I haven't been in class recently (so sorry about that!), so I don't really know much about what's been discussed, but I have been reading Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century by Cynthia L. Selfe on my own time, and I just sort of find it funny that we're reading a book on modern technology that was written in 1999...over 13 years ago. At first I thought it couldn't really be all that relevant, with the way technology develops so quickly, but at that point most of us in the class were really too young to know the issues and debates that were going on about technology in that time period. We were sort of born into this rise of the Internet and computers and it has developed and matured with us, so many of us probably wonder why it's even being debated. We (or at least I) didn't or still don't understand how much societal change has occurred in our lifetime because of the rise of the computer and Internet age.
I didn't realize that all these debates were going on at all. Some of the arguments the book tries to make seem so backward to me now that we're 13 years in the future and now some of their fears have been disproved. I don't really like how, in the second chapter of the book, someone suggests that using computers or the Internet for anything other than schoolwork or research or very official, dryly academic objectives is some kind of moral faux pas. Using something for entertainment isn't some kind of misuse, the way whoever said this is implying. That just sort of rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. And, oftentimes, entertainment and education overlap--which I think is usually the case with modern technology. And what about art? That definitely can take the form of what many people consider useless entertainment. There is a fine line here.
Just my two cents about the book so far...
I totally agree with you about education and entertainment overlapping. Who decided that they should be separate? I think that's absolutely ridiculous, we should be able to make things educational and entertaining without being scoffed at. That's what I want to do with my creative writing major, I want to write entertaining books that are also educational, geared toward people who have not had the opportunity to get higher education. People like to be entertained, and by trying to deprive people of entertainment in addition to education, that's how useless entertainment is born. Of course people are going to opt for entertainment over educational, why is it surprising? Will that change any time soon? No. We have to learn with people's obsession with entertainment, we can't destroy it.
ReplyDeleteI was also really skeptical about reading a book published in 1999 talking about the 21st Century and digital literacy. I really thought that we could have read something more recent about this phenomenon, but that's just my humble opinion.
ReplyDeleteI think that a lot of academic society has gone way too far to the left hemisphere of the brain, ignoring the importance of the humanities. Sciences teach us what and how. Humanities teach us why. I think we underestimate the important question of why we should do things.
When entertainment teaches us about the human condition, that is art. The kind of education you get from Clockwork Orange in learning about human behavior. For example, how people treated Alex harshly even after he was reformed. These are the kinds of lessons that art can teach us.