But less often. And only if business, professional, or personal reasons make it absolutely necessary. The amount of travel done today, by air and on the roads, is unsustainable. It consumes prohibitive amounts of non-renewable energy; it is an intolerable burden on the environment. Mass tourism, to be sure, is a huge industry, many economies have become absolutely dependent on it, but I submit that those economies are travelling down a blind alley. More importantly from my present point of view, mass tourism is a psychological blind alley for the global middle class which appears to be served by it. Your vacation begins tomorrow: it's early in the afternoon, but already you are packed, soon to be stuck with your car in the inevitable jam on the motorway, or queuing up at the airport for the offensive and ridiculous security check, terrorism's punishment for your lack of commitment to your own habitat. You do not consider using your holidays, or your weekends, to weed the garden, or to clean up the mess on your desk, or to visit acquaintances in your neighbourhood. You are fleeing your home. I believe a radical change in our life patterns is called for, a change implying a new attitude towards digitally mediated communication. For years now, social science research on effects of the net has been proclaiming that digitally mediated communication does not impair personal relationships; that it leads to more, rather than to fewer, face-to-face encounters. These research results and forecasts were entirely right. However, converging telecommunications technologies today have the potential to fulfil a very different, and by now absolutely called for, social role. This new role consists in not merely supplementing, but also, in no small measure, supplanting personal meetings. Telecoms should realize that this is the new challenge they now have to meet. They can succeed, but only if elites will realize, or can be convinced, that they have to set new examples. Let us look 1

Extended version of the position paper written in preparation for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences / TMobile workshop Ubiquitous Communication in an Intelligent World, Budapest, Sept. 18–19, 2009.

at the possible, and in part actually emerging, novel paradigms in business, study, and leisure. The survey Nomads at Last: A Special Report on Mobile Telecoms, published by The Economist, April 12, 2008, quotes Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz as saying that he works from "anywhere that has Wi-Fi", that "the venues for his scheduled meetings are flexible" (with many of them conducted on Skype), and that he is having altogether fewer "flesh meetings". As The Economist, significantly, puts it, this "runs counter to the conventional wisdom of the past few decades, which held that improvements in telecommunications always lead to more physical travel, rather than less. Mr. Schwartz used to spend two weeks a month travelling to meet customers; that has come down to less than one week a month. With more than 100,000 customers, he finds that he communicates far more efficiently through his blog", and in general he finds that "face-to-face is overrated". Similar observations were reached by István Maradi, Magyar Telekom's Chief Technology and IT Officer in his talk at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences / T-Mobile conference Mobile Communication and the Ethics of Social Networking, held in Budapest in September 2008. Maradi noted that especially with social networking now having penetrated beyond corporate firewalls, and with today's state-of-the art virtual conference rooms, remote working has become more effective and practical.2 As with remote working, so with remote study. I am coming to the main point of my talk. Virtual learning – e-learning, m-learning – is today vastly more operative than just a few years ago.3 Let me here briefly recall the discussions, from the 1990s, surrounding the first virtual university experiments. Indeed let me, first, recall some episodes from the pre-history of those discussions. It was in 1852 that Cardinal Newman published his book The Idea of a University, in which he stressed the point, centrally important to him, that a university should be a place of encounters and exchanges. If he had to choose, he wrote, "between a so-called University, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to any person who passed 2

Cf. "Social Networking on 3 Screens: A Transition Story", in Kristóf Nyíri, ed., Engagement and Exposure: Mobile Communication and the Ethics of Social Networking, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2009, pp. 135 f. 3 See András Benedek's chapter "Mobile Learning", in Nyíri, ed., Engagement and Exposure, and also his earlier papers referred to in that chapter, cf. p. 139.

an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years, and then sent them away", he would definitely elect the latter. "When a multitude of young men", he explained, "keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn one from another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and fresh views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day." For this reason already "a large school or college" should be seen, as Newman puts it, as "an enlargement of mind": "It is seeing the world on a small field with little trouble; for the pupils or students come from very different places, and with widely different notions, and there is much to generalize, much to adjust, much to eliminate, there are inter-relations to be defined, and conventional rules to be established, in the process, by which the whole assemblage is moulded together, and gains one tone and one character. ... that youthful community will ... give birth to a living teaching, which in course of time will take the shape of a self-perpetuating tradition, or a genius loci, as it is sometimes called."4 A similar view was formulated by Hastings Rashdall, in his classic work The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, published in 1895.5 For Rashdall, "[t]he two most essential functions which a true university has to perform are to make possible the life of study, whether for a few years or during a whole career, and to bring together during that period, face to face in living intercourse, teacher and teacher, teacher and student, student and student. It would be a fatal error to imagine that either the multiplication of books or the increased facilities of communication can ever remove the need of institutions which permit of such personal intercourse. A university, therefore, must have a local habitation. It may in a sense be maintained that the bewildering accumulation of literature and the rapidity with which it is diffused have only emphasized the necessity for personal guidance and inter4

