Every Tool Shapes the Task

Speech by Ursula M. Franklin
  1. ​Imagine the world like a cake​
  2. ​Power makes knowledge sufficient​
  3. ​To do some more pushups on the internet​
  4. ​Adding up to hair-brained​
  5. ​Who the problems are​
  1. ​You can almost tell which software they were designed in​
  2. ​A minimum size to fish​

Communities and the Information Highway

Originally a keynote speech given by Franklin at the "Community Access to the Information Highway* conference, held in Ottawa, Canada, 1995.

  1. Imagine the world like a cake

    Imagine the world like a cake. Imagine that you slice it into the customary slices by vertical cuts. Each slice of that cake should signify for us, a constituency. Each is geographically located as one segment of the larger cake. Each slice is more influenced by its immediate neighbors than by what might be in the cake quite far away.

    What technology has done in the world increasingly is to put horizontal cuts in that cake. You don't only talk up and down. Now you can talk across barriers.

  2. Power makes knowledge sufficient

    Whether it is civil rights' violations in many countries, whether it is the increasing numbers of unemployed people in our own country, whether it is the homeless we see on our way to work, it isn't as though we don't know.

    But there is that horrible realization that, while the knowledge of facts may be a necessary condition for action, and we talk about democracy in civic action, it is unfortunately not a sufficient one.

    While knowledge may be a necessary condition, it may in fact be a less necessary condition that the one that makes that a sufficient condition, and that is access to power.

  3. To do some more pushups on the internet

    There may be a lot of things that have to be studied, but there is also what I call "occupational therapy for the opposition" that says, send them off to do some more pushups on the internet. You need to be mindful that it is possible to use information, and the need for information, as a delay for the call for action.

  4. Adding up to hair-brained

    I have for myself come to the point where I say that people or groups or governments make the decisions that make sense to them, even if they look totally hair-brained to me.

    My task then is to figure out the constellation of forces, the pushes and pulls, that in fact do add up to that hair-brained decision-making. Then we can go into the next iteration and say, "What can we do about the balance of the push and the pull that seems to result in totally non-constructive decisions?"

  5. Who the problems are

    Recently my attention was drawn to a quote from Peter Drucker who said, "If there isn't dissent, we would not know where the problems are."

    I said to my husband, "Look, if there isn't dissent, we wouldn't know who the problems are." I think one has to keep that in mind.

  6. Your new electronic microscope

    Learn what is in this Internet. But then keep your head clear and go back to your goals. What in fact, in the best of all worlds, do you want to do? Do any of the activities with your new electronic microscope bring you closer to that?

    1. ​Candide​
  7. Cyberspace as a global dump

    If we think that cyberspace is a public space, then let's think of the oceans. They used to be as much of a world resource as anybody could think of but didn't belong to anybody. So everybody put their garbage into them. The potential of cyberspace as a global dump is quite substantial.