Ch. 3
Not much to say...
He
wrote this book nearly twenty years ago, and most of his concerns remain quite
valid. The first half of Ch. 3 posits the god
of Technology. I enjoyed his
description: “…people believe that technology works, that they rely on it, that
it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are
delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in
mysterious ways…” (p. 38). I may
use this quotation, along with the notion that “technology uses us,” next year for
my unit on Fahrenheit 451. My students maintain “sleepwalking
attitudes” with respect to technology.
I am bothered by the way hallways look after school; students
huddled over their devices—not interacting with each other. And when students bring devices to
class, I know that even the good ones are texting friends and checking Facebook.
Can you imagine
never being unplugged from social life?
Going home in the mid-90s, I savored my time away from school
life. Now young people are in
contact with each other all the time.
(Unless, of course, their parents have the good sense to impose usage
rules at home.) I wonder if they
get exhausted…
The second part
of the chapter is an unforgiving critique of multiculturalism. Not much to say here.
posted by AJV at 11:56 AM
1 Comments:
I really like what he says about the technology god. I think it is more relevant today than it was when he wrote. (Never looked at how old this book is! It is that old! ) We are constantly online and communicating… But we seldom seem to sit back and think about what is being communicated. (We never ruminate!) It becomes communication for communications sake. When was the last time you got or wrote a long email (or better yet a real physical letter!) that wasn’t work related? I talked with some of my students early this past year about what they read outside of school work. Some of them thought that reading full news articles on CNN or BBC was boring because they were long. They are used to SMSs, FB chat, Statuses and Tweets! That is incredible to me, though I find myself falling into that pattern to more and more.
That is directly related to what he says about information. The more information (just like communication) we have the harder it is to deal with it all. Schools need to teach how to screen information and then to dig deep into the important stuff. I have had many students that simply Google something you ask them to do research on and pick the top result as if it were the definitive source… They often don’t even open then link! It is crazy. Yeah, schools need to spend time on teaching how to sort and then on how to dig in deep once you have the heard thinned. But where does that fit into a curriculum?
I have no idea why he spent so much time bashing that strain of multiculturalism. I hope that isn’t a real issue in the US that deserves that much ink spilled over it.
Random name dropping: Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication (maybe in name only), Nietzsche and the COWS!, Heidegger and how language is not a keg that you scoop words out of with a mug…
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