Several years ago, I found this article, “Look Who’s Talking”, on WIRED, by the web visionary, Howard Rheingold. Recently I revisited the article and I still think it makes for fascinating reading. What strikes me most about the article is that here is a web visionary, perhaps the first man to coin the term “web communities”, talking about a group of people who are often seen to be modern-day Luddites (which they are not). Rheingold is fascinated with how the Amish leaders’ approach to deciding what technology is to be used by the community.

What Rheingold discovered then was that the Amish were not anti-technology but they were very mindful of the impact of technology on their community especially with regards to their “togetherness”. According to Rheingold, the primary question that the Amish leaders ask when discussing the use of a new technology in the Amish communities is “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?” To the Amish community, nothing must damage this principle. So in the Amish communities you see brand new state-of-the-art gas-fired barbecue pits but no cars or internet. Barbecue pits goes down well with the Amish because it encourages family and community togetherness while cars will lead members further away.

When Rheingold started to find out about the Amish use of technology he had a few questions in mind. He wanted to know:

What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance (of new technology), as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?

I think the questions above are valid for most modern societies, like Singapore too, that have been enthralled by science. Rheingold’s questions has me taking another look at how Singapore has been approaching the issue of ICT use for education. I would be the first to admit that I am an unabash proponent of the use of ICT for education. Of course, Rheingold’s questions goes beyond schools only. But after reading about the new ICT initiative, FutureSchool@Singapore, by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore, about using new technologies to help students learn, I wonder often if we are moving “ahead” without deep thought about how these technologies are going to affect us, more specifically, the students in Singapore schools. Technology is often “unleashed” upon us. We are expected to be technology-conversant but we seldom seriously conduct conversations about our use of technologies. As Rheingold puts it:

I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed “English” (the Amish description of the non-Amish American world) don’t have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we’ll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It’s time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.

I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

Today, we just hurry to get enmeshed. Are we behaving Borg-like and just assimilate everything that we come across? Are we also in too much in a hurry with adopting technologies for education without considering their real impact? What do we become if we continue with this Borg-like behavior?

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