VIRTUAL ON VIRTUAL:
A Virtual Review of Harvey Wheeler's Virtual Book
on THE VIRTUAL SOCIETY
by Paul Levinson

Tons of paper have conveyed text seeking to explain the impact of
computer processing and transmission of text on the human intellect
and society. Few if any of these reams have related what the
computer does to the thousands of years of text manipulation and
communication fostered by earlier media -- few have adequately
placed the computer revolution in the context of history.

What is needed are Marshall McLuhans for the computer age, thinkers
whose sense of the present and future is imbued with a grasp of the
great legacy of communicative history, whose assessment of where we
are going is thus illuminated by analogy drawn from throughout the
ages. Harvey Wheeler's THE VIRTUAL SOCIETY, presently available
only on computer disk, begins to make such an accounting of present
and future text forms and the past.

First let's clarify what Wheeler and the yet small band of e-text
(=electronic text) practitioners -- including myself -- mean when
they speak of "virtual" this or that. A traditional university,
library, restaurant, society consists of both physical structures
(the building, the books, the tables and chairs, etc.) and
informational structures that bring the physical structures to life
(the classes taught in the university, the words in the books, the
talk of people in the restaurant, etc.)

One of the most interesting facets of the physical
structure/information structure relationship -- or hardware/software
relationship, to use the parlance of media theory -- is that the
information or software can be separated from its original physical
structure and transplanted into a new one. A book that carefully
details what goes on in a classroom or restaurant in effect does
this. But the transplantation of information into a printed book
freezes the information or renders the information incapable of
further change in that book structure.

The marvel of electronic structures is that their receipt and
conveyance of information permits an infinite change of that
information. Knowledge or information structures transplanted into
electronic fora thus have the capacity to breathe -- they are
"fungible," as Wheeler puts it -- and this makes them serious
alternatives to the original in-person physical environments. The
class conducted on-line through exchange of ideas via electronically
written and transmitted text is no less alive than the class
conducted on-line, and these "virtual" classes and "virtual"
libraries (texts available in electronic form, readable anywhere in
the world, by any number of people at the same time) are the subject
of Wheeler's inquiry.

Nor is this education anything like the traditional correspondence
school -- students and faculty interact with each other on-line, and
the community that develops electronically is every bit as strong as
that which may develop in in-person settings. In addition to
teaching on-line, Wheeler has been instrumental in developing a
virtual library at the University of Southern California (the
publisher of his disk-book: or virtual book).

Wheeler begins with an evocative sketch of the shaman's
communication ritual -- reminding us that from shaman to computer
search, we are all of us engaged in essentially the same activity.
He moves on to describe the development of libraries and then
libraries of books in ancient and medieval times, noting that we
must take care not to get mesmerized by the literal physical
features of the libraries and books (the hardware), but instead
should strive to see and understand the communicative function
behind, within, and in front of these.

Wheeler sees the core of this function as "archiving" -- bearing
witness{to the life of society -- and allows that the out-of-favor
word "progress" may apply to the development of the archiving
function throughout the past and recently courtesy of computers.
(For me, use of the word "progress" is like pushing an open door: I
have no problem with seeing progress in nearly all things
technological, except nuclear weapons. See my recently published
MIND AT LARGE: KNOWING IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL AGE for more.)

Wheeler appreciates what McLuhan and students of the media have long
stressed: that introduction to a new communications technology is
never a casual enco]{nter or a one-night stand; the relationship with
the new means of communication is rather a total love affair that
eventually pervades every aspect of society and continues for
centuries. He sees three significant revolutions in
communications-human societies prior to the computer.

First was the development of the capacity to name and count -K{
capacities dependent upon spoken language and primitive writing
(scratching), capacities which as Alexander Marshack points out make
us fully human. Second was the consolidation of human knowledge in
philosophy -- first typified by Plato, the shift to alphabetic
writing in his time, and the consequent externalization and
transformation of dialogue. Next came the encyclopedic, physically
transportable but nonetheless cumbersome edifices of knowledge made
possible by the printing press.

Wheeler associates Bacon with this age, which we still by and large
live in today. Yet those of you reading this on paper should know
that a fourth age is well underway: what Wheeler calls the Boolean
age of electronically manipulable text. Whether this is most
properly associated with Boole, Babbage, or even Turing is not as
important as the fact that the age is coming upon us.

