Reformed English Curriculum Revisited 2

In my last post, The Reformed English Curriculum Revisited, I filled you in on a session I organized for the New York Society for General Semantics last year, a discussion related to the origin of media ecology. 

And even though there were several unrelated programs that followed, I thought I'd jump ahead here on Blog Time Passing and post about the follow-up session we did towards the end of last year. In contrast to the initial program, this one consisted of all local participants, mostly with an intimate knowledge of Neil Postman's work.

Here's the write-up:

On January 26th, 2018, we held the first panel discussion on this topic, and promised to follow it up with a second program held on November 28th, 2018, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Neil Postman's formal introduction of the term media ecology. The occasion was the 58th annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, held in Milwaukee on November 29, 1968. Neil Postman gave an address entitled "Growing Up Relevant" as the main part of a program session entitled Media Ecology: The English of the Future. This talk was later published as a book chapter in the anthology, High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited by Alvin C. Eurich, where it appeared under the title of, The Reformed English Curriculum.

In his 1968 address, Postman introduced media ecology as a field of inquiry that he defined as the study of media as environments. A year later, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, co-authored by  Charles Weingartner, he introduced “the Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein-Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan-Et Al. Hypothesis … that language is not merely a vehicle of expression, it is also the driver; and that what we perceive, and therefore can learn, is a function of our languaging processes.”  And in conjunction with the 1974 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics, Postman delivered an address entitled, Media Ecology: General Semantics in the Third Millennium, in which he described media ecology as "general semantics writ large."

This 50th anniversary offered us the opportunity to take up questions such as, what has media ecology and general semantics contributed to the field of education, to teaching and schooling, and what might be contributed in the future? What has media ecology and general semantics contributed to the study of language and the subject of English, and what might be contributed in the future? What can we learn about Neil Postman in particular, and his views on education, communication, and culture? To what extent have things changed over the past half century, and to what extent do they remain the same?

As for the participants on this program, here's the listing:

Thom Gencarelli, Professor and Chair of the Communication Department at Manhattan College

Terence P. Moran, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University

Michael Plugh, Professor of Communication at Manhattan College

Madeline Postman, Teacher in the New York City school system for over 20 years, currently teaching at the Corona Arts and Sciences Academy in Queens

and the program was moderated by NYSGS President Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

And here now is the recording of the session for you to look and listen:





 All things considered, it was an instructive and enriching discussion!

 

The Reformed English Curriculum Revisited

It has been a while since I shared one of our New York Society for General Semantics sessions here on Blog Time Passing. Yeah, I know, it's been a while since I've shared much of anything, you don't have to tell me. So let's reach back into the archives for this one, and for once a session that did not include me on the panel, although I do provide a bit of an introduction.

This goes back to January 26th, 2018, and the program title was The Reformed English Curriculum Revisited: A Panel Discussion. It was the evening before the annual board meeting of the Media Ecology Association, so I took advantage of the fact that we had a bunch of folks from out of town. And last year represented another significant milestone for media ecology, which I explain in the description of the program, which I'll provide here now:

At the 58th annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, held in Milwaukee on November 29, 1968, Neil Postman gave an address entitled "Growing Up Relevant" as the main part of a program session entitled Media Ecology: The English of the Future. This talk was later published as a book chapter in the anthology, High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited by Alvin C. Eurich, where it appeared under the title of The Reformed English Curriculum.

In conjunction with the 1974 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics, Postman delivered an address entitled, Media Ecology: General Semantics in the Third Millennium, emphasizing the link between the two. A similar connection was made in the 1969 book he co-authored with Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, which introduced “the Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein-Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan-Et Al. Hypothesis … that language is not merely a vehicle of expression, it is also the driver; and that what we perceive, and therefore can learn, is a function of our languaging processes.”

Postman's 1968 address marks the formal introduction of the term media ecology, which Postman used as the name for a field of inquiry that he defined as the study of media as environments. As this year marks the 50th anniversary of that talk, it seemed only fitting to revisit "The Reformed English Curriculum," and the equally seminal, "Media Ecology: General Semantics in the Third Millennium," as our first NYSGS event of 2018. What can we learn about the history of media ecology as a field, its relation to general semantics, to the study of language and the subject of English? What can we learn about Neil Postman in particular, and his views on education, communication, and culture? To what extent have things changed over the past half century, and to what extent do they remain the same?

We had the rare opportunity of presenting a program consisting entirely of out-of-towners who have converged on New York City to attend the annual Media Ecology Association board meeting.

