A recent journal alert led me on a fox and hedgehog chase. I came across a paper called The Hedgehog and the Fox: A Discussion of the Approaches to the Analysis of ICT Reforms in Teacher Education of Larry Cuban and Yrjö Engeström. It’s a bit of a mouthful of a title, but as my interests do lie in the area of ICT reforms and education, I downloaded it and read it. What struck me most was this explanation of the first part of the title.
… Isaiah Berlin (1998) began by quoting Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (p. 437). Berlin used these words to describe people as being either like a hedgehog or like a fox. Hedgehogs are those people who pursue one idea thoroughly and who develop an integrated or universal principle. Foxes, on the other hand, are people who pursue many ideas and who seldom stay long with one before trying out another. These people are pluralistic; they move on many levels and draw on a variety of experiences. (p84)
While the paper does describe the reactions to reforms of teacher education using computer technology, the conceptualisation of foxes and hedgehogs lead me to consider other areas where computer technology approaches are dichotomised, namely the Internet Filtering debate we are currently engaged in within Australia.
I went searching for more to help me understand this and came across quite a few new references. One in particular allowed me to start unpacking some of the debate we are having. The particular paper, The fox and the hedgehog: Myopia about homeland security in U.S. policies on terrorism by Mitchell (2003), elaborated the dichotomy of foxes and hedgehogs within the realm of risk and vulnerability. The whole debate about the filter is framed as risk and vulnerability, most frequently of children and viewing of pornography (see Hamilton 2009). But the language of risk and vulnerability seems to be problematic whether applied to terrorism or the Internet filter. One of the points that Mitchell makes is that the current approaches to risk management entail a
… top-down, expert-led, directive approach for the implementation of risk-reduction measures … But one of the central lessons of the American experience of coping with natural and technological hazards is that bottom-up, lay-inspired, voluntaristic approaches have been just as important, especially when applied to the reduction of vulnerability. (p61)
This almost precisely describes the current debate on Internet filtering. Hamilton sees the former (top-down, expert-led, directive approach … with himself as expert) as the only way of mitigating potential harm to children. As Mitchell points out “Populations that combine high exposure to risk, low levels of resistance and weak resilience are most vulnerable to hazards” (p61) – the hazard framed as inadvertent exposure to pornography.
Before proceeding further with this analysis, it is important to stress a point by Rasmussen and Ludvigsen:
This overly simplistic contrast between a focused and a multilevel approach to the world can obviously be discussed and interpreted in different ways, and it is perhaps for this reason that it is much borrowed. It is important to stress that the contrast is used here as a tool for thinking and unpacking issues and not as a typology.(p85)
However, we employ typologies in many areas, including that of risk and vulnerability. But the language of risk and vulnerability that Mitchell demonstrates frames the debate and allows the hedgehog-like to elaborate their ‘one thing’, namely that children are at risk of exposure to harm, while simultaneously reducing the opposing argument to be part of the problem. But, there is an assumption that to reduce the risk of ‘inadvertent exposure’, the solution is to prevent access. As Mitchell explains:
Whereas risk-reduction strategies usually seek to modify the phenomena that inflict losses (e.g. storms, fires, explosions) or to separate them from populations at risk, vulnerability-reduction strategies focus on improving the capabilities of affected populations to avoid, prevent, resist, absorb and recover from loss. (p62, Italics added)
The latter part, vulnerability-reduction, is an educational part. It is the actions that many experienced users of the Internet inevitably undertake, eg installing pop-up blockers, ad-blockers, and flash blockers. Having been inadvertently exposed to the kinds of risk that Hamilton fears, I have all of the above. After typing in google.com to my browser, back in 2000, and forgetting to include the dot, I landed on the page googlecom.com (which has since been taken over by Google and redirects to google). Googlecom.com, in those days, was a framed version of Google that lead to no less than 27 pop-up windows all containing ads for various porn services. But rather than staying away from the web, I mitigated further risk of such occurrences by installing a pop up blocker. This is similar to what Mitchell suggests:
Vulnerability may be reduced in many ways. Most … involve training, prediction, evacuation and structural strengthening. But the biggest opportunities for reducing vulnerability (and for bringing down losses generally) focus on changing knowledge, behavior and societal impediments to protective action. Some of the ways the latter may be accomplished include:
- Improving information upon which decisions are based
- …
- Promoting a wider range of choices that reduce vulnerability (p62-3)
While ‘structural strengthening’ may be interpreted as providing a barrier around vulnerable individuals (and indeed the whole country), the focus on change that Mitchell elaborates is very much that latter point “Promoting a wider range of choices that reduce vulnerability” (p63). The barrier method reduces choice. A one size fits all solution is no solution to a complex problem (that is, if it’s not a silver bullet, the monster will still exist). The multitude of solutions that many of us already implement are being reduced to a ‘menu of misleadingly simple choices among alternative risk-reduction technologies’ (Mitchell, p67). The biggest problem with the debate is that menu includes focus on only one item, particularly from the policy and legislative perspective. Take away the focus on one item and the choices available (education, point of access solutions (PC filters), parental guidance) become more palatable and indeed more relevant.
