Tools for Conviviality

In a golden period in the 1970s Illich set about dissecting the failings of modern institutions, the professionals who organise them and the systems they design, in a series of short polemics:
Deschooling Society, Limits to Medicine, Disabling Professions and Tools for Conviviality. He argued that as people become dependent on the expert knowledge of professionals they lose faith in their capacity to act. His solution was that people should spend less time as consumers, more as producers of their own well-being. And for that to be possible they need more convivial, easy-to-use tools.

Illich's most optimistic book, Tools for Conviviality, which inspired Felsenstein and others in the hacker community in the 1970s, put the challenge this way:

I believe a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to produce and consume.

Convivial institutions work through conversation rather than instruction, through co-creation between users and producers, learners and teachers, rather than delivery from professionals to clients; and through mutual support among peers as much as by means of professional service.


Illich, Ivan, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
quoted in
Leadbeater, Charles, We-Think(London: Profile, 2008) p.44

What kids learn in virtual worlds

I am drawing these quotes from Doug Thomas, Annenberg School of Communication, who is cited by Stefanie Olsen in a special feature of CNet's news.com:

Knowledge is changing. It (used to be that it) was a set of facts, now it's not so much a 'what' but a 'where,' in which kids learn how to find information," Thomas said. "That's going to be the single most important skill--the ability to adapt to change.

It's strange that we need experts to point this out to us. The ability and willingness to be flexible is much more far-reaching than just this kind of tech-flex, though.

He added: "I wouldn't be worried if they're engaged and playing these games, I'd be more worried if they're not."

Again, it's stating the obvious, but we need voices like Thomas's to state what seems to be so broadly missed by so many: exclusion leads to lack of competence in a broad set of social skills. When we look at any kind of media literacy, isn't it safer and more socially responsible to actively get involved and teach kids how to be literate within these media? This is not just "digital literacy" in terms of being able to functionally navigate software, but the deeper literacy of being able to deconstruct texts at a philosophical and psychological level.

If you're a parent, I would be much less concerned about things like online predators or violence, then I would be about the conflation between consumption and consumerism and citizenship (in virtual worlds).

I predict that this last statement may raise the ire of some advocates, but it's being extreme in order to make a point. On the one hand we fear the issues that the popular media makes so blatant and so explicit, however, the popular media is quite often not so interested in making us wise, responsible consumers and citizens, because then the shareholders couldn't exploit us as much. Consumption of new media has a profound effect on molding the citizenry. Access to, and knowledge of, specific digital resources could become components of caste and class in this century.

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