Today’s Social Research Colloquium at Mary Washington featured Tom Fallace of our Education Department talking about his research on John Dewey. I know a mere thimble-full about Dewey and was keen to learn more, and Tom certainly delivered: it was a fascinating and lucid talk and sparked many ideas and questions in my mind. The discussion was lively. I felt lucky to be there.

Afterwards I collared Tom for some more conversation, part of it about my experience with E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” project (thereby hangs a long tale), and part of it about Dewey and Tom’s work on his thought and influence. Tom said that Dewey would have been aghast at the way we use information technologies with no idea of where these technologies came from. For Dewey, ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, and one could not use a hammer effectively without understanding something of the origins of that tool, the history of its refinements, and the techniques of its use through time. Of course I found myself in vigorous agreement with Dewey. (Tom may be a little skeptical of Dewey in this regard–further conversation is indicated.) I tried to explain some of my own work on the digital imagination, in very general terms, and I suddenly had a flash of insight that I wanted to record here. I didn’t articulate that insight in Tom’s presence–it was one of those bolts-from-the-blue that I couldn’t work into the conversation very easily–but the conversation was deep and intense and I’m confident the insight’s power was a direct result of our talk, even though it might not seem directly related.

So the insight? I was telling Tom that there was only a little bit more I wanted my students to know about their iPods, just enough that they wouldn’t think it was a magic box on which music resided and simply issued forth at the press of a button. (It occurs to me that I had echoes in my mind of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation about sufficiently advanced technologies seeming like magic, an observation that I was reminded of recently in a podcast featuring Rodney Brooks. But yes, I digress.) I wanted my students to know that there was a spinning disc in there, and that someone had decided to make the menu this way instead of that way, and so forth. Clearly I was working on the same ideas I’d elaborated in my digital imagination talk at JMU, and that I’d talked over with Alice and she’d taken up in her blog post here.

Then the flash came. I realized that without that little bit of extra knowledge of what was inside the box, and how human decisions had made the box and its innards and the ways in and out, students would never have these devices available to them as metaphors or analogies. A little knowledge of the genealogy and anatomy of the tool, a little understanding of the origins of that tool, the history of its refinements, and the techniques of its use through time, make that tool, that device, available to the imagination as a metaphor, and thus not as an empty user-endpoint but as one more link in a large web of further understanding and exploration and connection.

This, this is the reason we must not treat our computers as toasters. To follow Eliot’s dictum to “amalgamate new wholes” out of apparently disconnected experiences (reading Spinoza, falling in love, smelling cooking in the next room, as Eliot imagines), it’s vital to have something more than operational experience with on-buttons, GUIs, and DVD burners. It’s great when things “just work,” but make that “just work” too transparent and we lose our access to the metaphor-possibilities these new information technologies afford.

Lose those metaphor-possibilities and the jig is truly up.

These tools are almost nothing but metaphors, metaphor-makers, lodgings-for-metaphors.

Computers have become a major part of many human days. No part of any human day should be unavailable as metaphor.