Well I liked this a lot; your mileage may vary.
--bks
>Next: Pigs That Fly?
>--------------------
>>Andrew Kimbrell, founder of the International Center for Technology
>Assessment in Washington, D.C., describes one of the "classic" experiments
>in genetic engineering this way:
>> Dr. Vernon Pursel inserted the human growth gene in a pig. Pursel
> hoped to create giant pigs that would be major meat producers. The
> problem was that though the human growth gene was in every cell of the
> pig's body it did not act in the manner the scientists expected.
> Instead of making the pig larger it made it squat, cross-eyed, bow-
> legged, smaller than an average pig, with huge bone mass, a truly
> wretched product of science without ethics. Pursel tried to find a
> silver lining in his experiment gone wrong by claiming that the pig was
> leaner. Pursel's argument was that people are worried about
> cholesterol, so maybe we can sell this as lean pig. Did he really
> think the public was ready for pork chops with human genes?
>>That pig strikes me as a good metaphor for the constructions of the
>Information Age. The prevailing notion is that we have this massive
>collection of information -- exemplified by several hundred thousand
>snippets of human genetic code -- which we can merrily pass from one
>database to another, inserting this piece here and that piece there.
>>But there is no such thing as an "objective piece of information". Like a
>word in a sentence, a bit of information *means* a particular thing only
>within a given context. Pursel's pig symbolizes the kind of result you
>get when you ignore context and try to build things from the bottom up --
>that is, when you start with the reduced products of your sophisticated
>analyses, forgetting what it was you were analyzing in the first place.
>>Context in the present case means, to begin with, the pig itself. Pursel
>was willing to see fragments of DNA -- and even lean pork chops -- but did
>not care to see the pig. Such is the technological mindset we now trust
>to re-engineer the human being.
>>Exactly the same trust is at work wherever information is glorified as the
>decisive form of capital, the basis for problem-solving, and the
>fundamental ingredient of all knowledge.
>>[...]
>>NETFUTURE is a newsletter and forwarding service dealing with technology
>and human responsibility. It is hosted by the UDT Core Programme of the
>International Federation of Library Associations. Postings occur roughly
>once every week or two. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of "The
>Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst".
>>You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. You may
>also redistribute individual articles in their entirety, provided the
>NETFUTURE url and this paragraph are attached.
>>Current and past issues of NETFUTURE are available on the Web:
>>http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/>http://www.ifla.org/udt/netfuture/ (mirror site)
>http://ifla.inist.fr/VI/5/nf/ (mirror site)
>>To subscribe to NETFUTURE, send an email message like this:
>> To: listserv at infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca>> subscribe netfuture yourfirstname yourlastname
>>No Subject: line is needed. To unsubscribe, the second line shown above
>should read instead:
>> signoff netfuture
>
