New Media, Old Media, Teaching

Are You Sure We Can't Go Back...At All?

I've been having a pretty good time teaching this month. Not only does it seem that students are learning, but I’m learning so much that it is deeply affecting my experience right now. This doesn’t always happen as powerfully as right now. Class material is expanding far beyond the hours of formal work on the topic.

In part because of my class Zoom Text Talk Insta Sing Chat: Media and Modalities of Interaction class—a stealth linguistic anthropology class—I have been thinking a lot about media, and how they affect our experience all the time. And though I am fascinated by technology, I am finding myself, this week at least, longing for a simpler set of options.

Happily, students seem clearly engaged. Of course, we have finally gotten to social media, so what's not to like!? (We started with the origins of language, and moved through the beginnings of writing, then printing, etc., into telegraphy, telephony, photography, and TV/radio/movies.)

Students lead classes in teams, twice. The first time it's very uncomfortable and they don't quite know how to do it; the second time they are much more at ease. They've devised all kinds of interactive activities that are really effective in having us learn about crucial issues related to the course topics, but also compelling to the students. When I design courses, I can only guess about what will resonate. But students are really serious about this stuff. It is the stuff of their, our, lives, and anthropology helps them analyze it.

Last Monday, when I was all discombobulated because our power had gone out as a result of a tornado, and I had barely gotten any sleep, one of the activities the students organized for the class was to understand different types of “fake news.” They used a framework created by Claire Wardle to distinguish seven different types of mis- and disinformation: satire or parody, misleading content, imposter content, fabricated content, false connection, false context, and manipulated content. Our team leaders assigned one of the types to each of the six tables where students, including me, sat in groups, and asked us to find an example of this type, from recent events. Then the other groups had to determine which type of misinformation it was. And unlike what we often hear about students, they really cared. They take seriously the danger of fake news. They were aware of news items that were old and new, and they found excellent examples of misleading or fake news. I left that class feeling fantastic about the capacity and earnestness of our students.

“Previous attempts to influence public opinion relied on ‘one-to-many’ broadcast technologies but, social networks allow ‘atoms’ of propaganda to be directly targeted at users who are more likely to accept and share a particular message. Once they inadvertently share a misleading or fabricated article, image, video or meme, the next person who sees it in their social feed probably trusts the original poster, and goes on to share it themselves. These ‘atoms’ then rocket through the information ecosystem at high speed powered by trusted peer-to-peer networks.”

Claire Wardle, “First Draft”

On Wednesday, this class went to the Rare Book and Special Collections room of our university library. Two amazing curators, one now promoted to administration, had prepared a set of fascinating artifacts in their fields, from a fragment of Egyptian papyrus to a zine made out of recycled materials, all showing us the materiality of books and other printed material. There was a first edition set of pamphlets of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. There was a gorgeous tiny color Illustrated hymnal, a “book of hours” in Latin, that would have been owned by an aristocratic woman in Europe in the 15th century. The colors, in lavish inks, were as vibrant as anything you could create now. Women would have worn this book, as ornament, as well as using it to pray.

Exploring Our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts - Medieval manuscripts blog

The students were mostly quite fascinated, especially but not only the graduate students who asked a lot of questions and stayed after the seventy-five minutes ended. (I, an academic nerd, could have discussed any of these items for hours, asking about how or for whom it was made, and the labor conditions and the facts of the materiality, and the costs, and the use, and the languages that it was made in and the effect of this object, and the other objects owned or circulated at the same time and the relative importance of each one.)

Aside: Not all the students, of course, were particularly drawn to the materials. When I asked how many had been in this room before, about six or seven of the twenty-some indicated they had. When I asked who had been in the library before, all but one or two raised their hands. But it is to be noted that at least one or two students, mostly graduating seniors, had never before stepped foot in the library.

In a room just off the library hallway was a temporary exhibit about fascism (“Tragedies of War: Images of WWII in Print Visual Culture”), and one of the students pointed out an actual star from Nazi Germany that said JUDE, just a cheap paper yellow six-pointed star, preserved in laminated plastic. I had not realized how flimsy they were. I commented that as we have more and more AI, and people distrust what they see more and more given how simple it is to produce convincing lies, it's increasingly essential that we preserve evidence from the past, and the less of it is digital, the better.

Last week I also gave a lecture to a group of older adults engaged in a program we call the “Inspired Leadership Initiative.” I decided I would just speak, and tell my story. (This version: how my research focus shifted from the study of ethnicity and nationalism in China to the study of education.)

The through-line of this post is this: as I attend to the nature of media all the time, I am finding myself curious about what happens if I consciously try to be as analog as possible, whenever it is appropriate, because I think we are all weary of digital everything. We've been joking about “Death by PowerPoint” for decades, and I feel it myself.

My students may not recognize the causes of their distraction, but it often feels to me that their heads are filled with checklists and pings and countless pulls of fear and hope and need and tasks and desires.

Sometimes in my classes this semester I tell everyone to put away their devices. I almost never use slides, but write on the board. We move around the room. Sometimes I give them paper. Sometimes they write on the board, or on post-its, or index cards. I’m seeking the tangible.

And still….what Chris Hayes calls "the sirens’ call” pulls us all….What if we're missing something? What if something happened? Where's my little jolt of outrage, or a laugh?

And it’s not just students.

When I settle down to work, the whole world available to me to check out facts, to find relevant links to a post, to see if I’ve gotten a response to an email, or to look again at my calendar, my mind careens in fractal shards. (Mixed metaphor? Well, of course!) If one of the hallmarks of wellbeing is immersion in an activity, “flow,” then the constant interruption (“You are signed out of the page”; “Get a push notification”; “Ping!”) is a recipe for ill-being. I have declined notifications for most of my apps, but that’s not enough.

