“Computing is not about computers anymore. It’s about living,” Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of the MIT Lab, Being Digital (1995, p. 6).
“Creative classrooms today are ones where everyone is learning, including the teacher!” (Center for Media Literacy, 2003).
The quote above, by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, has intrigued me since I read it more than 25 years ago in his book, Being Digital. Even in 1995 I was feeling like I was living more and more of my life on a computer. Things called smart phones would become available within the next few years. We could suddenly hold a powerful computer in our hands and carry it around in our pockets.
If you have lived through the computer revolution like me, perhaps starting your journey with the purchase of a Commodore 64 computer, or a Tandy computer, or maybe the Apple II, then you know we have come a long way. There were four TV channels when I grew up, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Most of them signed off at about 2 am. There was no TV to watch for several hours. Radio stations signed off at night. Everything was closed on Sundays but hotels and gas stations. We could tune out and turn off the stream of information, and sometimes we didn’t have a choice. Programming stopped; it was not 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year. In addition, we can communicate over vast time zones and even cultures with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms. Just 30 years ago we could only communicate with another person globally through a telephone, and it was expensive to do so. Now we can communicate cheaply with mobile phones, websites, and social media, though the technology itself is not cheap.
What does all of this mean? Honestly, I’m not sure. I would welcome your thoughts on this topic. I think we’re all still figuring it all out. All this technology makes it easy to put your thoughts out there into the ether and to gather information from all those aspects called new (or digital) media. I once had a staff member, probably 15 years younger than me at the time, who thought more choices was always better. Even then I thought that probably wasn’t true, and I’m even more convinced of that now. The process of choosing among nearly infinite choices is overwhelming. Maybe your elementary school students and my college students are developing cognitive processes in their brains that will allow them to make some sense of it all. Neuroscientists now say that are brains remain highly plastic (adaptable) well into our adult years. You evidently can teach an old dog a new trick. It just might take longer than with the young pup. Being a competent communicator, especially for potentially global audiences, is going to take heavy-duty media savvy, what I would call media literacy for want of a better term.
“Better and more efficient delivery of what already exists is what most media executives think and talk about in the context of being digital. But like the Trojan horse, the consequences of this gift will be surprising. Wholly new content will emerge from being digital, as will new players, new economic models, and a likely cottage industry of information and entertainment providers,” Negroponte said. Of course I, and maybe you, too, immediately think of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tic Tok, YouTube, streaming videos, so he is foreseeing that future, which is our reality 25 years later.
During the past four years, I have been involved in the development of a new associate degree pathway in new media (or digital media) along with the development of a new course, titled “Introduction to Communication Technology,” to service this pathway within the Communications Division at Pima Community College.
The course will directly address the way new media is influencing culture and society, and it will provide instruction in how to become a literate consumer and producer of new media. In their introduction to their article in The American Behavior Scientist, Elizabeth Thoman and Tessa Jolls (2004), of the Center for Media Literacy, explain the need for educators to address this need:
“The convergence of media and technology in a global culture is changing the way we learn about the world and challenging the very foundations of education. No longer is it enough to be able to read the printed word; children, youth, and adults, too, need the ability to both critically interpret the powerful images of a multimedia culture and express themselves in multiple media forms. Media literacy education provides a framework and a pedagogy for the new literacy needed for living, working and citizenship in the 21st century. Moreover it paves the way to mastering the skills required for lifelong learning in a constantly changing world” (p. 18).
I appreciate Lev Manovich’s (2014) discussion of how to define new media and how this development in society may be just as profound, maybe even more so, than Gutenberg’s press:
… Just as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the nineteenth center had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern society and culture, today we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication.
This new revolution is arguably more profound than previous ones, and we are just beginning to register its initial effects … the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage, and distribution; it also affects all types of media – text, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions (p. 15).
Just as the printing press has made reading important for a democratic society throughout the nation’s history, the new media revolution is making media literacy essential for an educated and engaged citizen. As Crystal Beach (2015) expressed, “… My students need to better understand how authors of the multimodal messages they are reading daily … are positioning and potentially manipulating them” (p. 78).
In the context of discussing literacy and new media effects, a colleague of mine, Teresa Filipowicz, a former print journalist and broadcast journalism producer who now teaches communication and journalism courses at Pima Community College, mentions the importance of helping students to understand and navigate how new media advertising is tracking their movements and providing additional advertising, which are often presented as helpful suggestions. “Because you have purchased that pen, perhaps you would be interested in this one too,” she says. “If you are identifying with something about yourself by looking at this media, maybe you would be interested in this [product] too.”
Bronwyn T. Williams (2008) discussed an interesting aspect of this issue in considering how young people use the internet to explore their identities. “One of the more intriguing developments has been the way online technologies allow young people to play with their identities. The idea that individuals can create online personas that are in some ways different from the way the present themselves in their face-to-face encounters is well known” (p. 883).
