Hall, Barbara Welling. 1994. "Information Technology and Global Learning for Sustainable Development: Promise and Problems." Alternatives 19(1994): 99-132.

Thesis:

Information technologies make positive and negative contributions toward global learning for sustainable development. They increase 'positionality' and collaboration, but are unequally accessible and lead toward a tendency to substitute 'information' for knowledge, wisdom, and real solutions. (p.124)

Summary:

The author takes an ecological approach to sustainable development, such that what is needed is a fundamental reconceptualization of duties and life-styles "aimed at reducing poverty and protecting the integrity, stability, and beauty of life on the planet" (p.105). She argues that approaching sustainable development will require learning by individuals and the adaptation of 'social choice mechanisms', or the tools societies use to make decisions and to allocate values.

Information technologies are likely to be utilized in the search for sustainable living. New technologies are not neutral, as is usually assumed, but "shape the social choice mechanisms available to the communities that use them. The tools and machines we develop for thinking and communicating fashion the tasks that we identify and pursue" (p.102). Hall explores the relationship between knowledge and power, and how this interacts with the technologies that may be used in the pursuit for sustainable development.

Hall isolates four practices which she finds critical to evaluating innovations in light of sustainable development objectives: acceptance of negative feedback, appropriate inclusiveness, rejection of problem displacement, and positionality.

Accepting negative feedback means "receiving information about processes that need to be corrected" (p.105) This is crucial for ecosystems to maintain equilibrium, such as in cycles of predator-prey population balances. Hall contends that most of human destruction of the natural world has occurred through mechanisms that ignore or repress negative feedback, leading to ecological imbalance. "Ecologically rational social choice mechanisms" depend upon accepting positive and negative feedback. (pp.105-107)

Appropriate inclusiveness is a challenge because political jurisdictions and ecosystems are usually not contiguous. An ecologically rational social choice mechanism should include all actors who have a stake in solving a particular problem. This should be neither too exclusive, nor unsuitably inclusive, as individual responsibility can be lost in the 'global pothole problem' (Hardin, 1985). Problem displacement occurs when the boundaries of a problem are unclear, and action does not solve a problem, it merely shifts it to another area and to other people. (pp.107-108).

Positionality is drawn from feminist theory (Bartlett, 1991), and refers to the capacity to see one's own view as open to refinement, amendment and correction, and to seek out other perspectives for interpersonal learning about the world. (p.108).

Hall then evaluates new information technologies and some of the specific ways that they have been used in light of these criteria (pp.109-124). On the positive end of the spectrum, information technologies can facilitate collaboration between thinkers who may never meet. In addition, such ready access to differing perspectives, and seeing the contingency of "truth" may foster greater positionality.

On the other end of the spectrum, Hall has identified four biases of information technology that can have negative impacts on sustainable development goals. These are the exclusion of the poor, both in international and class terms; ahistorical approaches to problems, which undermine the capacity to accept negative feedback; the privileging of induction; and the displacement of community. Most troubling of these to Hall is the disparity between the information wealth of the United States in comparison to access to information in many other countries. Despite its potential for international communication, Hall warns that "the new technologies may ironically reinforce center-periphery relationships" (p.113).

Hall draws upon Habermas' theory of self-transformation, which occurs in the process of political discourse. This transformative dialogue takes place in a community which balances autonomy and interdependence. Hall questions whether computer networks that are focused on ecological and social problems are "communities" where common values, personal investment and altruism can emerge (p.118).

Hall concludes by acknowledging some of the promise of new information technologies in moving toward sustainable development, but cautions that "[d]ata may reveal the existence of injustice, but data alone rarely generate the political will either to make difficult trade-offs or to discover creative solutions to perennial problems" (p.124). The new media "will not inevitably take us down the road to sustainable development" (ibid).

Keywords: information technology, sustainable development, positionality, ecologically rational social choice mechanisms