Glorifying The Obvious

WELCOME, TRAVELER, TO THE Technorealism Web site (www. technorealism.org). Here is a document hoping to establish ""a more nuanced and useful way to think about the changes that are occurring in computing and communications.'' At first blush, it seems a welcome balm to the confusion of the digital age. Don't listen to the ""pundits, politicians, and self-appointed visionaries'' who try to convince you that technology's all-encompassing swath is either good or evil, it says. We can get through this--by thinking critically, by acknowledging the continuity of history, by rejecting the overly simplistic misconceptions by which the media present the shattering effects of the information revolution.

Cool premise, big promise. But a sad thing happens when that same critical scrutiny is applied to Technorealism itself--a fast-cooked movement introduced earlier this month by 12 editors and writers. What pledges to be new and useful is somewhat of a hedge, and something of a redundancy. Though well-intentioned, Technorealism is dangerously close to what it warns against: another Internet hype.

This movement began at a Greenwich Village bistro (Les Deux Gamins) where author David Shenk dined with fellow technology writer Andrew Shapiro. Shenk expressed frustration that talk-show hosts assumed that since he was critical of certain aspects of the Internet, he must be a foe of progress. Shenk thought there should be a term for people excited about the information revolution but wary of its darker implications. People who approached complex technological issues not with a Panglossian overenthusiasm, and not with a deluded nostalgia for the good old days when chips were something produced by buffaloes--but with rationality and proportion.

Shenk and Shapiro, with the help of author Steven Johnson, set out to define this new school of cyberthought, which aspires to ""expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism.'' This is a strange ambition, since the so-called middle ground between those wild extremes probably includes all but perhaps a few hundred people on the planet, not counting those in mental institutions. The founding statement consists of eight vague principles. Most are self-evident: ""Information is not knowledge.'' Who says it is? ""The Internet is revolutionary but not Utopian.'' Does anyone think that the spam-infested, porn-saturated, privacy-threatening Net is a problemless community? Even the authors admit that the document, which underwent a review process by nine cofounders, is a bland work of committee writing.

Nonetheless, a publicity campaign geared to the document's March 12 Web-site debut drew national coverage. And last week Technorealism had a coming-out party of sorts, when its founders tried to explain the movement at panel discussions at the Harvard Law School.

It was there that Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig cheerfully prodded the Technorealists to come up with something more than platitudes. Lessig noted that Technorealist principles like ""Wiring the schools will not save them'' really didn't say anything--even access activists don't claim that the Internet will singlehandedly solve our education problems. Lessig wondered if the Technorealists were really proposing that we shouldn't wire the schools. After much cajoling, he got one to say it straight: no, we shouldn't.