Graduation Ceremony 7
Wednesday 26th November 2014 at 4.30 p.m.
JESUITS’ CHURCH – VALLETTA
Academic Oration
Dr Carmen Sammut
B.A.,P.G.C.E.,M.A.,Ph.D.(Goldsmiths)
This occasion marks an important milestone in your life. You secured a well deserved certificate that will hopefully widen your
career prospects. You are also celebrating your personal growth, your drive and your ability to cope with the various challenges
that were encountered during this voyage. Graduation is not the ultimate destination. There is a compelling saying, which online
sources misattribute to the ancient philosopher Socrates that “education is the kindling of a flame”. I truly hope that during your
stint here, we have contributed to turn your flame into a fire and that you have acquired a greater thirst for learning.
The constant acquisition of new knowledge and competences is vital in modern life as we struggle to catch up with accelerating
change. No matter how much we prepare ourselves for tomorrow, we must brace ourselves for fast transformations. Fluid work
scenarios and countless life-choices present fresh challenges as we try to make our way on shifting sands. While learning is a
lifelong process, we have easy access to unlimited sources of information. I have just marked a personal anniversary that has
inspired me to discuss some of the hopes and fears of different generations that are experiencing the digital revolution, the impact
of which is often compared to the great transformations brought by the Industrial Revolution.
I began my own journey as an independent adult on the 31st October 1984, thirty years ago. That day India’s Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi was murdered by her own Sikh bodyguards in revenge for an army raid on the Golden Temple of Amritsar that was
aimed to crush separatist sentiment in the state of Punjab. That same day, I was thrown in at the deep end as an 18 year old eager
to become a good foreign news writer for the national broadcasting station. There I began my slow journey to learn by rule-ofthumb. I sat at a chunky wooden desk behind a heavy Imperial typewriter. Hundreds of incoming telex feeds from Reuters and
Associated Press needed to be filtered. Concentration was impossible … a dozen manual typewriters produced a crazy cacophony
of sound that competed with the telex machines, a flickering television set and a radio receiver tuned in to BBC World. Indira
Gandhi was dead … and I was swamped. I struggled and splashed in a glut of information that instantly needed to be weaved into
a media narrative for the consumption of a Maltese audience. Much has changed since then.
Yet, our endeavour to cope with an information overload; the necessity to rise above the cacophony of information, has become an
everyday reality for all. As we tap on our touch-screens to explore the world-wide-web, how do we distinguish trustworthy texts
from conspiracy theories? How can we differentiate between fact and hoax? As in the case of our earlier Socratic reference, how do
we know whether information is correct?
Making sense of information is difficult because we often find that, as observed by the French intellectual Jean Baudilliard, “we live
in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”. The sheer amount of information at our
disposal is truly overwhelming. It has been claimed that if we digitally recorded all existing human cultural artefacts and all
information created from the dawn of time until 2003, “one would need 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. By the year 2010
people created that much data every two days”. Who would have told me when I was your age, that I would be able to carry all
this information in one of my smallest handbags?
The start of my own work and academic journey preceded the computer. I am thus a “digital immigrant”, a native of the era of the
typewriter and carbon copies, the time of hardcopies, photocopies and box files. You are the generation of the internet, satellite
broadcasting and mobile telephony, labelled by Mark Prensky as the “digital natives”. You are the citizens of the ‘information
society’ that has boundless possibilities to interact with ease from the bedroom, to the boardroom and to the classroom.
Universities, in partnership with governments and the industry, greatly contributed to the expansion of the information society.
Proposals to research social interactions by means of computers were made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over 50
years ago. Cold War politics then led the US government to launch the famous ARPANET, a project that looked at university
research for possibilities to advance military technology. When the internet was eventually privatized, universities and especially
students played a pivotal role.
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The modem was invented in 1977 by two students in Chicago.
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In 1998, two doctoral students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google.
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Mark Zuckerberg first developed Facebook ten years ago in a Harvard dormitory.
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Jack Dorsey was still an undergraduate student at New York University, when he co-created Twitter in 2006.
Our University boasts a state-of-the-art IT Services that enables us to soar above limitations of size and geographic position. We
are connected in real time with other centres and networks across the globe and so we are in a position to remain relevant while
we hope to gain a competitive edge. Yet, we also experience some dilemmas that are common in academic circles across the globe.
