TEC/Tech

As I write this, I'm listening to NPR's Diane Rehm Show and a discussion with journalist Joel Garreau about his new book, Radical Evolution. Here's a blurb about Garreau's book from his own website:

In Radical Evolution, bestselling author Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor for The Washington Post, shows us that we are at an inflection point in history. As you read this, we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny--and perhaps our very souls.

Bottom line for Garreau? Researchers are today finding ways to give us the powers of the comic book superheros. He opens his book with the story of the telekenetic monkey. That's right. A monkey that controls things with its mind. It lives in a lab at Duke University. And in the interview, Garreau discusses "silent messaging" -- which is like instant messaging only it is done telepathically. Can't be? Garreau reports in the interview that a researcher has already sent the first ever message using only his brain (and some carefully implanted electronics). Don't believe it? Garreau would not be surprised. According to him, "This gulf between what engineers are actually creating today and what ordinary readers might find believable is significant."

From Genetics to electronic enhancements to nanotechnology, we are seeing incredible leaps of human development in our lifetimes, in our recent experience, every single day.

What does this have to do with us locally? Well, Garreau makes the point that as these changes are speeding up, so is our potential for dealing with them. The fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 is an example. Here a group of passengers, empowered by cell phone technology, discover a problem, diagnose it and take steps to solve it with tremendous speed and at tremendous personal cost to themselves. Without that technology and -- more importantly -- people willing and able to absorb and act on the advantage that technology gives them, that plane likely reaches its destination. And cell phones are only a 20th century technology. Our local information web can empower us in a similar fashion, on things that concern us locally, and at a much less severe personal cost.

We should put more pressure on ourselves and our governments to take advantage of that empowerment -- and to support improvements that speed up the time it takes us to respond to local events. I attended last night's Park Board meeting and listened to a presentation about building an outdoor public pool. The board decided to create a task force to examine the idea in more detail. Had I been thinking as a web-empowered individual, I would have taken my digital voice recorder to the meeting, recorded the event, transfered it to my computer, exported it as an MP3, and posted it on the web. Voila! Instead of reading someone else's description of the event in the Southern, you could have heard it for yourselves. But I wasn't thinking as a web-empowered individual. Perhaps next time I will.

Our government could assist us in thinking as web-empowered individuals by providing their own podcasts of public meetings. I call the process of enabling individuals and communities by using technology to increase the speed and comprehensiveness of our responses to important events, the WET index (for Web-Enhanced Transparency). Carbondale government's WET index is low right now, perhaps a 2 or a 3 (out of 10). But with a small investment of time and money, this could shoot way up. A fully WET government gives its people the power to stay up with the kinds of changes that Joel Garreau is writing and speaking about. And that increases the chances that we can influence the direction of those changes in ways that are both ethically palatable and socially beneficial.

But perhaps transparency is not enough. NYT editorial writer Thomas Friedman has written about how, globally speaking, technology puts us in each other's faces -- and our anger is sometimes transmitted more quickly than our compassion. He writes, "Maybe the Internet, fiber optics, and satellites really are, together, like a high-tech Tower of Babel. It's as though God suddenly gave us all the tools to communicate and none of the tools to understand."

Still, WET government is a good place to start. And on a local level, the chances that we all share common goals and ideals is much greater than civilizations at the level of Friedman's global technological babel. Our shared goals and understandings give us a leg up and a greater chance for putting technology to good use.

This is why I suggest, humbly, that we adopt three pillars for developing the local information web: Transparency (already discussed), Engagement (the desire to identify and work on key issues facing the community), and Collaboration (the process of and technologies for working with others who share core concerns).

Collectively, I call these three pillars the TEC triangle. And I say, somewhat glibly, that there is no good from tech without TEC.