  
As for the participants on this program, here's the listing:

Stephanie Bennett, Professor of Communication and Media Ecology and Fellow for Student Engagement at Palm Beach Atlantic University in South Florida, and author of the Within the Walls trilogy, which employs fiction to explore the future of digital media, relationship sustainability, and community.

Fernando Gutiérrez, head of the Division of Humanities and Education at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (State of Mexico Campus), and author and co-editor of several titles about media.

Paolo Granata, holder of the Marshall McLuhan and Print Culture professorship at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, after spending 15 years at the University of Bologna, Italy, and author of Arte in Rete; Arte, Estetica e Nuovi Media; Mediabilia; and Ecologia dei Media.

and moderating the discussion, Edward Tywoniak, Professor of Communication, Director of the W. M. Keck Media Lab and Program Director for the Digital Studies major at Saint Mary’s College of California, Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics, editor of ETC: A Review of General Semantics, and President of the Media Ecology Association.

And here it is for you to see and hear:










It was an evening that was intriguing and unique!

On the Role of Play for Learning & Language

So, how about another New York Society for General Semantics session? Sure, why not, you say, and I thank you for being so agreeable! This one took place on December 6th of 2017, and the result was a really interesting discussion, at least I think so.

Here's the description of the program:




 

Play, Learning, and Language

A Panel Discussion

General semantics has long been concerned with the uses, misuses, and abuses of language. As the primary form of human symbolic communication, language is a tool through which we learn about our environment, make sense of our surroundings, evaluate and act upon our world. Language is the foundation of human intelligence and time-binding, our capacity for learning, both individually and collectively.

The processes of learning and education are also among our most central concerns. Over the years, leading educationists such as Neil Postman, Ashley Montagu, and Jerome Bruner have been associated with general semantics. And that should come as no surprise since general semantics represents an educational movement in its own right, one devoted to incorporating the benefits of the scientific method to human relations, improving our methods of evaluation and understanding, and maximizing human potential.

Early in the 20th century, play was recognized as an important part of our learning processes, one that is closely connected to our capacity for symbol use, language learning, and cognitive and emotional development. The role of play and creativity in education has gained increasingly greater emphasis in recent decades, along with greater interest in the interactions and interdependencies among speech and language, literacy and media, and art and play, as they all relate to learning.

Our panelists discuss the relationships between play, learning, and language, and these related topics. It was a program that was most certainly elucidating and enlightening!

The participants on this program were:

Robert Albrecht, Professor of Media Arts at New Jersey City University, author of Mediating the Muse: A Communications Approach to Music, Media, and Cultural Change (2004), and a musician and songwriter, his two CDs are A Tale of Two Cities (2012), consisting of original songs about Jersey City and Hoboken, and Song of the Poet (2008), consisting of poems by Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, and others set to music. He is currently co-authoring a book tentatively entitled, The Arts as Pedagogy in the Age of Digital Technology: Teaching as a Creative Activity.

Margaret M. Cassidy, Professor and Chair of Communications at Adelphi University and Past President of the New York State Communication Association, author of BookEnds: The Changing Media Environment of American Classrooms (2004), and the recently published Children, Media, and American History: Printed Poison, Pernicious Stuff, and Other Terrible Temptations (2017).

Michael Plugh, Professor of Communication at Manhattan College, Immediate Past President of the New York State Communication Association, Internet Officer and Executive Board member of the Media Ecology Association, and member of the New York Society for General Semantics Board of Directors, currently researching innovative initiatives in schooling.

Oh, and the moderator was none other than yours truly. And here's the video:





I think this was one of my all time favorites NYSGS sessions! 

Success and GS

 So, I know it's been awhile, another bit of a hiatus, life happening while I was making other plans, that sort of thing, but I will try to get back on track, at least a bit. And let me start with a post about a podcast interview that took place back in August, and was published on September 12th, 2017. Here's a rather cool and groovy preview video for the podcast:







The interviewer was Jeff Bogaczyk, who was finishing up his PhD in communication at Duquesne University, and does a podcast series called Mind for Life. As he explains it:

Who Am I?

My name is Jeff Bogaczyk and I write about and produce a podcast on personal development. I am very interested in the intersection between our thoughts and actions and explore this in my writing and podcast. I hope you enjoy!

What is Mind For Life?

Mind for Life is a podcast/blog designed with your best life in mind based on the idea that how you think greatly affects the way you live. This seems obvious at first glance but a deeper probe into the question reveals how important this fact is, and also how often it is forgotten in our daily activity. The majority of our life experience is done on “autopilot.” What this means is that our actual lived experience is comprised of thousands of things each day that affect what we choose to do, how we respond to people, the choices we make, and the actions we take. There are so many factors involved that we cannot consciously be aware of all of them and so our brains “choose” for us based upon past experiences and decisions. Our brains act for us and make “autopilot” decisions beneath our conscious awareness.

