docChicago Interview with Ernest Adams
Ernest Adams is a true phenomenon, a video game designer and technology philosopher whose thoughtfulness and ability to articulate his ideas make him a great commentator on technology. You may know him from his appearance in David Bolt's Digital Divide TV series. Adams may be a video game designer, but his perspecitves on computing and his arguments regarding the digital divide are invaluable.
Please introduce yourself...
I'm a computer game designer, and a commentator on games and the game industry. I've been in the business for about eleven years. I've worked on games for all kinds of machines and until recently I was the audio/video producer for Madden NFL Football, a very successful product. I make computer games because I believe they have enormous potential, of which we've only begun to scratch the surface. Games can delight and enthrall; but they
can also educate, inspire, and deeply move people. I enjoy working in a medium that has that kind of expressive power.
What do you see as the issues of the digital divide: Who is being left out of the Internet revolution and why?
Well, obviously, most of the Third World for starters. However, for many of them there are higher priorities: clean water, a stable food supply, decent medical care. The Internet could help get badly-needed information to these people, but
information alone is not enough to solve their problems.
In America I see the real sufferers of the digital divide as those people who have little or no contact with computers. We in the white-collar world are so used to computers that we seldom think about the fact that many people never see one all day long: itinerant farm workers, for example, or garment industry workers. Having no access to computers at work, and no direct incentive to learn about them, these people are left behind
by the Internet revolution.
What forces created the digital divide?
The computer, for all its apparent ubiquity, is still fundamentally an office machine. It's an expensive device which requires a great deal of experience to be comfortable with -- vastly more complicated to operate than a car, for example. Until the Internet "went public," so to speak, most people had very little reason to own or work with computers at home. Gradually, as the machines began
to come home from the office, people found personal uses for them. And the Internet has increased the utility of the home computer a hundred-, a thousand-fold. But of course, those people are white-collar workers who have seen the value of computers at work. If you're not a white-collar worker, you don't get that opportunity.
So the digital divide was not created by a force, exactly. It's a gap caused by the nature of the delivery medium -- the personal computer itself.
Computers are expensive and they're difficult to use without training. Many poorer people have neither the money to buy them nor the opportunity to learn about them.
What forces will close it?
If we're thinking of the digital divide specifically as a problem of access to the Internet, then the fastest way to close it is to make the Internet available without computers. This is starting to happen, as cable television and satellite TV providers make the Internet
available through the remote control. The $500 "Network Computer" discussed a few years ago would also have been a step in the right direction. The learning curve won't be nearly so steep, and the financial barrier to entry so high, once we have simple devices that offer access to the Internet without having 101 keys and a $2000 price tag.
However, access to the Internet itself is not the only problem. In order to offer all our citizens access to good jobs, we need to
teach them to use computers, and to be familiar and comfortable with them -- not just the Internet, but personal computers themselves. When I was a kid, every high school in America taught typing, although it was an elective course taught as part of the "business" curriculum -- college-bound kids often didn't take it, believe it or not, because they knew they weren't going straight into business. And every high school taught driver's education, as well. Why? Because
although neither driving nor typing are academic subjects, they are skills that people need to get along in life, and it's the role of a high school to teach those skills. In Britain, driver's education is not offered by the public school system -- but they have much better mass transit than we do in America too, so it's not so vital.
To close the digital divide, WE MUST TEACH COMPUTER LITERACY, not as an elective, but as a required course -- and not just a one-semester
course in high school, either. We need to get kids used to computers and comfortable with them from grade school on. I don't mean programming, although programming should certainly be offered; I mean general familiarization. Everyone should know what a hierarchical file system is, how to install and remove applications, how to maintain their machine.
What role(s) does gaming play to lower barriers to entry to computing?
In addition to economic barriers, there are
attitudinal ones as well. Many people see computers as scary, complicated, or simply "not for us." Gaming can't help with the economic barriers, but it can help with psychological ones.
One of the things that it's hardest for people to grasp, especially adults, is just how stupid computers really are. They seem to be smart; they help solve difficult problems and new triumphs performed by computers are constantly in the news. As a result many people who are unfamiliar
with them expect computers to act as intelligently as a human does. You can see this clearly watching some elderly people using an ATM. All their lives, they have simply asked a teller to give them a certain amount of money, and they have gotten the money. Now they are confronted with a machine with a dozen or more buttons, and a variety of tedious steps to take: inserting the card the right way up, entering a password, choosing an account to withdraw from, and so on. And at the end they
still can't get the amount they want; for some reason it has to be a multiple of $20. A human teller could have given them exactly what they asked for in half the time with one-tenth of the fuss.
Using stupid machinery, especially machines that require that things be done in a long series of steps, requires experience and familiarity with their rigid ways of doing things. It's like the difference between driving a car and driving a train. With a car, you can go anywhere you
want to. With a train, you have to go where the rails take you, and you can only change course at certain points.
Children have much less trouble adapting to this, first because they don't assume everything they interact with should be intelligent, and second because they're always looking out for rules that tell them how the world works. Computers may be stupid, but they are extremely predictable, and children like that and find it easy to work with.
Computer games give
people a chance to use a computer within a comparatively friendly environment. A word processing program, for example, just sits there offering dozens of buttons and menu items but no indication of what they're for or when to use them. A game usually provides much more guidance about what to do. And people don't mind that games have rigid rules; that's a familiar concept from board games, card games and so on. In short, computer games offer a way to learn about the inflexible,
unintelligent way that computers work in a non-threatening context.
What role(s) does gaming play as an educational tool?
Games can reinforce knowledge delivered by a teacher through quizzes and exercises, but that's actually the least of their uses. Where they're really valuable is in delivering an experience that demonstrates a concept which would be difficult or expensive to demonstrate in the real world. Sim City is an excellent example. Although Sim City has
its weaknesses, it immediately brings home to children the difficulty of maintaining a balanced budget in the face of constantly-changing circumstances. This would be awkward to do in the classroom, but it's trivial on the computer. The possibilities go on and on. What better way to learn the principles of flight than with a flight simulator?
What gives you the most hope for the positive uses of technology?
Despite crime statistics and grim news on the TV every night,
most people have a desire to do good -- the problem is that charitable work is time-consuming and all too often thankless. The power of the Internet has enabled small charitable projects to have enormous consequences. The best example I can think of is The Hunger Site (www.thehungersite.com). On this site, visitors click a button to donate food, competely free of cost to themselves, to needy people. The Hunger Site was set up by a single individual, and its concept is breathtakingly simple --
yet it donates thousands of pounds of food EVERY DAY to the United Nations World Food Programme.
For every bad thing you hear about the Internet -- scams, pornography and so on -- there are hundreds of great things that go unreported: web sites that offer medical information free of charge, for example, or help locating missing children.
The other great thing about the Internet is that it cannot be used as a mechanism of political repression -- just the opposite, in fact. Its
chaotic nature makes it impossible to police, which occasionally has unfortunate consequences, but it encourages free expression. In many countries, television and radio are used by the government as propaganda tools, because the state controls the content. The Internet can't be used that way - since anyone can put anything on the web, propaganda can be rapidly countered by an opposing viewpoint.
In short, what gives me the most hope for the positive uses of technology is human
goodwill. Information technology amplifies the amount of good a person can do, in the same way that a block and tackle amplifies the amount that a person can lift. Technology can be used for evil as well, of course, but if access to technology is maximized, the good will outweigh the evil. That's one of the reasons we have to close the digital divide.
David Eads is a physics major at North Park University in Chicago. David Eads can be contacted at david@docChicago.net