Essences
On its website (the old name for a wiki), the Kaiser Family Foundation says "our product is information." Interesting. So was John Grierson's. What information is actually gleaned from a produced work is my question, of course. Do the consumers of the information hear/perceive the intended message of the work/author/creator? Is the intended message of a work the same thing as its essence? Somehow, I don't think so. But, Wayne Dyer (Dr.) made a big production of the "Power of Intention." I have not heard him talk about essence.
We saw that the Kaiser report contained some, what I thought to be, alarming statistics. Those representative statistics of the general youth population are, however, biased. The report tells of a population sample of 2002 youths that has an oversample of African American and Hispanic students. I have not read the entire report, just a few lines. So far though, so interesting. The intention of the report was to draw attention to media use among a the grade 3-12 student population. The message: look at what's going on in the lives of youth. The essence of the report? Not quite sure. But here's a looper: What's the essesnce of time? Why care about the 7 hrs and 38 mins youth spends every day with media devices? Perhaps Roman's comment in class about how electronic device based games actually are benefiting youth is what needs to be heeded. I won't expand anymore on this now because I want to work with other ideas in this post. This means that I will use this week's post as "creative time" - Goolge gives 20% of the work time to employees to do whatever they want and from that time comes half of the ideas they actually use... see http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html. Perhaps any tangential hyperlinking done here will generate better reflective fodder.
Since we are getting into the essence of things, I have chosen to follow the lead of some others (we know who you are: Julye, Roman) and post TED talks that I heard about today during the (IEP) inservice I attended in Winnipeg. The one above says the reward-coercive method is just wrong. In this one, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jan_chipchase_on_our_mobile_phones.html, the cell phone is shown to have become part of the basic human survival kit. Knowing that, how does one see the essence of technology? And I guess I should ask this question, "What is the essesnce of information?" given that I began this entry referring to information.
Information and technology. Hmm. Do you remember a Rowntree chocolates commercial with actor David Niven that was on TV years ago that had in it the line "Christmas and Rowntree go together like the fire in the hearth, and the warmth in your heart?" So goes information and technology, to some degree anyway. Can the essence of technology be information? What if the essence of technology was education? John Grieson proposed that "education is the medium of all media," so why not play with the idea of technology's essence being education. What technology may do in the long run, and here I am partly answering the question that I posed during class about what technology does to us, is bring us to a fresh but heightened, more intense and involved experience of physical reality. In this sense, technology may be serving to educate (inform) us about where we can find a rush, either at the comfort level, the cool level, emotional level... however one may describe the effect it has on us. Now consider this idea: let's suppose that TV, the security of the cell phone, texting, the Wii and DS, Xbox and the numerous internet experiences like Facebook, YouTube and the i-games, let's suppose that we reach a limit when there isn't much more that can be satisfying from engaging ourselves with those devices, that the virtual world becomes dead to us. We know that people these days sit across from each other or next to each other and text either each other or someone else. They are engaged and obviously getting some kind of satisfying experience, call it a rush (oh what a feelin'... what a rush! - recall the song by Crowbar). I suggest that this will disappear; no more satisfaction. So, if that be so, then what? Perhaps people may discover each other again and engage the human relationship reality at a new level. People may actually begin to make eye contact again. Imagine that! What a concept. What about being able to feel empathy or to be able to pick up on another person's feelings in a way that today perhaps only the most gifted of psychologists do. Again, what a concept. An awakening to physical reality for sure, but, maybe a spiritual one too. Perhaps the preoccupation with technology can actually lead humanity to rediscover itself at a deeper, sharper and more fundamental level. Perhaps the thing to do then would be again to go to the ball park or sit down, play the guitar and sing with a group. What about just talking face-to-face? Imagine. What ideas! Who would have thought that such activities could be fulfilling after being so consumed with all electric. Could technology in the long run actually be a liberating force that brings people to an authentic level of living, to an understanding of the essence of who they really are? Plato again? Might technology really be a way out of the cave? Perhaps it is educating (informing) us, whether we know it or not, of what to look for in terms of a real and satisfying experience in life. What might Grierson have said? Don't know. As a tool, technology has brought us closer together and information to us like in no other time known to us. It serves and will continue to serve well the needs of education as we currently know it. But in other ways, apart from the real information it supplies, it may be generating other information, even more real than the content it delivers. If the medium be the massage/message (McLuhan), then the medium may be delivering the information that says to us, "you won't find me here, try another way." We are looking for something; we are on a quest. Technology has been giving a temporary fix, like a drug. It is illusory. What is it that lasts? What is real? That's what we want, and ultimately, that is what we will seek. Should we worry about how much time our kids are spending in the virtual universe? Maybe not. Technology has no intention apart from us; it never has had. It's essence? What do you think? In the end, we might just find it is or has been a useful tool on the way somewhere else.