Of course some of these decisions are minor and don’t have major affects on our lives–we are tired of sitting so we stand, we stretch our arms, we fidget in our chair because we are uncomfortable. Usually, we aren’t aware that we are doing these things because it happens subconsciously. However, there are other decisions our brains make for us that have greater consequences in our lives. How we respond in a conflict situation with someone we love, for example. See, our brains have been “programmed” to respond in these instances based upon the past experiences in our lives. In other words, our environment has taught us how to respond simply by experiencing things and events. To use the conflict example–we usually respond to conflict the way we have been “taught”–not intentionally, necessarily–but by the examples of the people that we have been around and grown up with. Our parents, our household environment, our friendships, and other relationships all influence how we learn about managing conflict. So, if we have grown up and lived in an environment that has been characterized by shouting, slamming doors, demeaning others, etc. in conflict situations, we learn that unconsciously and that becomes the “default” for how our brains operate in similar situations.

We Can Change

The good news is that we can change our default thinking patterns by establishing intentional, productive thinking processes in our life. Recent research into our cognitive development has shown that our brains have a quality called neuroplasticity. This basically means that our brains, our thinking patterns, our thought processes are still mold-able and can be adjusted and improved. This is good news because we all understand, if we are honest with ourselves, that we have areas in our lives where we can improve. Self-awareness is the ability to see those areas of weakness in our own lives. The challenge is finding ways to correct them. This is where communication can make a difference.

Mindful Communication

Really, if you think about it, thinking is simply a process of communicating with ourselves in a particular direction. When we think, we enter an internal dialogue with ourselves where we ask questions, provide answers, state premises’ and hopefully solve problems and come up with solutions and answers. This podcast/blog is basically about helping to turn our attention to this entire process as it is taking place in our lives and helping to establish proactive thinking patterns that will, in time, provide better outcomes and a better life. If our default thinking patterns in particular aspects of our life are dysfunctional due to bad experiences in our past, then the default thought process will result in a habitual action that results in a destructive outcome. Think of it like this. Though the “computer” model of brain function has many problems, in this area we might be able to say if the programming is bad, the output will be bad. Garbage in, garbage out as they say.

The solution? Though we can’t always fix what goes in, we can take steps to address these inputs in constructive and productive ways. Changing our thinking involves self-awareness–a realization in all facets of what has happened to us and where our areas of difficulty lie. Secondly it involves education–learning about what is really happening, how these processes are taking place and how we can respond positively and productively. This is what Mind For Life is all about. Join with us on the journey!

Jeff has been doing very impressive work, and we originally connected via his interest in media ecology and participation in communication conferences. Given the nature of his series, it was only natural that the discussion emphasized general semantics, and it seemed only fitting to get into Wendell Johnson's general semantics concept of the IFD disease. 

Jeff incorporates the connection in his blog post related to the podcast: 3 Powerful Leadership Lessons From General Semantics And Media Ecology. You can read what he wrote over on his blog, I'll just note here that the three lessons he mentions are: 1. Develop operational definitions; 2. Watch out for idealization; and 3. Avoid abstract jargon and leadership clichés. His explanation of these three ideas and the overall discussion leading up to it are worth reading, so I recommend checking it out.

As for the podcast itself, can listen to it via this link: MFL 22–Dr. Lance Strate: Success and IFD Disease. I do think it turned out rather well, don't you agree? And here's the custom pic he included:

You can download the podcast via that link, and there's a bio and list of my books on the same page, and some links, which I don't need to include here. But I think the following items Jeff also includes are worth a little cut and paste. The first is a list of Podcast Time Stamps:

Podcast Time Stamps

[5:51] – Dr. Strate tells what Media Ecology is all about and explains General Semantics.

[7:48] – Lance describes how General Semantics can help us in thinking about words and how we use them in our lives.

[10:03] – Dr. Strate describes how General Sematics can help us when thinking about success.

[11:00] – Lance talks about IFD disease: Idealization, frustration and demoralization. A process that occurs when we use our words as high level abstractions instead of more specifically.

[17:13] – How operational definitions can help to prevent IDF disease. Operational definitions prevent us from idealizing any given term or goal in our lives.

[18:42] – How General Semantics is an attempt to take scientific method and generalize it to human relations.

[21:26] – Lance talks about his own personal “operational definition” of success. Specifically about looking at accomplishments and completing tasks as realistic expectations instead of idealized abstractions.

[24:00] – How pride and status are related to success and accomplishment. For Lance, it’s more about “going with the flow” and following the path that rose up before him.

