Real life before and after the birth of the internet.

‘No One Is Talking About This’ by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead Books, 2021)

In an interview the people’s comedian Stewart Lee, esteemed British author Iain Sinclair commented on changes in the cultural knowledge over time noting that “older, deeper, stranger knowledge is disappearing”.

Here and now, in the Google universe, everything is searchable and, on a superficial level at least, knowable. Among the list of ‘100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet’, Pamela Paul lists ‘Being the only one’, ‘Private Observances’ , ‘Blocking Things Out’ and ‘Figuring Out Who That Actor Was’. This makes for a light-hearted topic at a dinner party but in the internet novel ‘No One Is Talking About This’, Patricia Lockwood makes it abundantly clear that the re-wiring of our brains has more serious consequences.

She addresses head-on the growing perception that despite the ultra-connectedness of the 21st Century, we are losing the ability to communicate or to understand reality. Lockwood writes: “The future intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.”  Arguing with people you’ve never met and never will meet is no substitute for face to face confrontations or any way to be human.

How to be unique in the digital age

‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ This is title of  the famous Pop Art collage by English artist Richard Hamilton from 1956.

In it we see a body builder, a fashion model, a portrait of an unidentified Victorian man ,  a ‘young romance’ magazine cover, a hoover ad, a TV and a reel to reel tape recorder.

Hamilton’s image playfully mocks the way in which the saturation of  media imagery influences the way we make our lifestyle choices.

Sixty years on, the satire looks fairly mild and humorous rather than disturbing. The world wide web has changed everything. TV and dumb magazine advertisements are the least of our worries.

Nowadays, with the information overload, our minds have become more nimble but the major drawback of all the online zapping is that we are rapidly becoming less capable of the kind of critical thinking that makes us unique individuals.

Nowadays, by the time kids reach 18 it is estimated that will have seen 500 hours of advertising spots while they will have spent just 5 thousand hours reading books.

Should we be concerned about this?  Derrick de Kerckhove a Canadian born professor and disciple of Marshall McLuhan, thinks so.

The statistics about what he calls the “always-on hyperkids of today” are taken from de Kerckhove’s  The Augmented Mind (40k, 2011).

In this short but cogently argued book he details how the rapid transformation of the digital world has re-wired our brains and fundamentally altered our behavior. One consequence of this is that “people are gradually delegating their capacity for imagining things on their own to processes that do their imagining for them”. 

#EDCMOOC PHOTO CHALLENGE – A DIGITAL NATIVE

Perhaps I’m taking Clay Shirky’s concept of digital

natives a bit too literally !!

Related link:
Clay Shirky – Napster, Udacity and the academy. shirky.com, 12 November 2012.

Flickr photos tagged #edcmooc

EDCMOOC : E-LEARNING FOR DIGITAL NATIVES

A new born digital native.

One of the texts from week one of the MOOC  – E-learning and Digital Cultures  is Marc Prensky’s influential 2001 essay Digital Native, Digital Immigrants in which he wrote that “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors”.

One of the posts in the course forum linked these ideas to the following video showing K-12 children, i.e. kids in America from kindergarten (K) to 12th grade (12).

The unequivocal (utopian?) message is that new technology equals creativity and that classrooms without computers cannot hope to engage ‘digital natives’. This is exemplified by the little girl in the video who holds up a paper full of handwritten text, then picks up a flash card which says: ‘How will this help me?’