Recording: July 05, 1999 issue of New Thinking

July 05, 1999 New Thinking:
Recording

Website content management

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July 05, 1999

Recording

By Gerry McGovern

There are things in the world that cannot be recorded by written words or frozen images. They are very often the things we search for when we search for meaning, for spiritual sustenance, for deeper understanding and knowledge. Some things, to be truly understood, require an intimate interaction with people and with our environment.

From the first moment we made our first tool, we sought to support and extend ourselves; to save ourselves time and labor. As our tools became more complex, we achieved the ability to replace human labor. That is much of what the Agricultural Revolution was about. Much of the Digital Revolution is about supporting, extending, and in some ways replacing, the human mind.

The first computers were not designed with an objective of ploughing fields more efficiently or driving cars more economically. Rather, they were designed to break codes and plot trajectories; to compute. Today, we find computers in tractors and cars, sure. We also find them as recorders, as supports for our memories. We carry them around so that we don’t have to remember as much.

The Internet has already become the world’s greatest library and store of things. We come to it to find out, to support our learning, work, leisure and consumer activities. Increasingly, people will become more and more dependant on the Internet.

Some believe that this is a negative development. I don’t subscribe to that view, because if you were to follow that logic, then we would have to strip from ourselves all of our tools. You see, over thousands of years our tools have become an intricate thread of the weave we are. We can no more know the human from the tool than we can “the dancer from the dance”.

However, there is a point beyond which dependency on the tool creates a decreasing benefit. There is a point where the tool gets in the way of a certain kind of understanding. Total dependence on the tool is rarely a wise thing.

Last week I watched a documentary on a Native American initiation ceremony. The ‘wise man’ allowed the camera roll up to a certain point. Then he ordered that it stop. Nothing further could be recorded, he informed the crew, because the act of recording would in fact change and diminish the nature of the ceremony.

Because so much is recordable does not mean that everything is. The Internet is a wonderful and growing record and library, but we must gain a balance with it. Too many are selling the Internet as some total solution, as an environment where the only humans who are needed are those with something to spend. Whether they are spending on ‘distance learning’, Internet stocks or a few summer novels, we are informed that the Internet can meet all their needs.

But of course it can’t. In most things we do there is a need to interact. Very little is bought, very little is learned, in perfect, virtual isolation. There is nearly always a part of the ‘purchase price’ that we psychologically allocate for interaction. We have never had to measure that allocation until today. However, marketers and businesses must now learn how to measure the ‘value of positive interaction.’

A website needs to be more than a record of everything you have to sell.

Gerry McGovern

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The Internet has already become the world’s greatest library and store of things.