[25:30] – There is also a component about being realistic about what you are able to achieve.

[26:22] – How Lance finds the motivation to write as extensively as he does – it’s about committing to things and leveraging his sense of obligation to deliver on what he promises someone.

And the second is Jeff's list of Top Learning Moments:

Top learning moments

Much of success is related to your definition of success. From a General Semantics perspective this has to do with creating an “operational definition” that allows you to pursue something that isn’t a generalization or abstraction.

IFD disease – the idea of having “idealistic” expectations that will never come to pass turns into frustration and demoralization. If you find yourself frustrated or demoralized, ask yourself if you aren’t pursuing some idealistic end and then think about how you can make that more realistic and practical.

Committing to doing something leverages the psychological power of obligation. When we commit to something, we have a stronger tendency to accomplish it because other people expect it of us. So, to accomplish more, it may be helpful to say “yes” rather than “no” when someone asks us to do something outside of our comfort zone.

 

All in all, I'd say the outcome of this interview interaction was, indeed, a success!

Media Literacy and Media Ancestry

So, last year media literacy maven Renee Hobbs published an anthology she edited entitled, Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy Through Personal Narrative through Temple University Press. The volume includes a chapter I wrote for Renee on Marshall McLuhan, in case you were wondering. Here's the write-up for the volume:

Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative provides a wide-ranging look at the origins, concepts, theories, and practices of the field. This unique, exciting collection of essays by a range of distinguished scholars and practitioners offers insights into the scholars and thinkers who fertilized the minds of those who helped shape the theory and practice of digital and media literacy education.

Each chapter describes an individual whom the author considers to be a type of "grandparent." By weaving together two sets of personal stories⏤that of the contributing author and that of the key ideas and life history of the historical figure under their scrutiny⏤major concepts of digital media and learning emerge.

And here is the Table of Contents:

Introduction ■ Renee Hobbs

1 Historical Roots of Media Literacy ■ Renee Hobbs
2 David Weinberger on Martin Heidegger ■ David Weinberger
3 Lance Strate on Marshall McLuhan ■ Lance Strate
4 Dana Polan on Roland Barthes ■ Dana Polan
5 Cynthia Lewis on Mikhail Bakhtin ■ Cynthia Lewis
6 Srividya Ramasubramanian on Gordon Allport ■ Srividya Ramasubramanian
7 Michael RobbGrieco on Michel Foucault ■ Michael RobbGrieco
8 Gianna Cappello on Theodor Adorno ■ Gianna Cappello
9 Douglas Kellner on Herbert Marcuse ■ Douglas Kellner
10 Henry Jenkins on John Fiske ■ Henry Jenkins
11 Amy Petersen Jensen on Bertolt Brecht ■ Amy Petersen Jensen
12 Donna E. Alvermann on Simone de Beauvoir ■ Donna E. Alvermann
13 Jeremiah Dyehouse on John Dewey ■ Jeremiah Dyehouse
14 Renee Hobbs on Jerome Bruner ■ Renee Hobbs
15 Vanessa Domine on Neil Postman ■ Vanessa Domine
16 Peter Gutierrez on Scott McCloud ■ Peter Gutierrez
17 Susan Moeller on Roland Barthes ■ Susan Moeller

Epilogue ■ Renee Hobbs

And you may notice that the title of each chapter follows a strict formula, so I want to stress that this was not a bit of narcissism on my part. In fact, the title I had given for my essay, not knowing that it would take this final form, was, "The Medium, the Message, and Me: Marshall McLuhan and Media Education" (just so you know).

By the way, Renee's Introduction to the volume can be read online on the Temple University Press's website. And of course the book itself is available for purchase there, and on Amazon:

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And just recently, Renee launched a website entitled Grandparents of Media Literacy that you might want to go check out. Here's the welcome message:

Welcome to the Grandparents of Media Literacy website! You can explore the many people who have influenced the field of media literacy through their work, ideas and creative contributions. These intellectual grandparents may come from fields including philosophy, sociology, literature and more. You can contribute to the website by uploading information about an author, scholar or creative individual whose work influenced your own. You can also share your own story of how an intellectual grandparent influenced your work in media literacy.

And here is some further explanation of the site:

A CROWD-SOURCED NARRATIVE APPROACH TO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Reflect on your experience with media, technology, society and culture and think about the writers, artists, filmmakers and others who have influenced your work in media literacy. People with interests in media literacy come from a variety of fields, including writing and composition, media psychology, literacy education, technology in society, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and communication arts. As an transdisciplinary topic, media literacy scholars and practitioners do not all share the same foundational knowledge. We do not all rely on the same canonical texts that "tell the story" of our shared values and beliefs.

