Notes and Recommendations for 15 December 1998: "David Noble's latest article about distance education provoked as much hate mail as you might expect. You're not interested in the personal abuse and all-around cheap shots in several of these messages. More interesting is the underlying form of their arguments. Although nobody openly says this, the conflict here is between two tacit views of the relation between technology and power. Noble comes from a tradition that regards technology as an instrument of power and its plans. Power, he believes, wants to replace people with machines, regardless of whether it is efficient or decent to do so, simply because the machines make us easier to control. The history of this perspective stretches across centuries, and Noble regards distance education as simply the next chapter in that history. Noble's opponents, on the other hand, assume that technology is the natural enemy of power. They believe that technology has its own inner logic, that this logic is unstoppable, and that its inevitable effect is to destroy hidebound institutions and to overthrow their oppressive masters. They apply these assumptions not only to the university system, but to governments and hierarchies of all sorts, and they get upset if anybody challenges the virtues of technology. These two views cannot both be correct, and you will be unsurprised to hear that I believe that the truth lies in the middle. That's not because I'm a centrist, as someone suggested. A centrist is someone whose views are defined in relation to the views of others -- Slobodan Milosevic is a centrist in the terms of Serbian politics. Rather, I have repeatedly noticed that opposite-extreme ideas are, in practice, evil twins that feed on one another. To be sure, each of the extreme views is useful as a counter to the other, and each side directs our attention to factors that the other side defines away. What's valuable in the perspective of Noble's critics, for example, is an insistence on the unanticipated consequences of new technologies. And what's valuable in Noble's perspective is its insistence that the proper unit of analysis is machinery plus institutions. The machinery and the institutions, that is, evolve together. "