On the Internet

Hubert Dreyfus is a professor of philosophy at the University of California. He puts video versions of his courses onto a Web site, and uses the full resources of the Net for distance learning. Yet this short book is essentially a techno-sceptic case against the Internet. How can that be?

He dresses up his arguments with references to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Habermas - but basically, he has three objections to the Internet. The first is about links between documents. He believes that because one item can be linked to any other, with no quality assurance guarantee, this leads to a downgrading of cultural values. It doesn't seem to occur to him that items of non-Net communication have links - such as quotations, references, and footnotes in printed books.



And he doesn't realise that part of the educational process is to learn how to assess their value. His second objection is that using the Net removes the aura of personal presence from communication. His examples are drawn from the realm of distance learning - where this is certainly true. But most educationalists see Web-based learning as a useful supplement to face-to-face classes - not a substitute for it. His use of the mass lecture to illustrate the value of 'aura' is quite unconvincing. And he ignores the many cases where Web-based learning might be the only alternative to no learning at all - to say nothing of its convenience value.

The third main objection is a notion that the Web gives people too much information - that they need this information to be sifted and categorised for them. He seems unaware that some of the main information portals he criticises are already doing this. But what would be the difference for anyone walking into a very big library for the first time? The truth is that we have to learn to find our way around; we learn to assess our sources; and we learn to discriminate.

Dreyfus may well wish to preserve the element of personal, physical presence in the teaching process - and it may well be a valuable element in most education. But on the Internet he makes some wrong assumptions, asks the wrong questions, and comes up with warnings to which we already know the answers.