Personal storytelling can help people discover how we have been influenced by the generation of scholars and thinkers who came before us. Anyone can upload an intellectual grandparent, providing information about their work that will enable readers to understand their key ideas and contributions. Anyone can share a story about any grandparent, explaining "how they influenced you." Through this website, we aim to discover threads of previously overlooked connection to understand the subjectively-experienced history of media literacy education around the world.

So, anyone can sign up, log in, and leave their comments and stories. As one of the contributors to the anthology, there's a page already set up for me. Not the best photo of me, but what can you do? And there's an excerpt from my chapter that can be found under the profile set up for McLuhan, along with any other comments left by others (as of this writing, there's one other comment on McLuhan). It can also be found on my page, under "Stories" and, why not, right here as well:

The experience of suddenly getting McLuhan has been described as akin to a religious experience by some or in more general terms as an epiphany; to use a term popular during the sixties, I was able to grok McLuhan (grok was coined by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land to refer to an extreme form of understanding and empathy). In visual terms, it was the kind of experience depicted in comic strips of a light bulb being switched on over a character’s head, which would certainly be fitting, given that McLuhan argued that electric technology and electronic media constituted the basis of a revolution that was reversing the course of some three millennia of Western civilization.

Television was the specific electronic medium that had pushed our culture over the edge, he argued, and one of the characteristics of television was its low resolution image, which McLuhan compared to that of the printed cartoon, which elevated the comics medium in importance (see Scott McCloud’s insightful, McLuhan-inspired graphic nonfiction, Understanding Comics [1993]).

This idea had no small significance for me because I had been reading comics since before I could read (my parents read them to me), despite the fact that the hybrid medium was often disparaged by teachers and others arguing in defense of elitist literary culture. The fact that comics crossed—or, if you like, transgressed—the boundary between literate and pictorial media contributed to my own developing awareness of differences among media, differences in their biases towards different types of content, differences in their effects on the ways we think, feel, act, perceive, and organize ourselves, differences that McLuhan famously summed up by saying, “The medium is the message” (1964, p. 7).

The image of a light bulb turning on is a visual metaphor for an idea (the word is derived from the Greek term for seeing) and perhaps the most basic way of describing the effect of my reading The Medium Is the Massage was that I was suddenly able to see the world from an entirely new perspective (in addition to being a field or intellectual tradition, media ecology has often been referred to as a perspective, although I prefer to use approach in order to avoid the visual metaphor). Or, to invoke Aldous Huxley’s well-known phrase, used to describe his experiments with hallucinogens, the “doors of perception” suddenly opened for me. The reference to perception is particularly significant because McLuhan’s specific approach to media ecology emphasized the primary role that sensory organs play in our thought processes.

Although there are differences between media literacy and media ecology, there is some significant overlap, as can be seen by the inclusion of Neil Postman as well as Marshall McLuhan in the anthology, as well as comics creator and theorist Scott McCloud. And depending on who you ask, other "grandparents" such as Heidegger, Barthes, Bakhtin, Foucault, Brecht, Dewey, and Bruner would also be characterized as media ecologists (not that anyone on that list would necessarily be excluded). 

The Grandparents website itself is an interesting experiment in fostering participation in this project, and perhaps exploring possibilities for a second edition or volume of the anthology. So I would certainly recommend it to you, to at least go take a look, and maybe even sign up, log on, and share your stories.

On Media Ecology Books and Book Series

In my previous post, A Good Causality, I neglected to mention that our new co-edited anthology, Taking Up McLuhan's Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality, was published as part of the UK publisher Intellect's new book series on media ecology, which is being edited by my friend and fellow media ecologist Phil Rose. 

This represents the third book series devoted to the field of media ecology to have been launched. The first one, which I proposed and was supervisory editor for, came courtesy of Hampton Press, back circa 1994-1995. After publishing many books in the series for well over a decade, Hampton decided to stop publishing new books of any kind, the owner was essentially retiring, so although the books that were published would continue to be sold, this essentially brought the series to a close.

For several years, there was no active book series devoted to media ecology, and I have to credit Phil Rose for the push to find a new publisher to start one up. It was at his urging that, following the successful publication of Amazing Ourselves to Death, that I proposed a new book series to my publisher, Peter Lang, which was accepted with the title, "Understanding Media Ecology" (that's a title I was going to use for a book of my own, but Peter Lang wanted to distinguish the new series from the old Hampton Press series, and like that title, so I gave it up).

