Why ICT will Destroy the Building and Teacher Monopoly
Automation: The Ratchet and the Rest
No amount of wry humour about the failure of the paperless office can hide the decrease in the number of jobs requiring modest or basic skills. Not all of this is rational of course; the sight of a CEO commanding a 6-figure annual salary typing his own emails with two fingers makes a nonsense of the division of labour. On the other hand, the replacement of ponderous, decorous, individually wrought letters with crisp and immediate responses and templated terms and conditions is a great advance. Overall, we know from our experience with banks and travel that machines are now doing jobs which people with basic skills did until quite recently. The growth of 'intelligent' computing based on much more sophisticated algorithms, reacting to user behaviour, will take the process further. We are facing a skills ratchet which demands ever more of the able but which also leaves a rump of low or unskilled people for whom there are no longer appropriate jobs.
Our education, as a precursor to life and, within it, work, will have to concentrate on two major areas, namely, media literacy and content handling.
The central principle for life and, within it, vocational education, which we must now put at the centre of our thinking is this:
Human beings must concentrate on those areas where their performance is likely to continue to be superior to machine processing.
The key tasks here are information evaluation, conflation and creation.
3.1 Evaluation: Media Literacy.
Content evaluation, or media literacy, involves:
assigning weight, significance, reliability, intent and outcome to information both in its self referential aspect and in the way in which it relates to other content and to individual and social experience.
Rather than write the essay, let me give you some very quick examples of good media literacy questions:
- How do you view docusoaps, reality television and other hybrid information forms?
- How do you distinguish direct statement and irony in Shostakovich
- What is the difference between a digital camera and a painter's rendition of a landscape?
- Is packaging a reliable guide to content reliability and brand values?
- Is rap music social comment or cheap profiteering?
- What is art and what is it for?
Listening to culture historians you would think that Orson Wells' War of the Worlds was a very special media event in generating social panic. Of course this is not so. From Nostrodamus to the Daily Mail's murderous MMR campaign, the distortion and misreading of information have caused social panic. In the digital world of merging formats and virtual packaging, knowing what you are consuming will become ever more important; you are not what you eat, you are what you see and, to a lesser extent, hear.
3.2 Information Handling. In addition to media literacy, content workers require skills in conflation and creation. Conflation is simplest described as the process whereby the whole is more than the sum of the parts. It usually involves taxonomy and structure at least implicitly to demonstrate the connectivity of the pieces that have been forged together in a new way and it can vary on a spectrum of integration from Meccano like processes to genuine chemical transition, though its most familiar manifestation in modernism is the alloy where two or more still identifiably distinctive phenomena are forged into a physical whole; early examples of this would be the neo-classical music of Stravinsky and the poetry of Ezra Pound but in what we now call the post modern world this technique is commonplace. In fact much of what we think of as genuinely creative and novel fits into this class of craftsmanship. It is difficult to know where alloying and rendering, in both its physical and intellectual meanings, become genuinely creative; but we all recognise the phenomena of the paradigm shift, the filling of a void we did not know existed and the extension so radical that we enter new territory; one thinks of Monteverdi and Schoenberg, Shakespeare and Becket, Giotto and Picasso, Fielding and Joyce. Of course most of us are not cut out for such genius even though we still glorify the twin icons of autonomous achievement, the examination hall and the novel. There isn't time to go into the subject in detail at this point I believe that our new icons should be the team exercise and the feature film. There is only time to say this; if collaboration in content creation by people with narrow skills bases, through the use of the internet, cannot be realised then we will face a devastating employment crisis for people with skills which, exercised autonomously, are not productive in this new environment.