There are few things more tiresome than a group of ageing and effete academics sitting in a panel discussion boasting about their embrace of new technology. The present author has been unfortunate enough to endure many such sessions over the last decade or so – Deans of Faculty puffing up about “crowd sourcing”, Vice-Chancellors relating their first experience of “twitting”, Sociology professors droning on about “drilling data” from a new spreadsheet program. The uncritical and self-congratulatory tone of such sessions – “Gee, look at how techno-savvy I am. My, aren’t I up to date?” – is a form of narcissistic delusion that is at plague proportions in institutions of higher learning everywhere. It is even worse among educators in lower year levels. Everyone thinks that the more technology the better. Technology = education. It is, of course, nonsense. But we live in times when it is almost impossible to challenge the equation and those who do are quickly given redundancies to make way for ‘Next Gen’ academics who have no critical insights into the machines they use at all since they do not remember anything before the digital age.
It was unfortunately the lot of this present author to attend yet another ‘app launch’ by a bunch of esteemed professors last night, and it was exactly like all the others. Speaker after speaker stood up to relate how “excited” there were about the “endless possibilities” of the latest “collaborative project” between the egg-heads and the tekkies. In this case it was an “app” (how casually people use that ugliest of abbreviations) that uses “geo-spatial settings” to illuminate your mobile phone with “data” when you point it at certain landmarks. You hone your phone at a certain location and the “app” gives you “data” about the location’s history. The historians present at the launch were visibly aroused by this idea. Not only could it help tourists become “better informed”, we were told, but it was fantastically “educational” – a new device to “empower” the history student and to “smash” the old paradigms of classroom learning.
Moreover, this was just the beginning. At present the “app” merely displays photographs and a bit of text. But soon, soon!, we were assured, there would be video and sound bytes and 3D virtuality and a whole array of other bells and whistles. All on your smartphone. The word that was thrown around with abandon, used by numerous speakers, was “immersion”. Soon the technology would be “immersive”, we were told. Tourists and students alike would be “immersed” in data of every possible type. Everyone present nodded with approval.
During question time it fell upon this present writer to ask the difficult question: how is being “immersed” in data “empowering”? “It seems to me,” he said, “and it is my whole experience as an educator, and as a computer user, that being ‘immersed’ is an unpleasant and unedifying experience. In order to learn one must keep an objective and aloof position outside of the data, a position from which to view, or else you end up swamped, drowning, floundering with no direction, no perspective. Being ‘immersed’ is not good. You need to keep your head above water in order to breathe. There is nothing empowering about drowning in random data.” This was treated as an unwanted and incomprehensible objection, and after an uncomfortable silence the academic techno-orgy continued as if the question had never been raised. Technology is an unmitigated good, it seems. Anyone who raises any questions as to the wisdom of its applications is a dinosaur.
The present writer is entirely familiar with this. He’s been called a dinosaur and a Luddite often enough. In this particular case – this particular “app” – there is the uncomfortable fact that he doesn’t even own a mobile phone and thinks that mobile phones are an abomination however you use them. This is in India, where even the beggars own mobile phones! A modern Indian without a mobile phone is inconceivable. When you tell a modern Indian that you don’t own a mobile phone they look aghast as if to say ‘But how do you access your porn!?’ (Pornography, and not historical buildings, is by far the main matter of interest for mobile phone users on the sub-continent.) So there is the question of what this writer was doing at this app launch in the first place? And does he have the right to an opinion since he is not even a user of this technology?
In answer, he takes the view that – inevitable though the flood of ‘immersive’ technology may be – it is the right, and the duty, of thinking people to ask hard questions about the wise applications of machines that, quite obviously, are as socially corrosive as they are socially constructive. We live in a digital revolution, though. It is difficult to think outside of the pervasive paradigm that it brings with it. Yet that is precisely the work of academics and other thinking people. Our duty is not to cheer and chant – it is to question and caution. Alas, this almost never happens. Most academics are, instead, boring middle-aged wanna-bes over-eager to show how contemporary and ‘nerd savvy’ they are. On the whole, they are quite incapable of independent, critical thinking. On the whole, there is hardly a group of people in society today more sheep-like in their group-think and conformism. That, at least, is how this writer has experienced the academic world, and this particular “app” launch - with everyone happily wallowing in the confused relationship between 'immersion' and 'empowerment' - was another reminder of it.
Yours,
Harper McAlpine Black
No comments:
Post a Comment