So far, three books have been published in the Peter Lang Series: the second edition of Bob Logan's Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan; Bob's collaboration with Marshall McLuhan that had never been published, with additional material updating it for the contemporary media environment, The Future of the Library: From Electric Media to Digital Media; and Dennis Cali's attempt to produce a media ecology textbook, Mapping Media Ecology: An Introduction to the Field.

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The next book in the series is one that is very near and dear to my heart, and is already listed for pre-order:

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But more on that when the time comes...

In the meantime, as I mentioned, Phil Rose was also able to successfully propose a new media ecology series for Intellect, and Taking Up McLuhan's Cause was the first book published in the series, and hard on its heals was another anthology, this one edited by Phil, entitled Confronting Technopoly: Charting a Course Towards Human Survival. The term technopoly was coined by Neil Postman, and the book follows up on his major media ecological work, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

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As you can see, this second offering from Intellect is also, unfortunately, only available in hardcover, and priced for library sales. In any event, here is the blurb describing the collection:

In 1992, Neil Postman presciently coined the term “technopoly” to refer to “the surrender of culture to technology.” This book brings together a number of contributors from different disciplinary perspectives to analyze technopoly both as a concept and as it is seen and understood in contemporary society. Contributors present both analysis of and strategies for managing socio-technical conflict, and they also open up a number of fruitful new lines of thought around emerging technological, social, and even psychological forms.

And here are the contents (you'll probably notice a familiar name early on):

Introduction: The Question Concerning Technopoly
Phil Rose 

Part I: Contextualization 

Chapter 1: Contextualizing Technopoly
Lance Strate 

Part II: Digital Manifestations  

Chapter 2: The Omnipresent Opiate: Rethinking Internet Addiction in the Network Era
Ryan S. Eanes 

Chapter 3: Probing the Media Ecology of Self-Tracking Technologies:  A Postmanist Critique and Defence
Yoni Van Den Eede 

Chapter 4: Navigating the Mobile Village
Zack Stiegler and Nick Artman 

Chapter 5: Insolent Networks: The Auto-Mated Social Life
Gary Kenton 

Part III: Ideology and Geopolitical Considerations  

Chapter 6: Striking Symbols: Re-Sounding Words from Leonard Cohen to Neil Postman
Ruthanne Wrobel 

Chapter 7: Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing! The End of Progress and the Beginning of a Third Way
Arthur W. Hunt III 

Chapter 8: Divinizing Technology and Violence: Technopoly, the Warfare State, and the Revolution in Military Affairs
Phil Rose 

Chapter 9: Posthuman Postmanism: Confronting Technopoly with Deep Media Ecology
Niall Stephens 

Part IV: Confrontations: From Education to Liberation  

Chapter 10: Postman’s Hope: Rethinking the Role of Education in Technopoly
Ellen Rose 

Chapter 11: The New Social Media Curriculum: Confronting Technopoly with Education
Geraldine E. Forsberg 

Chapter 12: Black Mountain College: Experiments in Form
Michael Plugh 

Chapter 13: The Arts of Liberation in the Age of Technopoly
Edward E. Tywoniak

A very nice collection of work indeed, and an important addition to the media ecology literature. It may be too much for most folks to buy, but again, maybe you can beg, borrow, or steal a copy!

Can You Hear Me Now?

Following up on my last post, here's another one of my op-eds from the Jewish Standard, this one published on September 2nd, just as the new school year was beginning:

As I begin my 33rd year in higher education, I can’t help but notice that my students are getting younger and younger every year—while I myself haven’t changed a bit.

Now, if you’re thinking that maybe I’ve gotten things mixed up a bit, that maybe it only seems that way from my point of view, I invoke in my defense Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. But rather than continue to argue the point, let me share another observation with you:

Cell phones have caused my students’ bladders to shrink. I know, I know, it may be hard to see the connection, but the correlation is quite clear. It used to be that students could sit through a class of approximately an hour and fifteen minutes without a problem, and it was rare that someone would need to get up in the middle of class to go to the restroom. It would happen, of course—we all are human, after all—but not very often.

But somehow, increasingly in recent years, students have needed to go more and more often. And this coincides with the fact that, just like the rest of us, they have come to carry their mobile devices with them at all times, including to class.

Many of them try to hide their cell phones, keeping them on their laps, which is why I think the devices are having a physiological effect. I do try to point out, by the way, that this maybe isn’t the best place to put your cell phone, at least not if you plan on having children some day. I point out that mobile devices do generate electromagnetic radiation, and that we really don’t know for sure how that affects the body. Do you really want to take the chance?

Of course, I know that the sudden rise in students excusing themselves during class is not due to the effects of cellular signals on their bodies, but rather to the effects of text messages on their minds. The magnetic pull of our mobile devices is altogether extraordinary, and affects all of us, young and old. There even is a new word to describe the compulsion, FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out. The fear is nothing new, but never before has it been so intense and unrelenting.