The underlying problem, it seems, is that the risk is ‘an externalised “other” that threatens a neutral us’ (Mitchell, p63). But there is little attention to the social constructedness of this risk and that our own vulnerabilities are the problem (of course, vulnerability is also socially constructed). Mitchell goes on to state that:
strategists need to take account of the expansive dimensions of socially constructed vulnerabilities. As part of that task it is time to consider how untapped resources might be mobilized both to reconceptualize the hazard … in ways that allow humans to live with increased uncertainties and to reduce the underlying vulnerabilities that contribute to a broad spectrum of hazard-related societal losses. (p66)
The idea of reconceptualising the hazard is a key concept in the debate, particularly if we are ‘to live with increased uncertainties’. While I know that there are potentially ‘harmful’ images on the Internet (think Abu Ghraib, child abuse images being subject to different laws), I also know that it is important that these ‘harmful’ images be available, to not whitewash history in an effort to reduce risk of discomfort. I also know and have developed a range of skills to deal with ‘inadvertent exposure’ to such images. These skills are not immediately available to all, but take time to develop. It is this developmental process that is most likely to be foregone if we are protected. Giving everyone the opportunity to develop their own moral compass and their own strategies for dealing with it is the most fruitful educational outcome that we could hope for. Mitchell argues similarly:
Not only will this enact the valuable principle of keeping responsibility for action in the hands of those who are likely to be most affected …, it will also help to dispel public illusions about the hazard that are based on fear of unknowns, it will temper discussions of security policy that might otherwise be ceded to unrepresentative activist groups with doubtful agendas, and it will engage a broad cross-section of society in shared projects that have therapeutic as well as protective value. (p68 Italics added)
The anti-filtering groups have managed to “engage a broad cross-section of society”, but there seems little possibility of multiple solutions to the problem being enacted. The problem, as Mitchell states, is
firmly rooted on the narrow side of the Archilochian dichotomy. More concerned about defense than security, tentative towards mitigation as a policy alternative, blinkered both about the concept of vulnerability and the use of vulnerability- reduction measures, it is also overwhelmingly reactive, palliative and reliant on technological fixes; in sum, deeply reminiscent of previous flawed (and sometimes quixotic) attempts to permanently eliminate specific hazards from the roster of public policy problems without addressing their causes. (p68)
Rasmussen and Ludvigsen outline that the “problem with this “top-down” approach is that it conceals changes that happen at the microlevel” (p83) The approach of the current policy for filtering the Internet seems to be very much “top-down” and single focus, while many experienced users of the web and Internet see a very different picture of usage patterns, patterns at the microlevel that speak of confident users with a set of skills necessary for risk minimisation. But, whatever the differences, and however we work this out, it seems that we must be fox-like and develop ways of engaging hedgehogs in a more pluralistic approach to problem solving and address the causes of the problem rather than simply attempting to eliminate specific hazards.
References
Mitchell, J.K,. 2003, The fox and the hedgehog: Myopia about homeland security in US policies on terrorism, Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, 11, p53-72, Preprint available at http://geography.rutgers.edu/people/faculty/mitchell/pub_fox_hedgehog.pdf (Note: page numbers in text refer to published version rather than the preprint linked here.)
Rasmussen, I. and Ludvigsen, S., 2009, The Hedgehog and the Fox: A Discussion of the Approaches to the Analysis of ICT Reforms in Teacher Education of Larry Cuban and Yrjö Engeström, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 16: 83–104, 2009
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censorship, nocleanfeed, research