Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability - Hardcover
Synopsis
Do computers foster cultural diversity? Ecological sustainability? In our age of high-tech euphoria we seem content to leave tough questions like these to the experts. That dangerous inclination is at the heart of this important examination of the commercial and educational trends that have left us so uncritically optimistic about global computing.
Contrary to the attitudes that have been marketed and taught to us, says C. A. Bowers, the fact is that computers operate on a set of Western cultural assumptions and a market economy that drives consumption. Our indoctrination includes the view of global computing innovations as inevitable and on a par with social progress--a perspective dismayingly suggestive of the mindset that engendered the vast cultural and ecological disruptions of the industrial revolution and world colonialism.
In Let Them Eat Data Bowers discusses important issues that have fallen into the gap between our perceptions and the realities of global computing, including the misuse of the theory of evolution to justify and legitimate the global spread of computers, and the ecological and cultural implications of unmooring knowledge from its local contexts as it is digitized, commodified, and packaged for global consumption. He also suggests ways that educators can help us think more critically about technology.
Let Them Eat Data is essential reading if we are to begin democratizing technological decisions, conserving true cultural diversity and intergenerational forms of knowledge, and living within the limits and possibilities of the earth’s natural systems.
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About the Author
C. A. Bowers has served on the faculty of the University of Oregon and Portland State University. He is the author of several books that examine the connections between education, culture, and the environmental crisis, including Let Them Eat Data, Educating for Eco-Jutice and Community, (both Georgia), Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable Culture, and The Culture of Denial.
Reviews
Not so fast, says Bowers, who believes that the media's infatuation with computers has blinded us to their negative effect on world cultures and the environment. An educator and author of The Culture of Denial (1997), Bowers asks readers to tune out the hype and focus on the motivations behind and consequences of the spread of computer technology, which he equates with nineteenth-century colonialism. Computers are a product of the Industrial Revolution's mindset, the belief that defines "humans as the dominant species and Nature as an economic resource." This distorted perspective, coupled with the push to computerize every aspect of life, has led to environmental degradation, cultural homogenization, and economic inequities that are now giving globalization a bad name. To compound the problem, our educational system does little to challenge assumptions that value the marketplace and technology more than communities and ecological well-being. Academic in tone but humanistic in content, Bowers' probing and nuanced critique provides a much-needed catalyst for serious debate about the state of the planet now and in the near future. Donna Seaman
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Let Them Eat Data
Published by
University of Georgia Press, 2000
ISBN 10: 0820322296
ISBN 13: 9780820322292
Used
Hardcover
Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.
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Condition: Good. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # GRP70010270