Geek Heresy (7 page)

These traits seemed correlated: More literate people were more adept with computer interfaces, even when the interfaces contained no text. To investigate further, we ran a study in which participants were first given tests of literacy and abstract reasoning and then asked to perform a simple task on a computer.
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The task was to navigate a menu interface, which we knew would be a challenge. The respondents were asked to find specific household items among cartoon graphics organized in one of two ways. In the first, the objects were laid out so as to be visible all at once, but in a random order. In the second, they were organized as a series of nested items, similar to files put into folders on a computer. In the nested interface, bangles, for example, could be found first by clicking a graphic indicating things you wear (versus things you use), and then jewelry (versus clothing), and then hands (versus face or feet).

The research validated our hunches. First, the degree of literacy correlated with the measure of abstract reasoning capacity. Second, all of the participants were quicker to find items in the single unorganized list than in the nested hierarchies. And third, on both navigation tasks – flat list and nested hierarchies – those who scored higher on the tests of literacy and reasoning outperformed their lower-scoring peers.

So whatever level of intelligence and education a person already had correlated with their facility with simple computer tasks. People with greater education and cognitive capacity were better able to use the technology. It would be careless to generalize too much from this one finding, but over the years, I saw many similar results. In a related study, supplying textual hints along with audio and graphics helped the literate more than the semiliterate and the semiliterate more than the nonliterate. Another group examined mobile phones and Indian women micro-entrepreneurs. The researchers found that the most ambitious and self-confident women benefited most from mobile phones. And a study of Tanzanian health-care workers showed that their visits
to patients increased with text-message reminders, but only if they were also overseen by human supervisors.
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In other words, what people get out of technology depends on what they can do and want to do even without technology. In retrospect this seems self-evident, but it wasn’t a major theme in technology and society literature.
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The Eureka Moment

So theories of social determinism say that technology is put to use according to underlying human intentions. At the same time, the degree to which technology makes an impact depends on existing human capacities. Put these ideas together and
technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces
.
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Like a lever, technology amplifies people’s capacities in the direction of their intentions. A computer allows its user to perform desired knowledge tasks in a way that is faster, easier, or more powerful than the user could without technology. But how much faster, more easily, and more powerfully is in some proportion to the user’s capacity. A mobile phone allows people to perform desired communication tasks across greater distances, with more people, and at greater frequency than would be possible without one. But whom one can communicate with and what one can expect of them depends on one’s existing social capacity.

The idea is so simple and so widely applicable that I have come to think of it as technology’s Law of Amplification. It was at work among the girls in Nakkalbande. Most had little conscious intention to learn or improve knowledge skills, and social forces such as the expectation to marry early impeded their interest. As a result, there was little productive force for the technology to amplify. But the two older girls who recognized the value of education had some inner flame fanned by the laptop. I could imagine that, with luck and persistence, they might have a chance at a different life.

Amplification also resolved some of the apparent paradoxes of my research. Why did MultiPoint, for example, work in our pilots, but not when we took it to other schools? It was because our positive results
relied on special conditions that we had imposed. For our trials, we had deliberately chosen partner schools with capable teachers and principals. As a result, the students were focused on learning. They followed instructions without too much distraction. Another critical factor was our own presence as researchers. We set up the technology ourselves. And where we found teaching capacity wanting, we filled in. In other words, we had lined up all of the social conditions favorably so that the technology had a chance to work. And on that firm base, MultiPoint increased the number of students learning from computers.

But, for expansion, we targeted subpar schools. They needed the most help, after all. We also reduced our personal involvement, since the schools would eventually have to operate without us. In the absence of good teaching and IT support, however, the technology didn’t do much.

In the worst cases, technology was detrimental. More times than I’d like to admit, I’d visit a class involved in one of our projects, and something would go wrong with the technology. With no IT staff, the teacher would fumble to figure things out. The children would grow distracted. Sometimes I’d jump in to help. By the time the power was back on, the PCs rebooted, and the children once more settled into their seats, half of a fifty-minute class period was lost. It would have been better if they had stuck to pencil and paper.

In these cases, we see vividly that technologies don’t have fixed additive effects. They magnify existing social forces, which themselves can be good, bad, or neutral. Thus, technological utopians and skeptics are both partially right and partially wrong. Of course, this means it’s the contextualists and the social determinists who are closest to the truth. But the Law of Amplification says something more specific and therefore more useful.

For example, amplification offers clues as to why large-scale studies of educational technology rarely show positive results. In any representative set of schools, some are doing well and others poorly. Introducing computers may result in benefit for some, but it distracts the weaker schools from their core mission. On average, the outcome is a wash.
An even bigger problem is that administrators rarely allocate enough resources to adapt curricula or train teachers.
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Where teachers don’t know how to incorporate digital tools appropriately, there is little capacity for the technology to amplify.

If a private company is failing to make a profit, no one expects that state-of-the-art data centers, better productivity software, and new laptops for all of the employees will turn things around. Yet, that is exactly the logic of so many attempts to fix schools with technology.

