Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama - Chapters 5-7

          In these chapters, Kentaro Toyama explored how technology and digitizing the world has changed what people value.  He started chapter five with an anecdote about book stores in Harvard Square while he was in college and by 2013 Amazon held a third of all book sales in the US and about sixty percent of e-books.  Towards the end of chapter five, Kentaro Toyama had a section titled The Tech Commandments, which I found really interesting.  The Tech Commandment categorizes how values have shifted because of technology.  Toyama acknowledges that could be an exaggeration, but they are not an extreme stretch.  The Tech Commandments consists of:

-       Measurement over meaning: value only that which can be counted

-       Quantity over quality: Do only those things that affect millions over people

-       Ultimate goals over root causes: Focus narrowly on the end goal to ensure success

-       Destinationalism over path dependency:  Ignore history and context, take a single hop to the destination

-       External over internal: Do not expect people to change; instead, focus exclusively on their external circumstances

-       Innovation over tried-and-true: never do anything that has been done before, at least not without new branding

-       Intelligence over wisdom: Maximize cleverness and creativity, not mundane effort.  Use intelligence and talent to justify arrogance, selfishness, immaturity and rankism. (Rankism is abuse humiliation, exploitation, or subjugation based on any kind of social rank)

-       Value neutrality over value engagement: Bypass values and ethics by pretending to value neutrality

-       Individualism over collectivism: Let competition lead to efficiency; avoid cooperation, which breeds complacency and corruption.  Any inhibition of individual expression, including compromise to support the common good, is the same as oppression.

-       Freedom over responsibility: Encourage more choices; discourage discernment in choosing.  Any temperance of liberty, including encouragement of responsibility is tantamount to tyranny.

I found these commandments to be pretty close to what I’ve observed around me.  A lot of what he talks about in these chapters is about how people are focused more on making their lives easier and looking for the quick fix or the easiest path rather than the most rewarding or what brings us the most success and fulfillment in the long run.  An example of “quick fixes” that he used that I really liked was “Teaching to the Test.”  Toyama explained that because schools are under so much pressure to have high test scores they “turn to quick fixes: technologies and methodologies that drill students in minor variations of common test questions.  However, rather than fostering curious, productive, well-informed, and well-adjusted citizens, the mindless drilling erodes students’ motivation to learn.”(Toyama 94)  I think that this is completely the case, at least where I’m from, because a large portion of our core classes only focused on the two standardized tests that we had to take and feeding us practice questions so the school would look good compared to surrounding towns.

In chapter 6, Toyama talked about his time at the Technology Access Foundation (TAF).  He talked about how powerful of a tool technology can be, but how teachers have to be very careful with it, using the example of how some classes open a laptop and start their school work, but others open a laptop and instantly start watching YouTube videos.  He talk about how there should be set rules that are explained at the beginning of the school year and stuck to.  Toyama explained how it took him a while being at TAF before figuring out which rules worked for him and his class and took some adjusting to get it right.  In this case they were just using laptops and had figure how to best use them, but there are now people who specialize in technology for education.  Schools higher these specialists to work in the school and figure out what kind of technology, whether it be software or different devices, and work with the teachers to see what will best help their classes learn in a productive, and maybe even fun, way.