Global Education and Local Communities

Global Education and Local Communities

Let me begin with a summary of what I am going to say. Cyberspace is a new kind of reality, in some crucial respects less real, but in some respects more real, than the space of face-to-face encounters and of physical documents. Signs in cyberspace might be quite unconnected to any real-life states of affairs, they might be quite abstract, but often they are much less abstract than, say, signs in a printed book. As I will endeavour to show, communication in the world of printed books is, characteristically, the communication of abstract meanings among members of an abstract society, such as a modern nation. The communication of knowledge in an interactive audiovisual medium is less dependent on an extended process of education in some national - i.e. literary - language than was the communication of abstract, typographical knowledge in earlier ages. Successful navigation in cyberspace does however presuppose some specific training leading to appropriate combinations of technical skills and literary skills, the latter normally encompassing both a rudimentary English and one's mother tongue. Working out how in fact such a combination of skills can be taught and acquired, and exploring the ways in which local communities can form a suitable learning environment, are the goals of an ongoing research program in Hungary; I conclude by sketching some essentials of this program.

The Ontology of Cyberspace

In some crucial respects cyberspace is, obviously, less real than the space of face-to-face connections. One should recall here Gérard Raulet's profound study "The New Utopia", written in the 1980s, pointing to the spurious idea of "supplanting places by spaces", and to the gap separating symbolic "interactivity" from actual social interaction.[1] And one should recall the essentially consistent findings of an impressive array of empirical investigations showing that telecommunications, however dense and multidimensional the networks, do not have the effectiveness, let alone the emotional impact, of face-to-face encounters. Until the late seventies, such investigations focused, understandably, on the effects of the telephone. What they found was that although telephone contacts did of course make a difference when no other contacts were available, [2] the former, as contrasted with face-to-face contacts, had no great propensity to create new linkages. Telephone contacts are effective if they can rely on background information from earlier personal meetings, and if they are regularly reinforced by such.[3]

The same pattern still holds when e-mail and teleconferencing enter.