My self-image is something of a Luddite, but I seem to be finding my way all over the new media. I've been on Facebook since 2007, my office music comes from radio stations in Ohio and Scotland, I keep in touch with friends regularly using e-mail, I use Internet sites frequently in my classes when the equipment's not balky, I encourage my students to send me rough drafts by e-mail, I have a Dropbox account to share files with my co-author, I use e-books to save me hunting resources down from other libraries. So I guess I take regular advantage of what new media have to offer.
I've lived long enough to see the world change, yet long enough to be skeptical when I hear predictions that Things Are Fundamentally Changing. Fifteen years ago, business commentators regularly proclaimed that the business model of the past had been changed by the Internet. Since then we've had two recessions, brought on by greedy people who thought they had all the answers. Certain things are eternal--virtue, the ingredients of a good argument, and maybe the old-fashioned business model.
Having viewed the two videos Lisa posted, and all the factoids they breathlessly presented, I'm thinking technology offers a lot of possibilities but there's a lot of hype as well. I hope we can take advantage of the opportunities while keeping our feet firmly on the ground. At the end of the day, having surfed, pointed, clicked, and hyper-linked, can we still get off the merry-go-round? Are we able to enjoy the deeper interactions brought by contact with human beings in real time, by walks in nature, by reading actual books, by writing letters and journals? Can we still concentrate?
I'm 51 years old. Thirty years ago, I was 21, and the world couldn't move fast enough to suit me. Thirty years from now, I'll be 81, and will probably feel more strongly what I already am starting to feel now: that people are moving too damn quickly for their own good, but for all their frantic oscillations not getting themselves any happier, smarter, or more humane. Web 2.0 is fun, not to mention full of potential, but I could live without it far more easily than I could live without conversations, hikes, and deep thoughts.
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Agree, agree, agree. I do think that there are some amazing things that are happening with the changes in communication/information dissemination in this Brave New World, for example the ability to see things from a variety of perspectives simultaneously, keeping in touch with my ever-expanding (geographically) network of friends. But I do think there is virtue (and always will be) to slowing down, methodical, deep thinking on one topic at a time.
ReplyDeleteI will embrace the irony of the situation and use a Web 2.0 application to share this link on 'Slow Reading' from a few days ago:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jD98lVM4dGsPuKnnvm0_mrYEmkMAD9GCU8C00
I stumbled across it on one of my web aggregator sites. I am a bit tired of the overuse of 'Slow' to combat the speed of modernity (we should be able to come up with more than one way to describe this method), but its interesting.
Hikes, conversations and deep thoughts should be a priority for sanity. Web 2.0 is more of a necessity for understanding the next generations... like our kids. I don't look forward to texting instead of hugging my kids when they go off to college but online communication is better than no communication... and I did enjoy the connection via Skype when my daughter was in Costa Rica.
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