And while our smartphones may be the cause of it all, it has nothing to do with the fact that they are telephones. Remember the days when everyone had a distinctive ringtone, often a few seconds of a favorite song? When every day we saw ads that urged us to buy special ringtones from a selection of thousands? Remember how we spent a considerable amount of time deciding which one to set as the mark of our own individual identity?

Funny how those days have come and gone. And the upside is that there are fewer instances when cellphones ring at inopportune times because their users forgot to put them on silent (or turn them off, something almost no one does anymore). They don’t interrupt services, or a theatrical performance, or a class, very much any more.

The ringing was more intrusive, but at least we all were embarrassed when it happened, and often enough would not answer it. Texts and status updates are nowhere near as obtrusive as ringing phones, but for that reason they are so much harder to ignore. The desire—for most of us the need—to check the new message, and to respond to it immediately, is all but overwhelming.

And you may think that no one sees the light from your phone shining in the darkened movie theater, but we do. That’s why theaters now ask their patrons to turn them off.

And you may think that no one sees you reading your messages or even responding to them during services, but we do. Back in the day, when a New York team was in the World Series and a game was being played during Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, there might be a congregant who came to services with a transistor radio and earpiece. But he (inevitably it was a he) would step outside the sanctuary or shul to get the update. He wouldn’t listen to the game in the pews, and everyone understood that this was a singular exception.

And my students may think that their professors don’t see what they’re doing, but we do. We can see that they’re looking down and tap tap tapping on something with their fingers. Or for the ones with laptops, we can tell when their eyes are glued to the screen, and they’re furiously typing away far and beyond what might be warranted by taking notes in class.

So why do they get up and leave during class? Perhaps it is out of a sense that they’re doing something inappropriate for class, but Sherry Turkle offers a different explanation in her insightful book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. They are seeking solitude so that they can focus on crafting a response without being distracted by the class. They see it as editing and creating the best possible version of themselves.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Turkle is rightly concerned about the negative effects of our smartphones on all of us—and especially on the young. That we forget or never learn how to deal with boredom, how to let our minds wander, how to daydream, and how to interact with others in a meaningful way. Messaging means never having to apologize, not really, not in a way that forces you to recognize the effect you have had on others, to see it in their faces. Messaging means you never have to stumble through awkward silences, difficult exchanges, never have to go the effort of really relating to someone else. Conversation among friends, family members, and co-workers is becoming a lost art.

Texting is safe, unless of course we’re driving. Think about how much concern there was about talking on cellphones and driving, and how much worse it is to be texting or looking at updates on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram! Emotionally, texting is safe, and face-to-face interaction is risky. But without risk, there is no growth. And dialogue is the best way to achieve what Martin Buber called I-You relationships, relating to other people as people, as opposed to the I-It relationships, relating to others as objects.

In many ways, messaging and especially updates give us neither I-You nor I-It relationships. Instead, they simply reflect back our own selves, mirror images that show only the surface: I-I relationships. And this brings to mind the warning given by Echo to Narcissus: Better watch yourself!

In his recent book, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that the Hebrew Bible was meant to be heard, not read, and the stories of family conflict in the Torah, which often take unexpected turns, should be understood in this context, one where you cannot see the text in its entirety, only hear the narrative as it unfolds, step by step.

. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .

It may be hard to believe, but reading silently was all but unknown until after the invention of the printing press. And this is so very important, because when we listen, we listen together, as one, but when we read silently, even if we read the same text at the same time, we read as isolated individuals.

Dialogue, discussion, debate, and devotion are communal activities, very much so in the tradition of Judaism. Whether it’s learning, praying, conversing, or simply being, we all need to put our mobile devices down and just listen. Listen to others, listen to the world, listen to ourselves.

After all, that still small voice that Elijah heard was not a text message.

Can you hear me now?

On Blackboard

So, if you're in academia, you probably know more than a little about Blackboard. No, not the pirate, that's Blackbeard, although there is a connection of sorts, given piracy's association with digital media. And I'm not talking about the old fashioned educational technology of the chalkboard, either.

No, this is about a form of new media and digital technology used exclusively by educational institutions, brought to us by Blackboard, Inc., and its proprietary learning management system.

If you're a student, you most probably have used it for some of your classes at least. If you teach, maybe you use it, maybe you don't. For those of us who don't use it, some avoid Blackboard because they don't care for such technologies at all. 

Others, including new media mavens such as myself, are critical of it as a system and prefer to use tools that can be used outside of academia, such as those provided by Google. Doing so makes more sense if you're studying new media, and if you want to prepare students for working with new media outside of the ivory tower.

