Texts without context

We seem to increasingly value ‘metaness’ and prize the ‘mash-up’ more than the original source that was ‘mashed’. Reading the work of Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr, it would seem that new technology is to blame: the former argues that the internet is creating mediocrity and swapping ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; the latter argues that our growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload is impeding our ability to think deeply and creatively.

I am a firm believer that the web empowers us through equity and equal access: twitter is used by Iranian dissidents and Facebook helped coordinate the aid work in Haiti. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to dismiss these sentiments as coming from luddites. This concern about the way new technology is reshaping our world stand as insightful and useful counterweights to a techno-utopia.

Technology is certainly accelerating certain trends: first, news and entertainment is blurring. We are over stimulated to the point that only sensationalism and hyperbole grab people’s attention. I smiled when my students asked a visiting speaker from a national newspaper whether news editors were just people that slacked off at work and surfed the web for ‘stuff to write about,’ as if news was about the latest and funniest ‘You’ve Been Framed’ clips!

Second, there is an increasing deconstructionist view of literature and a growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses, which means that readers are not immersing themselves in another world of reading in the same way they might. Reading is no longer a solitary act but social. Further, in our emphasis on speed and efficiency we are increasingly choosing the immediately available product over the more thoughtfully created one. Instead of embracing a whole novella, speech, film, for example, my students want to jump to the summary, the clip, the sound bite—overlooking the importance of context and nuance.

And third, mash-ups and bricolage are now everywhere in our cultural landscape. The cut and paste aesthetic inevitably results in tired imitations, like Lady Gaga who is omnipresent at the moment but can be seen as a third-generation Madonna.

In learning communities, then, we need to think very deeply about what this means for the future of our education system. We are at a very ambivalent time. Just today I confiscated a student’s phone and asked his parent to come into school to collect it; and yet, I run my life through a smartphone.