While many academics embraced change and renewal, a few ‘digital immigrants’ perished before they reached new shores. There
are some celebrated luddites, like the famous American scholar Neil Postman who authored 20 books in longhand. He continued
to refuse computers and the internet until his death in 2003. My own much respected doctoral adviser, author of 22 books, was
still using an old Amstrad word-processor (built in the 1980s) when I first entered his office at the turn of the new millennium. It
took years before he even adapted to electronic mail.
While the internet does not drive history on its own, it is deemed to be a ‘disruptive technology’ and so it has shaken the
foundations of the academic Ivory Tower. Some still insist that intellectuals should keep a critical distance from mundane
discussions on the social media, but is this still a feasible endeavour? In an era when popular rhetoric penetrates influential circles,
should intellectuals merely be voyeurs observing but not interacting with others outside their realm? On the other hand can we
really afford the time and energy to veer from academically valid fora?
While I will not here attempt to answer any of these questions, we should be ready to explore employing the social media as valid
instruments in academic life. Prensky warned: “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people
our educational system was designed to teach”. We all know that we are competing with the social media for students’ attention. I
do not rule out that as I speak, some of you are enjoying a more gratifying encounter with friends outside these walls. In all spheres
of life we often sense that we are in direct competition for attention. Meaningful communication is frequently frustrated by the
‘noise’ emanating from distracting technologies. Yet the social media offer endless possibilities which we may positively embrace
to kindle the proverbial flame.
As we explore possibilities, there are some anxieties that are being faced by both the digital immigrants and the digital natives.
These include the issues of privacy and reputation. A professor in a university overseas once confessed that he added his students
as Facebook friends to create awareness on how difficult it has become to protect our privacy. He sifted through their photo
albums and printed the most compromising pictures. He then displayed them on a prominent university notice board. As
expected the victims stormed into his office objecting to his invasion of their personal space. The moral of his effort was to
demonstrate that the internet may give individuals the illusion of intimacy but in fact it is indeed a public space. So next time you
dress up like Tarzan and Jane to attend a wild party, do not forget the infinite memory of the internet. Although earlier this year,
the European Court of Justice gave EU citizens ‘the right to be forgotten’, what you or your friends post online is likely to be
remembered. Your future employers (and possibly your future mother-in- law) are watching you.
Social media are known to have destroyed the reputation of individuals in cases of personal revenge. Sometimes it is people who
are nearest to us who may hit closest to where it hurts. Loving partners tend to share everything but it is becoming evident that
compromising pictures, passwords and PIN numbers should stay within our own control so that we protect ourselves in case
things turn ugly.
The protection of our privacy and reputation has much wider and more complex implications. A century and a half before the
advent of the internet, the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted that despotism in modern democratic
nations may assume different traits from that of tyrants. It would “be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men
without tormenting them”. On the one hand, we are living in the age of transgression where the unconventional thinker can freely
question the mechanisms of power and challenge the status quo. On the other hand, we are also extremely vulnerable because our
reputation is in fact exposed to great risks.
There are other threats to our privacy that are at the centre of big debates. We tend to become more aware of our vulnerability
each time we are hit by messages, emails and pop-ups that seem to target us with alarming precision. The search history of our
questions and anxieties, our likes and dislikes is stored. Researchers claim that even our anonymity may now be compromised.
Individuals are targeted in the heart of where they live and collective data is sold to commercial and political users.
But dystopian anxieties are not fit for today’s happy occasion and so let us see how the amassed information may also contribute
significantly to knowledge. Five years ago scientists had discovered a new virus strain that was dubbed as the ‘swine flu’ (H1N1).
We then experienced yet another global health scare. If a terrible pandemic broke out, we were told, millions of lives were at risk as
no vaccine was then available. A few weeks before the ‘swine flu’ hit the media headlines, engineers at Google announced they
could predict the spread of flu not just nationally, but down to specific regions and states. Since millions of people search for
information on Google, the company developed software that identified a combination of search terms which were used in
combination with a mathematical model. When the swine flu struck, Google’s system proved to be very useful for public health
researchers since now they were equipped with timely and valuable information.
Hence technologies are contributing to human knowledge and advancement, in spite of new anxieties. One more contribution that
is regularly celebrated is the emancipatory power of the internet to bring freedom and justice to downtrodden citizens. This feeling
of a cyber-utopia peaked during the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, which led to the fall of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Autocratic
regimes had previously censored and monopolised all the traditional information outlets; new interactive media were deemed to
be instrumental in these revolutions because they were not under the clutches of the state. These revolutions were then dubbed as
‘Facebook revolutions’ even though Facebook penetration was very low in each of these contexts.
