Modernity and its technologies bring many pluses. We can, more or less, learn everything we want to know about everything whenever we want to know it. Thanks to the Internet, 24-hour news, blogs and e-mail, we are awash in information and communication options.
We don't have to wait until the morning paper arrives to learn what happened in the world yesterday. We don't have to get to a broker's office to find out how our investments are faring. We can access scads of reviews of a movie or restaurant before buying a ticket or ordering a meal. We can second-guess our physicians by checking on our own diseases and their possible treatments. We can find out what a hotel room will look like by taking a "virtual tour" before booking a reservation. We can do research in the world's great libraries without having to go there and negotiate permission. We can comparison shop for clothes, for cars, even for houses, without leaving our desks or waiting in line or facing an over-zealous salesman. We can watch our elected officials redraw district lines so as to ensure that a suitable number of legislators or school board members are minorities.
In education, we can learn tons about colleges from their websites and from sundry outside reviews and guides. If we live in a state blessed with GreatSchools.net or Just for the Kids, we can access information about our children's schools and how they're doing. (State websites and report cards, though less user friendly, supply some of the same.) True, education is a more sluggish field than most and there's much we still cannot readily find out: how good a teacher is, for example, or what the school system budget is really spent on. Many schools are not yet "data driven" organizations and many states are slow in issuing their schools' test scores and AYP results for the previous year. Yet those schools that have joined the information age can often provide teachers and parents with near-instant feedback on how a child or class is doing, whether a given skill has been learned, whether the homework is getting done. A hundred commercial suppliers are now vying to create such information systems in thousands of schools. As they (eventually) link to consumer data systems and computer-adaptive testing, information about student and school performance will become ubiquitous and nearly instantaneous.
All of this is, for the most part, a good thing. Progress. Modernity. New ways of gaining control over our lives, our work, and our capacity to make things come out as we want them to. Productivity grows, efficiency advances, we get more advance warnings and tips and clues, and we waste less time making fruitless journeys and waiting for things that turn out not to be worth waiting for.
But progress, as usual, comes with costs. I began to appreciate it when friends remarked on what a "happy baby" my 9-month old granddaughter is. It's true, of course (she's also adorable and precocious), but she isn't always happy. Like babies since Moses, she sometimes cries and fusses and spits up and does other unmentionable things. What conceals this reality, I realized, and makes her look sublimely happy at all times to people who aren't in her immediate presence is digital photography, and our capacity to erase the ugly, sad, squalling, drooly, and out-of-focus pictures before showing them to anyone. No longer do the cute snapshots come accompanied by the lamentable ones. No longer must I wait even an hour for the camera shop to develop my film and return all my pictures, the bad and ugly as well as the good ones. Now I pre-edit, right on the camera, thereby altering reality and giving friends and relatives a false sense of nonstop happiness on the part of this little girl.
The problem turns out to be larger than that - at least it's a problem if you believe that surprises and mysteries are an important part of life and that unpredictability and risk are part of why it's worth waking up in the morning.
Are you certain that you want to know everything about a book before you read it? About a movie before you view it? About a restaurant before you dine in it? About a car before you drive it? Is it good for our character never to see a bad movie or buy a lemon of a car? Is it good for diversity and competition (and freedom itself) to have our options effectively narrowed by other people's opinions? Do you really want Congressional and legislative redistricting to be so precise that practically no seats are actually "in play" during the next election?
Do we benefit from having both instant news and instant punditry before making up our own minds? Isn't something lost when we don't have to wait for the morning newspaper to find out what happened yesterday? Shouldn't we have to reflect upon something long enough to compose an actual letter or memo rather than knee-jerkily firing off an e-mail, instant message or cell-phone call? Should I really have to crowd into the train's sole "quiet car" to avoid the blizzard storm of information and communication? Might it be good for kids to wait for the end of the grading period to find out how they're really doing? Might it be good for teachers to have to wait that long and then size up the child's progress in a more comprehensive (I would never say "holistic") way?
Luddite, you say. Old fuddy-duddy. Maybe. But I use much of this information and many of these tools myself, and feel like progress is helping me get more done with less hassle and enhanced efficiency. I try to multi-task with the best of them and find that easier thanks to the data, the control, the new systems. I love having people say that my granddaughter is happy (cute, beautiful, precocious, etc.). I delete the ugly pictures just as I delete the unwanted email messages and throw out the junk mail and avoid the bad restaurants and otherwise try to purge my life of unpleasantness and bother. But isn't it possible that we're gaining too much control over such things? That we may slip with Alice into a wonderland where things are not exactly as they appear? And where the disappearance of surprise and mystery may make life too predictable and too controllable and just the least bit less worth living?
