“No Country for E-Lit?” – India and Electronic Literature
Souvik Mukherjee · Hyperrhiz New Media Cultures · 2017
Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies sets out to ratchet our engagement with the contemporary moment a notch higher, in directions that are sober, exhilarating and discomfiting, all at once.Technology, which figures as an important strand in both previous Readers -Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain and Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life -has here taken centre-stage as a multi-faceted constellation of ideas, images, reflections, debates, histories and provocations.The first Reader held an encounter with the discourse around free software with which we viewed the possibility of the formation of a new public domain, and the second raised issues such as biotechnology, surveillance, and the politics of information technology.This third volume in the series presents a drawing together of many threads that echo and carry forward earlier themes and discussions to offer an array of considerations that locate themselves squarely within the present, while facing the future, and with an eye towards history.This collection seeks to bring to the fore a series of situations and predicaments that mark the encounter between people and machines, between nature and culture, and between knowledge and power.These encounters, to our thinking, embody the taking on of a particular stance towards the contemporary moment, which, notwithstanding contradictions and beset by metastasizing, proliferating, accelerating energies that pull in different directions, even while marked in equal measure by confidence and scepticism, nevertheless represents a qualified assertion of commitment to living and working in the world today, as active, transforming agents, creating new truths and meanings through praxis.This results in a wealth of questions and issues, that span a wide range -from the 1.It is in this context that the Court also made its famous observation that "if there is a short supply of an essential commodity, then the priority must be of public health, as opposed to the health of the balance sheet of a private company.To enable industries to cut their losses, or to make more profit at the cost of public health, is not a sign of good governance, and this is contrary to the constitutional mandate".for the benefit of mankind".1 Going by this definition, the term engineer must equally apply to practitioners of 'old' technologies --the farmers, carpenters, architects and plumbers -as it does to geneticists and computer programmers. The Gap between Importance and PerceptionOblique evidence of the supreme importance of engineers in recent times is available from the Soviet Union.Almost the entire generation of Soviet leaders that followed Stalin were engineers --including Kruschev, Kosygin, Brezhnev and Yeltsin.The probable reason for this was that while Stalin had little hesitation in wiping out everyone else, he must have appreciated that there was no way he could beat the Nazis, or compete with the West, without engineers.When he died these were the only people left in any sort of leadership positions.A Martian reading of this might imagine that engineers are the stars of a civilisation that is totally dependent on technology.Yet nothing would be further from the truth!Like the craftsmen who created medieval architectural and other masterpieces, most engineers remain anonymous, even the brilliantly successful ones.How many people could identify the inventors of the digital computer (John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert), a device whose importance in modern life is second to none?Alfred Nobel was himself an engineer par excellence.His invention, dynamite, is still widely in use in mining and construction.2 That even he did not see fit to institute a Nobel Prize for engineering is typical of the modesty of the profession.Perhaps the best example of society's lack of attention to engineers, however, is the case of Claude Shannon whom few outside the profession have even heard of.This genius discovered that Boolean algebra, an area of mathematics thought to have no practical use, was perfectly suited to the design of digital circuits.H. H. Goldstine, in his book The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, called this work "a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science".In 1981 Professor Irving Reed, speaking at the International Symposium on Information Theory in Brighton, England, said: "It was thirty-four years ago, in 1948, that Professor Claude E. Shannon first published his uniquely original paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", in the Bell System Technical Journal.Few other works of this century have had greater impact on science and engineering.By this landmark paper and his several subsequent papers on information theory he has altered most profoundly all aspects of communication theory and practice".This paper has justifiably been called "the Magna Carta of the information age".Shannon's work on information theory has also had significant impact on fields outside of communications --including linguistics, psychology, economics, biology, even the arts.Robert W. Lucky, executive director of research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, called his work the greatest "in the annals of technological thought", while IBM Fellow Rolf W. Landauer equated his "pioneering insight" with Einstein's.Claude Shannon died as recently as February 24, 2001, but the Internet, inconceivable in the absence of his insights, barely noticed.3 If people pay no regard to those who make technology, nor make any effort to understand them, they will find it hard to appreciate the logic of the direction it takes -for the inventor and the invention resemble each other.If the products of technology often seem lacklustre and unimaginative, maybe this is a reflection of a similar lacunae in most engi-Leverages / 23 neers.We can also take the analysis one level upstream.To understand why engineers turn out the way they do, one must look closer at how they, in turn, are made through life in an engineering college. The Deficient Education of EngineersThe manner in which engineering is taught is incredibly authoritarian and dull.The reason for this is not hard to find.As pointed out by Peter Senge and others, our modern education system was born during the Industrial Revolution, which faced a severe shortage of trained personnel.At the time, industrialists made a fortune by taking manufacturing out of the community and locating it in a new kind of space called a factory.Faced with a shortage of people skilled in manning these factories, the owners applied their tried and tested formula once again: they took education out of the community and made it the responsibility of a new kind of factory called a school.Indeed, our schools are organised along the same principles as assembly lines: students are like parts moving in lockstep from one class to the next, while teachers are like machines that impart education, within a highly authoritarian system.If a student cannot successfully pass the requisite tests, he is thrown out, not unlike a part that has failed quality control.According to Senge, "while the assembly line school system dramatically increased educational output, it also created many of the most intractable problems with which students, teachers and parents struggle to this day.It operationally defined smart kids and dumb kids.Those who did not learn at the speed of the assembly line either fell off or were forced to struggle continually to keep pace; they were labelled 'slow' or, in today's more fashionable jargon, 'learning disabled'.It established uniformity of product and process as norms and thereby naïvely assumed that all children learn in the same way.It made educators into controllers and inspectors, thereby transforming the traditional mentor-mentee relationship and establishing teacher-centred rather than learner-centred learning...The assembly line education system is now under stress.Its products are no longer judged adequate by society.Its productivity is questioned.And it is responding in the only way it knows how: by doing what it has always done but harder".4 Is it any wonder that a system which discards human beings as scrap produces so many terrorists and criminals?Those who survive it are almost brainwashed into believing that having an opinion about anything outside of their narrow areas of technical competence is inadvisable.The syllabus pounded into them is needlessly voluminous and difficult, of which a practicing engineer only actually ever uses a tiny fraction.Teachers typically have almost no industrial experience, nor do students have any regular interaction with industry.Could anyone imagine a medical school without an attached hospital, where the teachers have almost never seen a patient?It hardly comes as a surprise, therefore, that this profession attracts few women.Even among the men there is a very high proportion of, to say the least, poor communicators.Yet, these poorly equipped and trained people are the ones entrusted with running critical industrial establishments, and can be held partially responsible for such disasters as the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal and the nuclear reactors in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.