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I am particularly depleted at the moment—a depleting moment if there ever was one—by the constant banquet of options available on my digital portals, my phone, laptop, desktop. And also, the exhaustion of having to authenticate every activity—I understand how this protects us, of course—with passwords and other devices and sometimes biometrics, though I avoid those—and upload things into portals, to scan and save and move, the increasingly unbearable reminders about doctor appointments on phone and email, and the checking in in advance, and buying things with credit cards, and having to sign in again to send student messages, and the double work of putting things on a syllabus and via Canvas, and the relentless onslaught of all the brilliant people I now subscribe to on Substack along with all the other social media…all this and more have made me long for a less-digital or even non-digital world.

In my Zoom Text Talk class, I brought in physical newspapers that two friends had collected for me, and the team leading the unit on newspapers divided us into groups that read digitally and those that read on paper. The difference was stark. Focus was much easier on paper. Students noted side articles that caught their interest. But the articles couldn’t be updated or corrected in real time, if new developments occurred. People have studied reading on screens versus reading on paper, mostly to compare retention of information and “endurance.” Results show little actual difference, though there are also differences in preferences. But it also is less exhausting. Even when we resist the temptations to switch tasks, this takes determination, which is tiring.

Another activity I assigned was for students to interview someone over fifty or sixty about life prior to the Internet and cell phones, and to ask what it was like to talk with people, to make travel arrangements, to find recipes. Several of them reported that their interviewees, while appreciating the instantaneity of contact now possible especially in emergencies, really did prefer life in the pre-Internet, pre-cell-phone era. When you made plans, you just went. You made one phone call. Yes, sometimes you got your friend’s mother instead of your friend, when you called the house phone mounted on the wall, but when you went for a walk, it was just you and whoever you were physically with.

On the day that we were discussing videoconferencing, I held class on zoom. We had a robust conversation about what it had been like when they had “zoom school” and how they felt that they had learned so little. They do appreciate the affordances of keeping in touch with people they already know, and things like FaceTime feel more intimate than the formality of zoom. They were aware of the unnatural interactions, facing forward and being so visible, in the array of boxes.

I have had meaningful interactions on zoom, but the comparison with face-to-face interaction leaves it far behind.

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I think I need an analog vacation. Not to travel. Just to be, for a while, without all the devices.

I am very connected, all the time, and I don’t have the discipline to disconnect for hours. Some people I know well observe the Jewish sabbath, and for twenty-five hours every week they eschew all electronic devices. They all love this, the vacation from the onslaught. Judith Shulevitz wrote about this in her book The Sabbath World. Others urge a digital sabbath.

One day a week, it might be possible. But to function in the world, unless one is a crank, if you go to the doctor or do your taxes or order flowers for far-flung relatives and friends, if you teach or check your bank account, you need digital connection. Even the Old Order Amish now, selectively and carefully and mindfully, use technology for their businesses, according to communications scholar Lindsay Ems in her book Virtually Amish: Preserving Community at the Internet’s Margins.

But for me, some days, it is just too much.

Yes, medieval monks also had trouble focusing. This human challenge is ever with us.

Jamie Kreiner, “What Medieval Monks Can Teach Us about Avoiding Digital Distractions,” Aeon, 2019

And now it’s overwhelming, for all of us.

In another class we sometimes pass my physical book (the students get their books digitally; they may not like it but it’s convenient) around the room to read aloud a particularly important section (students can pass if they don’t want to read), and invariably this is the one they remember the most all semester.

David Sax, in his book The Future is Analog, makes the case for restoring more of the analog in our lives. As an extrovert, he found the isolation of the covid lockdown really painful. His account of digital kindergarten for his son shows the absolute absurdity of trying to have five-year-olds learn alone at home.

But what I am processing acutely right now, after decades of increasing the tech in my life, in my classes, in my work, in my citizen engagement, in the quotidian, is beyond just the need to be physically co-present with others, though I feel that too. It is a desire to just say no to it all.

As my students and I learned, Egyptian scribes had style in their writing, and medieval ladies signaled their conspicuous consumption, and Dickens fans got the latest episode of the novels on cheap paper. We could do so many of the old tasks with old tech.

I’m not usually nostalgic about the olden days, about the supposed rapt attention of students in days of yore. (I’ve been in higher education long enough to have witnessed its lack lo those many decades ago.)

One of the topics that has been evident in my class all semester, which the students find intriguing, is that of “moral panic,” identified by sociologist Stanley Cohen. Social change and new technologies have often been accompanied by alarm, some of it apparently, from our vantage point, ludicrous, as when Socrates laments the effect of this newfangled technology, writing, on memory. But as Chris Hayes says in The Sirens’ Song, though moral panics about comic books and telephones now seem overstated, don’t forget that there were also moral panics about cigarettes which, it turns out, can kill you. So which is it? What is the nature of the technology within which we are bathed? Is it comic books? Is it cigarettes?

Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, 2009

Shoshana Zuboff in her The Age of Surveillance Capitalism argues that the technology companies have been operating with a new kind of power, and it is even more inimical than the old, industrial capitalism, which was bad enough. It is aiming to shape our very selves. She’s not against technology. I’m not against technology.

But whom is it serving? What are the limits? What are the effects?

I’m not a Luddite. I’m the most connected person in my family. But I am also observing how I am now sometimes anxious as I approach my computer. All the tasks and all the options are right there, and only my self-control can keep me focused. (Yes I know there are internet-blocking apps.)

More and more I am trying to add in the tangible, the physical, the monotasking, the lack of options, sometimes using a favorite pen and paper, or talking via phone, or walking. I’ve always loved the physicality of books and now I am grateful for their lack of hyperlinks and their ability to do one thing at a time.

Don’t remind me of the big pile of books also making me choose….