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TED talks are great - thanks for these 2, Gary.
ReplyDeleteIn another class I am taking, we are reading Rogoff's "the Cultural Nature of Human Development". In a short section on tools, there is a paragraph which was very interesting.
"Artifacts such as books ... computers ... are essentially social, historical objects, transforming with the ideas of both their designers and by later users. They form and are formed by the practices of their use and by related practices, in historical and anticipated communities... Artifacts serve to amplify as well as constrain the possibilities of human activity as the artifacts participate in the practices in which they are employed. They are representatives of earlier solutions to similar problems by other people, which later generations modify and apply to new problems, extending and transforming their use." (p. 276)
As I read this (just after our class actually!), I thought, wow, what a lot in a short paragraph. It is McLuhanish (I must read more McLuhan). In regards to Grierson, we see how he transformed a medium, film, to a new use. Your comments about the technology being education fits in here, too, Gary.Our use of an artifact or tool, changes and transforms as we use it, and through all these uses, we are learning. Even movies meant to entertain contain some educational aspect, a message of some sort. Education is so much more than what goes on in schools. I like your last sentence, maybe all these cultural tools are just getting us somewhere else.. who knows where? I look forward to what you think of the paragraph I quoted. Thought provoking post, Gary.
Hey Mike,
ReplyDeleteThat quote is pretty rich. I don’t think I can really do full justice to it here, but I think the last sentence says it all in a nutshell. It does read very McLuhan: we shape our tools and our tools shape us. The entire paragraph points to refinements and plateaus. When I say that, I mean that if there were a basic set of tools that existed before any innovation of a new basic tool, then there would be continuous refinements on the same plateau. Consider the primitive cutting device (a primitive knife), maybe some flint. Over time it was shaped and people became more adept to using it. Maybe they created primitive saws too, and they were able to sculpt better saws. Those basic tools exist on the same plateau. Now, let’s say metals were fashioned into cutting devices and a new plateau was reached, that which had a new material being used to create the same kind of tool. The tools would get better too, and maybe a new basic tool could be made because of the malleability of the material, maybe nail clippers. New material and a new basic tool, hence a completely new plateau. In today's world, a laser can be used for cutting. This is a new technology that created another new kind of cutting device, the laser cutter (a new saw, so maybe it’s not such a new basic tool), so again there is a completely new plateau. In all the shifting though, the primitive application remained the same. The tool itself advanced plateaus, but the application didn’t. Further, the old plateaus would still exist, so in essence the original one was just extended as the technology allowed the cutter to undergo transformation. What I have not said yet is that as tools became more advanced, there were fewer constraints on the type of cuts that could be made. So, yes technology can be constraining, and as we advance and become more dependent on technological advances, the more the social lifestyle becomes constrained by the advances. Here I can reference Baudrillard and his levels of simulacra. Society becomes far removed from the ground level. Can you imagine trying to etch glass with flint as opposed to a laser? That is a practical example, but the same thing applies to lifestyles and attitudes.
What you say about Grierson is that he created a new application, which is a different extension than the extension of a tool. But, would Grierson have been able to do that without the creation of film? Maybe. He could have written a better book. Here it isn’t the technology that matters but the presentation of the story, the creative use of imagery and use of words. McLuhan’s book Medium is the Massage (message) gives us a look at presentation in a book. Different types of font, lots of pictures. He gets the point across (if you have not seen the book, I think you need to). I can share more, but I’ll stop here. One last thing I’ll say about plateaus. Basic belongs to the manual. After the manual there is the mechanical. Then there is the electrical. What’s next? The biological? And then what?