I do admit, though, that for other kinds of classes, I usually don't bother with the system, and opt for good old fashioned face-to-face interaction, and printed documents. It's not that I've never used Blackboard or would never use it in the future. I just don't love it.

Which brings me to a little article that was published last April 13th in Fordham's student newpaper, The Ram. The title was the piece is Blackboard as a Blight to Fordham Technology (I believe I gave them the Blackboard as a Blight, bit, prone as I am to hyperbole, and alliteration). The article was authored by Margarita Artoglou and Kristen Santer, in case you were wondering, and it begins like this:

The use of technology in the classrooms at Fordham can be extremely varied. One class may rely on technology, while another completely disregards it. Although students may bemoan the small bandwidth of Fordham Wi-Fi or the occasional faulty smartboard, most professors find that Fordham’s IT services and technology offerings are average compared to other schools.

Now as it continues we come to a relevant point:

Fordham offers several workshops to help get professors accustomed to new technology offerings and IT updates. Some of the workshops include introductions to SMARTBoards, Blackboard and creating and editing video files. Professor Lance Strate also agreed with the general consensus, “It’s a progression for sure, but I have seen schools that are much worse off than we are as far as not having [technological resources].”

Umm, I don't think the quote quite reflects what I was talking about, but let's say there's a spectrum, and maybe Fordham is somewhere in the middle, with our level of technology not as good as it could be, but better than a number of other schools. Of course, in some ways it would be better to have no technology at all than to have some technology that doesn't work quite work, and that leaves everyone feeling frustrated.

Be that as it may, let's turn to my friend, former student, and colleague, now teaching at Manhattan College, Mike Plugh, for a comment:

The continuous problem that professors seem to have with Fordham’s technology is Blackboard. Michael Plugh, a Communication and Media Studies professor, finds it frustrating. “Everything at Fordham is pretty straightforward, except Blackboard,” he said. “I’m sort of unwilling to get invested in Blackboard because I’m not convinced it has a life beyond itself.”

A scholar after my own heart, let me echo Mike's sentiments:;

Other dissatisfied professors with Blackboard were not as nice as Plugh. “I hate Blackboard,” Professor Lance Strate said. “I understand why it’s used but I think it’s a really badly designed system.” It seems that discontent may be an understatement of the professors’ feelings about Blackboard. It clearly seems to cause more problems instead of making them simpler and more convenient.

That's right, baby, I tell it like it is. But am I lone voice crying out in the wilderness? Maybe not:

Strate is not alone in terms of his problems with Blackboard. Many professors dismiss the system completely and use alternative, free software to communicate with their students. Among them is Professor Cornelius Collins, who finds Google Drive to be a much smoother user experience than Blackboard. “There are fewer steps [with Google Drive],” Collins said. “It’s integrated with students email and it suits my purposes. I find that Blackboard has built in so much functionality that it’s hard to do it in a streamlined way.”

 And then there's that important tenet in investigative journalism—follow the money trail:

At the point where professors are shunning paid-for software in favor of free substitutes, it is clear that Blackboard represents a blight on Fordham’s technological progress. Furthermore, if professors are choosing not to use Blackboard, then the university is needlessly wasting money on the program that could instead be put toward more fruitful pursuits.

All right now, let's cut to the chase, get to the nitty gritty, and hear from the students:

In addition, many Fordham students are disillusioned by Blackboard. “It’s completely disorganized. I never know what assignments are posted for what day,” Nicole Cappuccio, FCRH ‘18, said.

Students have also expressed distaste with the way that professors under-utilize the application. “None of my professors ever use the grading system on Blackboard either, and I think that’s a waste when I could be keeping tabs on my grades that way,” said Cappuccio.

And now, bringing the opinion-oriented article to a conclusion, here's what Artoglou and Santer have to say:

It is quite clear that Blackboard is an inferior platform for grading and source materials, especially when free platforms like Google Drive and WordPress are easily accessible. Fordham definitely needs to update Blackboard, either to a better platform or to a more workable interface with fewer bugs. However, the question becomes whether a university-wide platform like Blackboard is even necessary. Professors can just as easily use Google Drive and WordPress, and often prefer to.

Perhaps instead of spending money teaching professors how to use Blackboard, it could offer programs to help teach students basic technology, software and coding skills.  

 And there you have it!  And I certainly second the sentiment regarding teaching students about technology and coding, as a kind of literacy, media, digital, etc., that would go a long way in contributing to their education, when coupled with a sound liberal arts curriculum that helps them to learn how to think, how to think well (and critically), and simply, how to think.