Newman's book was based on lectures delivered in Dublin, where he presided over the establishment of a Roman Catholic University that came into being in 1854. The collection first bore the title Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education: Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin, becoming popularly known as The Idea of a University after several revisions and enlargements. I am here quoting from the edition by F. M. Turner, with contributions by Martha McMackin Garland, Sara Castro-Klarén, George P. Landow, George M. Marsden, Frank M. Turner, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. For the passages quoted, see pp. 76 f. 5 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895, in 2 volumes. New edition in three volumes, ed. by F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, London: Oxford University Press, 1936, reprinted in 1969. It is the latter edition I will be quoting from.

pretation – for association in teaching, in study, and in research. Personal contact adds something even to the highest spiritual and intellectual influences... There is a kind of knowledge, too, which can only be secured by personal intercommunication, a kind of intellectual cultivation which is only made possible by constant interchange of ideas with other minds, a kind of enthusiasm which is impossible in isolation."6 Now by the 1990s it has of course become obvious that Newman's and Rashdall's university had long ceased to exist. In his book The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University, published in 1992, Parker Rossman wrote of "the end of the university as most Americans picture it – four happy years on a resident campus". Rossman noted that half of American students in 1990 were older than the traditional college age, and that many people completed their college education or took graduate degrees on a part-time basis as commuters, taking courses across many working years.7 Or as George Landow, of Brown University, suggested in an essay published in 1996: "although we like to think – imagine or fantasize would be a more accurate term – that our educational institutions are characterized by Oxbridge tutorials, small seminars, and lots of contact between student and faculty, the great majority of American and European students (many of whom, incidentally, are nonresident or attend institutions without campuses or adequate student facilities) have for half a century or more received their education in lectures with hundreds of others." Also, "collegiality is dissolving throughout both our colleges and universities, ... because faculty, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, spend less time on campus, preferring to work at home on personal computers, which give them access to libraries, databases, and other colleagues all over the world. In that sense the university as a place is disappearing because the people who really constitute the place interact less and less in the traditional university space." Landow made the important point that "the digital university is coming into being to remedy the shortcomings of the present non-digital one"; he emphasized that traditional student-teacher contacts are supported and supplemented, rather 6

"To a certain extent of course", the passage continues, "these functions are performed by every sort of educational institution and every scientific or literary society. But it behoves us not to lose or lower the ideal of the university as the place par excellence for professed and properly trained students, not for amateurs or dilettantes or even for the most serious of leisure-hour students; for the highest intellectual cultivation, and not merely for elementary instruction or useful knowledge; for the advancement of science, and not merely for its conservation or diffusion; as the place moreover where different branches of knowledge are brought into contact and harmonious combination with one another, and where education and research advance side by side" (Rashdall, The Universities..., vol. 3, pp. 463 f.). 7 Parker Rossman, The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University: Information Age Global Higher Education, Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 7 f.

than done away with, by contacts in the virtual space; that "[e]lectronic networks, like telephone lines, connect people, supplementing and strengthening rather than destroying the community based on physical presence"; and that computer-mediated communication actually produces "a new kind of collegiality".8 It was in a similar spirit Neil Rudenstine, President of Harvard University, addressed the issue in a talk given on May 29, 1996. As he put it: "Many inventions (such as radio, film, and television) have of course had a massive effect on society – on how people spend their time, entertain themselves, and even gain information. But, in spite of many predictions, these particular inventions have had little effect on formal, serious, advanced education. Why should the Internet be any different? ... Let me suggest some of the main reasons why I believe that the Internet is fundamentally different from those earlier electronic inventions, and why I believe it is already having – and will continue to have – such a major effect on higher education. – To begin with, there is the steadily mounting evidence of dramatic change and intensity of use... More fundamentally, there is in fact a very close fit – a critical interlock – between the structures and processes of the Internet, and the main structures and processes of university teaching and learning. That same fit simply did not (and does not) exist with radio, film, or television. ... – If I say there is a critical interlock or fit here, I mean nothing more complicated than the plain fact that students can carry forward their work on the Internet in ways that are similar to – and tightly intertwined with – the traditional ways that they study and learn in libraries, classrooms, lecture halls, seminars, informal discussion groups, laboratories, and in the writing and editing of papers or reports.9 Some months later Rudenstine added some important points. As he said: "The Internet enhances the vital process of 'conversational' learning. We all know that the daily exchange of ideas and opinions among students, and between students and faculty members, is one of the oldest and most important forms of education. People argue and debate, listen and react, and sometimes even discover common solutions to difficult problems. – The Internet creates an array of new electronic forums for such conversational learning. Communication takes place at all hours, across distances, among people on campus and beyond. Instructors can hold supplementary 'electronic office hours' and moderate on-line discussion 8

George P. Landow, "Newman and the Idea of an Electronic University", in F. M. Turner (ed.), J. H. Newman: The Idea of a University, pp. 359 ff. 9 Neil Rudenstine, "The Internet is Changing Higher Education", American Studies Journal, no. 39, November 1996, p. 50.

