Patrick Steele
Robert Tillett
Writing Seminar
April 20th, 2011
The kids are alright.
When it comes time to transform an auditorium of middle class adults into a
mob of bloodthirsty villagers, the purportedly deteriorating quality of our children’s
education is a tried and true aggressor. Political figures from across the board are
quick to blame contemporary media for the intellectual degradation of our nation’s
youth, but the overwhelming majority of these arguments are made in haste and
with a reckless, if at times unintentional, misrepresentation of technology’s complex
role in modern learning.
At the heart of many misconceptions about new media, the catch all term for
a potpourri of content delivered via glowing rectangle, is the mistaken assumption
that we consume as passively today as we did in decades past. Previous generations
experienced radio and television as one-way channels of communication. Content
came out, but there was no way to respond with a reaction of your own. As a result,
radio and television were tools for consumption, not creation. Knowing no other
way, many adults continue to approach new media in the same way that they have
more traditional mediums. The field has been reinvented, however, and it’s no
longer enough to drool in front of a predetermined recording. Today’s content
platforms are sustained by two-way interaction, and the changing face of
entertainment has impacted the way today’s youth expect to engage with every
other element in their world.
In the same way that static entertainment sources have given way to
interactive experiences, the rote memorization of traditionally significant data has
been replaced by on-the-fly discovery of contextually meaningful content. The
internet, accessible from an ever-expanding arsenal of mobile devices, has
blossomed into a tool for connection, research, comparison, entertainment,
navigation, analysis, and just about anything else you could think to want in your
pocket. The potential present in these services is obvious to adolescents, and as a
result, they’ve been seamlessly integrated into the educational workflow of the 21st
century student. Unfortunately, this integration hasn’t occurred without opposition.
Because parents are unable to recognize the benefits of on-screen media, forward
thinking learners are chastised when their intellectual initiative is mistaken for
distraction or disinterest.
What’s needed is a reevaluation of our narrow-minded ideas about where
kids can and can’t learn. For the young mind, every single task we partake in on a
daily basis has the potential to be intellectually enriching. Genuine interest is the
strongest conductive material available when constructing a learning environment,
and it’s important that we harvest it in whatever form it takes. Amy Goldwasser
warns that the internet has “seduced a whole generation into its inanities”, but the
thought processes involved in any form of analysis are cumulative and easily
applicable to other areas of interest. Television shows, webisodes, and blogs are the
new training grounds for the mental exercises in deconstruction and inspection
formerly fed by dated literature. It’s often implied that current works are absent the
depth and poignancy of the classics, but these assertions foolishly discount one of
the largest and most rapidly evolving bodies of knowledge in human history.
Though the backlogs of modern culture may be saturated with pedestrian
ramblings, they remain ripe with valuable works in a myriad of mediums, and in
sorting through them, learning to differentiate between what is and isn’t
worthwhile, the native users of the web are building a skill set that will be
increasingly valuable as the cache of data available to them expands over time.
Because the use of new media so often occurs alone, it’s mistaken to be a
solely solitary endeavor, absent the bonding experiences of traditional pastimes that
prepared youth for the interpersonal interactions critical in the business world
ahead of them. Parents fear that their children are missing out on these crucial
social developments, and will be stunted as a result. Though it’s not always obvious,
today’s youth are using the mediums of their time to achieve a level of interaction
and connectivity that was unimaginable 20 years ago. These interactions can be
divided into two groups. Gerald Graff highlights one in “Hidden Intellectualism”,
pointing out that kids today recite facts about entertainers’ accomplishments with
the breadth and accuracy of career statisticians, having absorbed, analyzed, and
extrapolated data from the tsunami of pop culture that continues to intimidate their
contemptuous forbearers. Contemporary students are using technology to find ways
to relate to their peers in their day to day socialization, and the wide availability of
the mechanisms involved means that the points of mutual interest established will
be accessible in far more situations than the often vocational formerly established
by more traditional scenarios.
The second type of interaction occurs predominantly online. Today’s kids
begin at a young age to interface with others in ways more similar to business
meetings than playground antics. Using online journals, forums, encyclopedias, roleplaying games, news aggregators, and instant communication tools for schoolwork
as well as for entertainment, kids are doing more than just googling. Rich internet
applications, deeply integrated social sharing mechanisms, increased connection
speeds, and expanding device compatibility have all empowered today’s computer
users to do more than just consume. They create and share pictures, videos, music,
literature, and opinion in as many formats as they can get their hands on. People
devote hours to creating online content entirely separate from what’s
occupationally required. While the quality of what results is variable, the upper tier
of these online creators are developing abilities that surpass those of their mentors
at an increasingly young age, and every digital industry is experiencing an influx of
ever-younger employees. With tools like MIT’s online learning, TED talks, google
and amazon’s digitization of books, and countless do-it-yourself networks,
discussion has already begun on how long traditional education can remain
relevant. It’s certainly no longer the only valid means of acquiring life skills, and
while the newspaper headlines are grim with reports of record unemployment,
capable youngsters are getting hired right out of high school. Learning from the web
is cheaper, broader, and, at least in technical arenas, evolves in real time. This is in
stark contrast to college curriculum, which often sinks into obsolescence while
wading through the red tape involved in updating course content to align with
technological and conceptual advancements.
Despite the intellectual gains to be had, much new media content is less than
worthwhile, and it’s difficult to advocate leaving your kids alone with Snookie or
letting them fall behind in their schoolwork while swooning over Justin Beiber.
Children will, however, find worth in whatever they encounter, and as much as
many would like to believe that the collective minds of our nation’s youth are
disintegrating further each day, and that holier-than-thou renouncement of their
chosen mediums is the cure, the reality is that young minds are sponges, eager to
collect and make sense of the world around them, whatever world that may be. New
media has emerged as a conversational and analytical springboard from which users
can catapult into meaningful education on an infinite number of topics. These
mediums aren’t going anywhere fast, and they’ve already proven their worth, so it’s
time they start educating kids because of concerned parents, instead of in spite of
them.