And what about computers outside of school? What happens when children are left to learn on their own with digital gadgets, as so many tech evangelists insist we should do? Here technology amplifies the children’s propensities. To be sure, children have a natural desire to learn and play and grow. But they also have a natural desire to distract themselves in less productive ways. Digital technology amplifies both of these appetites. The balance between them differs from child to child, but on the whole, distraction seems to win out when there’s no adult guidance. This is exactly what Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson’s 2013 study of laptops in the home shows: If you provide an all-purpose technology that can be used for learning and entertainment, children choose entertainment.
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Technology by itself doesn’t undo that inclination – it amplifies it.

Amplifying Power

Back in Bangalore, I once hosted a political science professor, whom I’ll call Padma. She was interested in technology and governance. Padma was in the city to study a program that made the municipal government’s finances transparent to the public. A nonprofit group had convinced the government to set up a tool that let anyone with Internet access see how city money was spent. Citizens were able to see, for example, that 5,000 rupees (~$100) was spent repairing a pothole (expensive, but not unreasonable) or that 500,000 rupees ($10,000) was spent cutting down a tree (not likely; a sign of kickbacks). The nonprofit would complain to the government about egregious spending it
discovered. Sometimes it organized citizen protests. Padma had a hypothesis that technology promoted transparency and accountability, and here was a system that seemed to prove it.

When I asked her how the project turned out, though, she said the government had shut it down within a few months. Officials didn’t want their graft schemes open to public inspection.

If a computer system for government transparency was taken down by the very bureaucrats it was meant to monitor, then what accountability did the technology really bring? The project showed exactly the opposite of Padma’s claim. Instead of technology trumping politics, politics trumped technology. At first the technology amplified the nonprofit’s activism, but the organization’s power to affect government was overcome by the crooked bureaucracy’s greater power to turn off the technology.

Looking back at experiences like this, I saw that the Law of Amplification explained much more than just the fate of technology in education. It applies to a host of other situations. In 2011, earthshaking world events provided a unique testing ground.

Facebook Devolution

In what is now a well-worn story, Wael Ghonim, a thirty-year-old Google executive, used Facebook to help organize the protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Today, it’s hard to speak of the Arab Spring without calling to mind the phrase “Facebook revolution.”

In early 2011, Facebook had roughly 600 million users. Almost 10 percent of the world population was on it.
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Speculations about its initial public offering swirled, and
The Social Network
, a movie telling one version of its origins, was in theaters. With this buzz ringing in their ears, journalists and bloggers were agog over Facebook’s role in Egypt. A day before the January 25 protests,
Time
asked, “Is Egypt about to have a Facebook Revolution?” It cited the 85,000 people who had pledged on Facebook that they would march.
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Days after the first protest in Tahrir Square, Roger Cohen wrote in the
New York Times
, “The Facebook-armed youth of Tunisia and Egypt rise to demonstrate the
liberating power of social media.”
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One Egyptian newspaper reported that a man named his firstborn daughter Facebook.
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On February 11, 2011 – the day the regime folded – Ghonim told a CNN interviewer, “I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him. . . . This revolution started on Facebook . . . in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.”
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If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet
. This is a classic statement of technological utopianism. As in
Star Trek
, where technology eradicates hunger, Ghonim is saying that the Internet eradicates autocracy. Coming from someone directly involved in the revolution, it seems impolite to refute. But just as with the hype around technology for education, the case for social media as an important cause of democratic change vanishes under critical inspection.

First, let’s accept that in Egypt, and earlier in Tunisia, social media contributed to the overthrow of dictators. We’ll come back to exactly what that contribution was, but there’s no doubt that YouTube videos and Facebook posts played a part.

But in other Middle Eastern countries, events unfolded differently. Consider Libya, for example. On February 18, 2011, just days after the rebellion started, Muammar Gaddafi dimmed communication networks in his country.
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Maybe he had heard about the Facebook revolution next door and didn’t want one in his own country. He disabled most of the Internet in Libya and did the same for phone services, mobile and landline.
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The rebels, though, managed to coordinate nevertheless. Far from ceasing their activities, they kept fighting. Soon after, they overwhelmed Gaddafi’s forces, tracked him down, and executed him in the streets.

In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad took a cue from Gaddafi. When protests began, he shut down the Internet nationwide and selectively disabled phone networks to hinder rebel communications.
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Protests, though, continued, leading to an all-out civil war, with the
rebels showing no signs of quitting even four years later. Media portrayal of Syria has long since stopped mentioning Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

Meanwhile, in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, something very different happened. A few public protests were quashed in Bahrain, and the Western press hardly noticed the feeble activism in Saudi Arabia. Importantly, it wasn’t for a lack of social media organization. Encouraged by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, a spate of petitions and videos circulated in Saudi Arabia via Facebook and Twitter. They called for an end to absolute monarchy. But these online actions were squelched by offline forces, as reported by Madawi Al-Rasheed, a specialist in Islamist movements and Middle Eastern civil society.
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One young activist, Muhammad al-Wadani, uploaded a YouTube video urging democracy. He was promptly arrested. Two online petitions demanding constitutional monarchy received thousands of signatures. They were ignored. A group calling itself the National Coalition and Free Youth Movement attempted to organize online. It ended up in a game of virtual Whac-A-Mole as regime security took down its websites one after the other. Protests planned on social media led nowhere.