In addition to providing instruction on defining media literacy and on providing guidance on how to critical to read new media, this new course outline includes an objective focusing on communication technology applications. We will have students create their own content and use their chosen methods of digital distribution.
A comforting message for those of us teaching in this area of new media is that there are no experts. “We – educators and students – are in these intersections together, and navigating them can be messy,” Beach (2015) said. “However, once we see that the past is always with us in the present, we will start to see that the mediated intersections are only preparing us for whatever the future may bring.”
What is exciting and daunting about teaching a course in communication and technology is that we are all students at this time, and that aspect can make the classroom a place of discovery and creativity. This work is criticial in our classrooms today, because our students need to learn to cope with this new technology.
In June 2013, just a five months prior to his untimely death, sociologist and communication scholar Clifford Nass gave a talk at TEDxStanford titled, “Are You Multitasking Your Life Away.”
“The brain is structurally obsessed with emotion,” Nass said. “We have parts of the brain devoted to positive emotions, to negative emotions, to detecting, producing, and managing emotion in faces, in voices, in words, in body postures, and in all sorts of other things. So, our brains are really good at emotion. All we have to do is to pay attention and to think about what we see … Emotional intelligence requires attention. But … to achieve that attention, we have to look. The challenge to that is something called Partial Media Displacement.”
Nass explained that theory as, “Every time a new technology or service appears, the first thing that happens to us is pretty obvious, it steals time from other information services. Movies stole time from books, radio stole time from movies, television stole time from radio, the internet stole time from television, et cetera. But media are seductive, so after they steal time from other information activities, they also steal from non-media activities. But what happens when we run out of non-media time to steal from? At that moment, there was an inflection point in history. Rather than stop trying to cram in more media use, “we did whatever we do when we have too many things to do and too little time to do it: We started to double-book media.”
But, as Nass explained, “The rate of media, new media, gradually accelerated, and then increasingly accelerated … Then we triple- and quadrupled-booked media.” That has resulted in some college students who “use four or more media at one time whenever they are using media. That means whenever they are writing a paper, they’re also listening to music, using Facebook, watching YouTube, texting, et cetera. So, there has been a tremendous change in the nature of paying attention with media.
What are the consequences of those changes? Nass asked. “Chronic media users pay a strong cognitive price … they find it very difficult to filter out irrelevant information. They have serious problems with managing working memory. They’re also suckers for irrelevancy; give them something irrelevant, and they cannot help but look at it. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, they’re even bad at multitasking. They can’t actually manage doing multiple things at one time, even though they do it all the time.”
The price of multitasking, as Nass explained it, is that high multitaskers are using an enormous amount of mental energy (as seen through MRI brain scans) on irrelevant tasks while also trying to do the main task. Because we only have one storehouse of brain activation, if you we are spending mental energy on irrelevant tasks, “you’re not focusing on the relevant.”
This split mental activity is not happening only with media. “What we think is happening, Nass said, “is that people are generating habits of mind that are a distraction, and it makes those interactions with other people an invitation to distraction as well.”
This has resulted in people having a meal together while each person is looking at their individual mobile phones, people enjoying the beach together while looking at their individual mobile phones, and children playing different video games on their individual mobile phones while sitting next to each other.
“This type of activity, people sitting side by side doing unrelated things right next to each other, is described by psychologists as parallel play,” Nass said. “It’s a healthy developmental step if you are two to four years old. By the time you are six or seven, you’re supposed to learn to play together and to interact, and that playing together in elementary, junior high, and high school, and college, and as adults helps us to learn the deeper more profound emotional rules. As we are playing together, we’re looking at each other, and we are learning from each other, and because we share an environment, we can understand appropriate emotional responses.” Instead, many people today are existing in their own virtual worlds, and if we don’t get practice relating to each other, we don’t learn to manage our emotions, especially negative emotions. “If we don’t get practice with that, we are not going to learn to have healthy emotional lives.”
From his research, Nass found that, “Kids who were heavy multitaskers, showed a remarkable number of deficits. They did use media when face-to-face; they did distract themselves when with other kids; they felt less normal about themselves, they had more friends who their parents thought were bad influences, and they had less sleep, which is associated with a number of social, emotional, as well as cognitive deficits … Was there anything that helped kids develop emotionally?” Nass said, “Face-to-face communication is absolutely magical.”
The introduction paragraph is incredible. The way you situated yourself within the same time frame of the quotes really captures your deep interest in using the digital space as a learning tool. For most of us, we embraced the idea of digital learning and social media only very recently and two sentences in, you’ve demonstrated your almost two decades long interest in the topic. Your prolonged exposure to the sphere of technology establishes your credibility right away, as you show the extended time of your expertise but also your hands-on experience. Also not to mention that the way you wrote the intro paragraph is a great example of a ‘hook.’
This was such a fun read. I learned a lot…