Rear-view Mirror Society: Trying to Teach an Old Dog New Tricks
Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old. These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies. We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old. This clash naturally occurs in transitional periods. in late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dance of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old . -Timothy Leary
 The technologies of today have come into conflict with the old technology and thinking of the past. In the name of progress our society is trying to hold on to conventions and live through methods of the past. Our experience is so conditioned to the old, and the gap between them is so great, that we now live in an "age of anxiety" (McLuhan, 1967, p. 9). Children are being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder because they cannot sit in their chair and listen to an instructor for five hours. Their senses tell them they want more, they are restless and struggling with the old concepts of yesterday. The method of learning for new media society is exploration and experience, not instruction and attention. Marshall McLuhan argues that the student "finds no means of involvement for himself and cannot discover how the educational scheme relates to his mythic world of electronically processed data and experience that his clear and direct responses report" (McLuhan, 1967 p. 100).  Education institutions of the past and present require obedience and acceptance to authority, according to Howard Zinn, "the spread of public school education enabled the learning of writing, reading, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers, skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age...it was important that these people learn obedience to authority" (Zinn, 1999 p. 263). The public education system of today was built to train "the middlemen in the American system-the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians- those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble," and not the cyberpunks that are emerging at the wake of new media innovation (Zinn, 1999 p. 263). In the past information is scarce, fragmented and in control of "school officials" and not teachers. Today, electric information is instantaneous and embedded in the nature of our environment, it surrounds and is a part of us all. Today's students are cyberpunks. They are self-reliant and intuitive explorers, they "reject goals...they want roles...that is total involvement...they do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs" (McLuhan, 1967 p. 100). The cyberpunk student of today is demanding a shift in education "from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors" (McLuhan, 1967 p. 101).
|
