November 2015


Issue Home >>

I THE PRE-SCHOOLER

A mother of two young girls, six and three, was alarmed by the call from the pre-schooler’s teacher for all parents to attend an emergency meeting.

“Your children are not writing,” said the teacher to the bemused parents; they are not interested in writing.

Their interest is focused on the screens of various devices – some of which the school uses as teaching aids. The children are so tecched-up that keyboards are already passé for them and their preference is for devices that let them swipe their way into games and apps and so on.

The problem, warned the teacher, is that they are behind the standard of measurement used for their age group. She urged them to restrict access to devices and to encourage the children into habits of both reading and writing.

Even if they are proficient at navigating their way through cyberland, they are bypassing a fundamental aspect of learning.

Is it prudent to insist that they start with the basics, or is it more realistic to recognize that they were born into a world of which they are among the first and second generation of inhabitants and it would not be useful to take them to a different path of learning?

II THE TEEN

An evening in early October at the Learning Resource Centre billed as A Literary Conversation between writers Caryl Phillips and Robert Antoni with Dr. Raymond Ramcharitar moderating turned as most conversations do, to matters at the heart.

As Professor Phillips was advising that “you need to read what you want to write,” a woman said that she had teenaged children and although they read, they were more taken with social media.

“What advice can you give me as a mother to get my child really reading?”

Antoni empathized with her.

“Part of me feels all of your anguish,” he said. “You go out with your kids and they’re on their phones.” He tried to comfort her by telling her of an article in the New Yorker counseling parents that from early they should practice taking the phones away from their children and managing their access.

III THE YOUNG ADULT

In his classes, Professor Phillips faces that with the firm hand that should have come much earlier in life for most. He allows social media breaks, he says, but the rest of the two hours or so must be focused on what he is teaching. He knows technology is changing everything because the same things are happening in literature.

“It will change the way we read, and the way we write,” he says.

IV THE ADULT

Another member of the audience speaks of the feeling that “you can never disengage your digital self,” and his alarm that novels, “with their interior monologues seems like one of the culture’s last few available weapons to fight against that,” he said. “Part of what you were touching on was that problem, but of course, if the delivery system for the antidote is already the thing that is a sort of anti-matter to it; how does a writer negotiate that?”

Acknowledging the meatiness of the question, Professor Phillips tried to get to the essence of literature.

“Part of the great moral purpose of literature is to imagine somehow, the national, social, racial, ethnic divisions that have been constructed around our existence in this world are actually all bogus to some extent, because we are all part of one family. If we are not part of one family, we wouldn’t be able to read Anna Karenina and feel anything. We wouldn’t be able to watch Ibsen plays…” Marquez, Indian novelists…

“We can do it because literature reminds us that Faulkner’s definition of the novel as issues of the human heart, and the problems of the human heart in conflict with themselves, and it is a universal issue, and that’s the window we look through at other people in order to see ourselves.”

“The platform to media that we’re talking about is so damned narcissistic that it is working against the impulse of literature to empathy. There is a tension there between these systems of delivery and the essence of literature: deep reading, deep empathy and an understanding of somebody who isn’t you. That’s not what text, twitter, Facebook Instagram are about.”

V THE SELFIE

Students at a lecture by a psychiatrist are discussing the role of selfies. It’s an artificial representation of the self, says the lecturer, as they talk about the worlds projected online and how contrived and managed they can be.

Technology has enabled a safe way to fashion and refashion your image, your brand. So what if you couldn’t care less if a dog was being ill-treated right in front of your eyes, you could post up hundreds of cute puppy videos and be seen as a dog-lover.

You could ‘like’ as many of the relevant posts as it takes to become part of a community.

This desire to belong seems to be a powerful force driving these online obsessions.

But what really feeds the social media culture? What has been its impact on attention spans, human relations, social awkwardness, bullying? So many fuzzy areas still.

VI THE RESEARCH

At the Human Communication Studies Conference held in September on this Campus as well, the theme, “Identity, Context and Interdisciplinarity” was chosen by Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies, Dr. Godfrey Steele and his team of planners to explore various issues surrounding the discipline.

Looking through the list of presentations made over its two days, it struck me that there was scarcely anything that looked at the impact of social media and the various platforms and devices that are transforming lives at every level. It seemed oddly dissonant with the environment.

The changes are dramatic and as pervasive as the man in the audience mentioned. You simply cannot escape your digital self – because you engage it continuously: at the bank, the malls, your car, your home. Its very ubiquitous nature demands that we explore its impact, that we bring some academic focus on a culture that has changed and changed and changed again within the last 20 years – and, like a helicopter’s blades going from lazy motion to blurry speed, it is going to change even more rapidly.

I think that the next conference should be focused on these issues because it just seems too monumental to be ignored.

There is something at risk besides writing and reading, something profound in the course of human existence – a particular kind of connection – that is being lost in cyberspace.

“…if all of your relationships are virtual, you cannot look anyone in the eye,” said Robert Antoni. It might be the reason everything now seems so farcical.