groups, unbounded by time or place. Students, even those who are reticent in the classroom, can put forward their hypotheses and invite their peers' reactions, or describe a problem they are struggling to solve and solicit suggestions from others. – Sustained, direct human contact is absolutely essential to serious education, and always will be. Ultimately, there is no effective substitute for 'live', face-to-face interchange. Nonetheless, the Internet permits a significant extension of scope, continuity, and even the quality of certain forms of interaction, even though electronic communication will always lack critical elements of 'real' conversation."10 The virtual university hopes of the 1990s were, as we today know, premature, but definitely not misguided. They were premature, because the bandwidth and the speed had not yet reached the level psychologically and cognitively indispensable. To-day, e-learning is absolutely thriving; and there exists no bricks-and-mortar university without a virtual extension. In fact, our universities have become hybrid ones. Also, with blogs and social networking sites, the internet itself has become a worldwide virtual seminar; with Google Books and Amazon Online Reader, your computer – on your desk, or in your lap – has finally become a global library. Acquiring highlevel knowledge today requires, strictly speaking, significantly less travelling than it did fifteen, twenty, or hundred years ago. And as with study, so with scholarship and research. Certainly there are colleagues you must meet in person at some stage, but they aren't that many; and certainly there are conferences you must attend, but surely not dozens of them each year. Instead, maintain a steady flow of high-quality scholarly correspondence; exploit the richness of carefully crafted multimedia exchanges; don't let the phantom of easy and speedy travel lure you. But do not become a hermit. Undertake, prominently, journeys in your own locality – your very own vicinity, the background and basis of your local intelligence. You were always surrounded, humankind was from the very beginning surrounded, by intelligent objects; that is what made it human. Philosophically speaking, even your mind is a matter of intelligent extensions – an extended mind – and your memory an extended memory, essentially de-

10

Neil Rudenstine, "The Internet and Education: a Close Fit", The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 21, 1997.

pendent on tools and external storage devices.11 With GPS and the digital tagging of our physical environment, ever wider circles of the world surrounding us can be said to become intelligent.12 Today, you do not have to travel far in order to gain new, interesting, cognitively rewarding experiences. In a sense, the present paper is the continuation of a train of thought which I had developed in the 1990s – first in a very brief article in the newspaper Liechtensteiner Vaterland, in 1991, focusing on the merits of decentralized, local production relying on the potential of the internet, and then in my papers "Globale Gesellschaft und lokale Kultur im Zeitalter der Vernetzung"13 and "Konservativ sein im Zeitalter des Internets"14, returning to the issue in my chapter "Images of Home", in the volume A Sense of Place15, the fourth volume in the eight-volume series that has emerged from the joint interdisciplinary research program COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, conducted jointly by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and T-Mobile. In that chapter, I quoted a passage Raimondo Strassoldo had formulated in 1992, and has himself repeated in his contribution to the volume A Sense of Place. Our age, wrote Strassoldo, is "marked by a revival of localism. ... Postmodern man/woman, just because he/she is so deeply embedded in global information flows, may feel the need to revive small enclaves of familiarity, intimacy, security, intelligibility, organic-sensuous interaction... The easy access of the whole world, with just a little time and money, gives new meaning to the need of a subjective center – a home, a community, a locale – from which to move and to which to return and rest." In his contribution, Strassoldo suggested that mobile telephony is a disruptive force, alienating people from their close social and physical surroundings. In my rejoinder, I maintained what I still maintain today: that digitally mediated communication in general, and the mobile phone in particular, are not only revolutionary means that connect us globally, they are also powerful means for connections on a more local scale, organizing life in small spaces and communities. 11

Think of István Hajnal and his influence on the Toronto circle, think of Merlin Donald, think of Andy Clark; see the papers by Brook, by Preston, and by the present author, in Kristóf Nyíri, ed., Mobile Understanding: The Epistemology of Ubiquitous Communication, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2006. 12 A pioneering study in this direction was Barry Smith's "The Ecological Approach to Information Processing", in Kristóf Nyíri, ed., Mobile Learning, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2003. 13 See http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/tutzing.htm (1998). 14 See http://www.hunfi.hu/nyiri/CollBud99.htm (1999). 15 Kristóf Nyíri, ed., A Sense of Place: The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2005.

The web, and the mobile phone, can do this, because they convey not just written texts and not just voice, but also images. Images – mental images and physical pictures – have, in contrast to words, an inherently spatial organization. Also, pictures give rise to emotions more immediately than do words; clearly, attachment to a place involves making and having images of it. – I seem to be on the brink of opening up a new topic here, but will withstand the temptation, and conclude my talk instead. Until some decades ago, attachment to one's defining cultural-political community, that is, attachment to one’s nation-state, could only indirectly be conceived of in terms of images, since the rise of the nation-state ideology was connected, precisely, to printing – to the spread, characteristically, of texts. Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities,16 clearly, cannot be depicted by concrete images. By contrast, your locality, your vicinity, indeed can be so depicted. Don't travel: enjoy the images of home.

16

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983, rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.