Printed books, encyclopedias, and physical libraries lead as
naturally to traditional (what I called "place-based") universities
as the elevator makes possible and encourages the rise of the
skyscraper. (Indeed, as I point out in Mind at Large, printed books
directly stimulated the rise of public education by creating a
pressing need -- if you'll excuse the term -- to learn how to read.
After all, what good is the harvest of books that flows from the
press if one cannot read them?) Wheeler thus wonders what sort of
university the Boolean world will bring into being?

We already know that the view that computer mediated communication
is in some sense flattening or less than human is entirely wrong.
To the contrary, as Justine De Lacy makes clear in her essay about
the French minitel system ("The Sexy Computer," The Atlantic, July
1987; see also Lindsay van Gelder, "The Strange Case of the
Electronic Lover," MS., October 1985), humans communicating through
(not to) computers develop deep friendships, have explicit
sexual-textual exchanges, and even have been known to fall in love.
So the question is not one of affect or no affect, but of what kind
of affect comes with the on-line experience.

The main thrust of Wheeler's inquiry is what the on-line environment
does to pedagogy and intellectual expression. We have seen in
Connect Ed classes that the "asynchronous" environment -- person "A"
writes a comment at 6:00 PM Monday, person B reads it at 8:00 PM,
person C read it at 9:00 PM and immediately responds, person B then
reads person C's comment, person B signs on the next day and
responds to comments by A and B, person A then reads what C and B
have said, etc. -- leads to very rich and productive intellectual
exchanges.

The key apparently is that people work best when they can choose
when to work and participate: unlike the in-person class, in which
any number of participants (including the faculty) can be "out of
it" at any given meeting, the on-line campus is likely to get people
participating at their best (for they choose -- within certain
limits -- when to participate). Further, the capacity of the
on-line co[{munity to literally reach all over the world -- to anyone
with a computer and modem -- makes McLuhan's metaphorical global
village a literal reality, and this too engenders a very fertile
intellectual climate.

Still, Wheeler is correct that most of the differences in on-line
and in-person environments have yet to be fully mapped, and this is even
more
as Wheeler's -- and more statistical studies such as Roxanne Hiltz's
Virtual Classroom -- are so important.

The balance of this remarkable probe is devoted to the impact of
electronic text on libraries and publishing -- activities that
Wheeler astutely sees as becoming part and parcel of teaching,
literally indistinguishable from the university, in an electronic
context. Whether in virtual classroom or "infinite article" or
"fungible journal" (Wheeler's terms), the on-line text is at once
and always criticizable, revisable, and thus ideally suited to what
Karl Popper sees as crucial to the growth of knowledge. Further,
this "third hemisphere" of the brain must have impact on the brains
and people who utilize it -- unlike the book, the flexible,
open-to-group input on-line text becomes an active, living partner
of our intellects. Hooked into the humanly-produced electronic
infinite, our minds become "turbominds," with consequences likely
far more accelerating to the growth of knowledge than those deriving
from the printing press -- aptly termed "gunpowder of the mind" by
David Reisman.

Is all of this a little fast and furious for you? Well, even as you
read this, turbomind developments are probably going beyond what
Wheeler suggests in his book. But not to worry -- his book is in
electronic text, and thus infinitely revisable.

Or, if you like, call Wheeler's on-line, 24 hour a day "Virtual
Academy," whose number is listed at the end of hin{ book. Or pay an
electronic visit to our on-line Connect Ed campus anytime. You'll
find dialogue ongoing in both places about the "Virtual Society."

-------------
author's note: Paul Levinson is President and Founder of Connected
Education, Inc., and Director of the On-Line Programs of the New
School for Social Research. This review to be published in hardcopy
in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Social and Biological
Structures.


Netweaver readers with accounts on the EIES system may order Dr.
Wheeler's diskbook by leaving an electronic message for Dr. Wheeler
(EIES account number 2753). Netweaver readers who do not have
accounts on the EIES system may contact Dr. Wheeler online directly
through his Virtual Academy, accessible by modem at 1-805-684-5621.
Copies of the Virtual Society diskbook may also be ordered through
Connected Education, Inc.'s online Bookorder service, staffed by Ms.
Gail S. Thomas. To place orders through Bookorder, leave electronic
messages for Ms. Thomas at EIES number 1983, CompuServe number
74206,507, or SourceMail number bcf489. Harvey Wheeler's VIRTUAL
SOCIETY book currently available on MS-Dos, MAC, or CP/M disk.