To me those events highlight some concerns about the political implications of the social media. During the ‘Arab Spring’ I spent
months in the Middle East, namely Palestine. Amid all the emancipatory aspirations in the region, the efforts of young people to
employ Facebook as a tool in the opposition to Israeli occupation were immediately crushed because the Facebook accounts they
used were blocked. Palestinian efforts were blocked even when at almost 30%, Facebook penetration in Palestine surpassed that in
Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The question that springs to mind is, if the social media are useful political instruments, who is calling
the shots? Are we merely under the illusion that as individuals we may challenge structures of power and control?
In democratic systems, scholars are continuously probing the impact of the social on political life. They are concerned that many
users tend to stop at a virtual ‘Like’, a ‘Share’ or signing their name to a zillion online petitions; actions that are not necessarily
empowering. The British author Natalie Fenton warned that social media users tend to drift from one issue to another without
much commitment or with little time for reflection. Moreover, online activism can be illusive because it hardly ever leads to actual
deliberative engagement. She added: “The collective political identity of virtual communities has a short memory, which is easily
deleted because they are merely a click away from other distracting online activities”. As a result, while the social media are
wonderful tools for activists, activism must not be confined to virtual space. Online networking and awareness-raising are useful
but as the old Elvis Presley song affirms: “We need a little less conversation, and a little more action”.
One of the most enlightening contributions of the social media is that they can facilitate more openness to new opinions and
diversity. However, in online conversations the term “open minded” has long altered its original meaning. Research has shown
that people are not in fact too open to alternative viewpoints. In order to avoid dissonance many tend to participate in online
discussions with people who hold comparable outlooks. As a result, virtual communities are fairly homogeneous in terms of
values and opinions and it was stated that the internet is contributing to the so called ‘echo chamber effect’. In this space we can
hear the resonance of our own voice. Paradoxically, in the era of individualism, we seem to seek affirmation for some kind of
collective identity with people sharing similar perspectives on politics, religion and lifestyle. The possibility to explore diverse
opinions is there but we also need to be ready to step out of our comfort zone and to widen our horizons.
This evening I have assumed that everyone here is an avid user of the internet and the social media. Indeed 80% of the Maltese
population has broadband and 60% now have access to mobile broadband, so we often get this wonderful sense of universal
connectedness. While it is very likely that most of us in this room are in fact deeply immersed in the ‘information society’, let us
not forget or discount the fact that a third of the Maltese have never used the internet, whereas almost half have low or no digital
skills at all. In a society where it is assumed that the internet could help us overcome inequalities and where important functions
are increasingly organized around the internet, the ‘have-nots’ must not be forgotten. Our academic efforts and research must
continue to address the so called ‘digital divide’ that also tends to mirror other disparities.
In conclusion, I congratulate you for completing your academic journey. I now invite you to go and sharpen your competences,
improve your critical senses and enjoy the challenges. And while you are using your precious gadgets please always remember
that you are the masters, not the slaves.
1
Incorrect information and non-existent citations are very common on the web. This is attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher
but appears in fact in an article written in the 1990s. Quote Investigator (2013) Exploring the Origins of quotations, online
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/28/mind-fire, accessed 10 October 2014.
2
Baudillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (trans. Glaser, S), US: University of Michigan Press.
3
McChesney, R. (2013). Digital Disconnect. New York & London: The New Press
4
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon. Vol. 9 No. 5. Online:
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
5
ibid
6
Cited by Solove, D.J. (2007). The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. New Haven & London: Yale
University Press.
7
Mayer-Schönberger, V & Cukier, K. (2013). Big Data: A Revolution that will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. London:
John Murray.
8
Facebook penetration during the months of the Arab Spring was as follows: Tunisia 25%; Egypt 11%, Libya 5%, Occupied
Palestinian Territories 28%. Source: http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics, accessed 23rd October 2011.
9
N. (2012). Internet and Power. In J. Curran, N. Fenton and D. Freedman. Misunderstanding the Internet. (121-176) London:
Routledge.
10
Hall Jamieson, K. and Cappella, J.N. (2010). Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. N.Y:
Oxford University Press.
11
Curran, J. (2012). Reinterpreting the Internet. In J. Curran, N. Fenton and D. Freedman. Misunderstanding the Internet. (3-33)
London: Routledge.
12
European Commission (2012) Digital Agenda for Europe: Analysis and Data by Country. Online: https://ec.europa.eu/digitalagenda/en/scoreboard/malta#digital-skills Accessed 12th October 2014.