ETech 2007: Silicon Valley (Re)Discovers the Humanities
Created by Kaylea Hascall (University of Chicago) on March 29, 2007
I just finished up a week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, CA. I came here hoping for a repeat of the rewards of ETech 2006 -- access to the pulse of the emerging tech sector, a six- to nine-month head start thinking about and planning for the technologies that will start to break into widespread public consciousness, an opportunity to talk to people who think deeply about innovation and the future, a refreshment of my own energy for the creation of the better. On these fronts, ETech 2007 delivered -- I'm going back to campus with a number of new technologies in hand, and I'm ready to engage and create and work to shape the emerging world.
Certainly I'm coming home with some practical, look-at-this-soon ideas -- Yahoo pipes as a framework for mashups, Amazon's EC2 hosting model startup projects, a desktop version of Zimbra that can act as an IMAP client, and Adobe's Apollo platform for offline html/flash applications. Further out on the edge of emerging technology, we listened to Peter Biddle and Cory Doctorow debate the future role of Trusted Computing, Melanie Rieback on the future of RFIDs, Andy Kessler on the future of medicine, and perhaps the most viscerally provocative topic, Quinn Norton on "body hacking" -- body enhancing technology.
But the primary theme that I extracted from all the talks and keynotes and presentations was this: Silicon Valley has (re)discovered the relevance of the humanities to everything they do.
I saw more references to books than to websites, more attempts to contextualize a topic through history and psychology and sociology and cognitive neuroscience than boosterism, more discussion of what might be and what should be than what is and what must be. I listened to tremendously intellectual, often academic presentations from danah boyd, Scott Berkun, Matt Webb, Adam Greenfield, Jane McGonigal, Jeff Hawkins, all of them engaging with technology as a social-intellectual construct: technology is directly colliding with humanity and society -- tech is so much more than code and gadgets!
This re-awakened understanding of technology presents higher education with an incredible opportunity. We have the chance to meet the boundless creative energy of Silicon Valley with our own unbounded analytical energy to create intensive intellectual discourse. The contexts are new, but the dialogues are classically old -- the role of the individual and the group, the source of authority and ownership, the way that human bonds are formed, the nature of intelligence and knowledge, the development of ethics, and the battle against boredom and suffering and isolation and powerlessness and disease.
Who are we and where are we going? Can either world, Valley or Academy, hope to answer this question alone? Like high-octane gasoline supplied to a beautifully engineered engine, we have the opportunity to run far and fast and hot, intermingling two worlds of intoxicated engagement, devoted together to discovery and delight.
Certainly I'm coming home with some practical, look-at-this-soon ideas -- Yahoo pipes as a framework for mashups, Amazon's EC2 hosting model startup projects, a desktop version of Zimbra that can act as an IMAP client, and Adobe's Apollo platform for offline html/flash applications. Further out on the edge of emerging technology, we listened to Peter Biddle and Cory Doctorow debate the future role of Trusted Computing, Melanie Rieback on the future of RFIDs, Andy Kessler on the future of medicine, and perhaps the most viscerally provocative topic, Quinn Norton on "body hacking" -- body enhancing technology.
But the primary theme that I extracted from all the talks and keynotes and presentations was this: Silicon Valley has (re)discovered the relevance of the humanities to everything they do.
I saw more references to books than to websites, more attempts to contextualize a topic through history and psychology and sociology and cognitive neuroscience than boosterism, more discussion of what might be and what should be than what is and what must be. I listened to tremendously intellectual, often academic presentations from danah boyd, Scott Berkun, Matt Webb, Adam Greenfield, Jane McGonigal, Jeff Hawkins, all of them engaging with technology as a social-intellectual construct: technology is directly colliding with humanity and society -- tech is so much more than code and gadgets!
This re-awakened understanding of technology presents higher education with an incredible opportunity. We have the chance to meet the boundless creative energy of Silicon Valley with our own unbounded analytical energy to create intensive intellectual discourse. The contexts are new, but the dialogues are classically old -- the role of the individual and the group, the source of authority and ownership, the way that human bonds are formed, the nature of intelligence and knowledge, the development of ethics, and the battle against boredom and suffering and isolation and powerlessness and disease.
Who are we and where are we going? Can either world, Valley or Academy, hope to answer this question alone? Like high-octane gasoline supplied to a beautifully engineered engine, we have the opportunity to run far and fast and hot, intermingling two worlds of intoxicated engagement, devoted together to discovery and delight.
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Not only was the continued emergence of the arts and humanities interesting, but also the constant focus on pleasure, play, happiness and fun. As the educational process moves partially into spaces beyond the confines of the classroom and the teaching dynamic changes to suit, I think we have no choice but to think about these attributes, which are often dismissed as irrelevant to learning. The information pool grows ever larger, the social connections ever deeper-- it can't all be in one's head, so it has to be about communities and lifelong learning-- and who will do that if it isn't fun and/or pleasurable and lending to their feelings of happiness?It was great to see so many (meaning at least 10 or so) people from higher ed at etech this time around. Might be enough for a good BOF next time :)