Douglas Adams: an awful lot of 'us'
Reading Kevin Marks' post Keening for Culture sent me back to that old favourite, Douglas Adams' 1999 piece, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet. I often use the first part of this in talks to both students and adults, but I've spent far too little time on the second half, the bit that Kevin quoted from. Here are some excerpts:
… ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. …
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’. …
Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’
In between reading Kevin's posting and writing this, I gave a talk to Heads of Departments (Faculties) at Marlborough College (where I once taught) in the course of which I talked about this,
and also about those dates-from-the-point-of-view-of-someone-now-aged-22 which John Naughton came up with recently (I blogged about them here).
Before heading off to Marlborough, I showed the two slides to some of my 14 year-old students. About the first (the IBM PC), the best comment I got was, 'What was the point of inventing that?'! I suggested you had to start somewhere, and the same student then added, 'They must have found it so frustrating'. How telling is that! With John Naughton's dates, another student commented, 'You're saying how recent all this is. To me, it all feels so old'.
Back to Douglas Adams:
… the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. … Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour [of] kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.
Sometimes I'm asked by colleagues why students should blog, and what Douglas Adams wrote back in 1999 would sit right in the middle of my answer. But you can approach the question from another angle altogether, by thinking about why teachers should blog. Martin Weller and Tony Hirst gave an OU presentation on 18 May about just this, available here. The presentation draws upon blog postings by Martin that I'd been reading last month. For example, Some more reasons to blog ('reasons why educators should blog'):
- It exposes the process …
- It provides a useful tool for engaging with other technologies …
- It's a good means of getting down, or building up, all those thoughts that never quite get in to journal papers.
These things cut both ways: a good ICT course would recognise the first two bullet-points as important reasons why students should be blogging and the third, with some adaptation, would be true for students, too, of course. (And teachers, of course, should blog for the same core reasons students should — the ones Douglas Adams lays out.)
Martin's earlier posting, Encouraging educators to blog, proffered other reasons, of which I would say that 'the economics of reputation' is also absolutely central to why our students should blog:
… increasingly one’s reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.
(Again, the other reasons he cites there also have something to say to students, allowing for the fact that his focus was on why educators should blog: engagement with your subject area; increased reflection; personal status and payback; organisational status; link to teaching; eating our own dog food.) In addition to these two postings, Martin's now written up his and Tony Hirst's workshop.
I have a great deal of respect for what's happening at the OU, so it's nice to be able to wind up with this from John Naughton, blogging today — Student blogging:
Tony Hirst pointed me to a lovely blog by a T189 student. It's a stunning example of the usefulness of blogging in education. It provides the student with a tool for publication and self-expression, and it provides very useful information for teachers (e.g. in this case about the difficulties T189 students are experiencing with our Flash-based tutorials). I wish more of our students would blog.
