Pedagogy Today Is the Media: The End of Education as We Know It. Miseducation of a Civilization-Unlearning Old School

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Listening and reading what people are talking about, writing on various subjects and issues, blogging, twittering, Texting and being TV talking heads, one gets a sense that our knowledge about issues being discussed is premised and based upon what the media reports.

The way it disseminates information and data, the proliferation of technological gadgets and the fast changing technology and its updated techniques, has radically changed the way we communicate with one another on many levels, environments and so forth. We have been taught, weaned and programmed to listen and to see by the media and its new technologies and techniques.

Our discourses revolves around Films,radio talk shows, cable news, Youtube, texting, cell phones, internet, other new forms of media/communications spawned by this new and 'becoming complex and overwhelming' environment ushered in by Technopoly; and our dependence on it has also created a new mindset and new ways of interacting/communicating, and thus making it easy for its users to be depending heavily on 'techne', by doing so as to enable us and draw us intimately and wholly into its remarkable feats audio-logically and visually and technically: as being immersed, engorged and embedded with and within TV, DVD'. Listen to CD, i-Pods.

In the late twentieth century, the most common trend was thinking about what to buy next, what to read next, what to listen to next, -information products were being served at an amazing rate, and a pattern of consumption became a habit. As more and more Web applications began to appear that allowed each individual to become the "creator" of the Web, a new kind of Internet came into being. It was nicknamed Web 2.0, and now everyone could collaborate internationally with a click of a mouse. The twenty-first century has seen a dramatic shift-the generation of 'creative surplus'.

Technology is creating huge changes in the world scene as well as how we behave socially, how we learn intellectually and academically. The more one understands technology, the greater is ones productivity and become better prepared for any career. Technology now allows you to be very active in critical social and global issues. People have now had to move beyond being just casual computer users and achieve computer literacy. Being computer literate means being familiar enough with computers that you understand their capabilities and limitations, and you get to know how to use them .

Finally, being computer literate means knowing which technologies are on the horizon and how to integrate them into your home set up when possible. You might have to know how to connect Blue Tooth, and know if your computer has it. One has to know how to use a USB 3.0 flash drive be plugged into an old USB 1.0 port. Not only that, but a person nowadays has to know what is a USB port.

The other thing one must keep up with is now much memory should ones cellphone have memory. In this computer literacy age, one has to know how to upgrade ones computer; how to diagnose and fix certain problems which will save you a lot of time and hassle. One of the other things one has to know is how to upgrade ones computer if you want more memory; know which software and computer settings can keep your computer in top shape.

Modern-day Computers: Computer Pedagogy

Everywhere one goes one sees ads for computers and other devices: laptops, printers, monitors,cell phones, digital cameras, and GPS (Global Positioning system) devices. So that, as this is happening, one has to know what all the words/jargon in the Ad mean. Like one has to know what RAM is; what a CPU is; what are MB, GB, GHz, and cache?

We are the Grammatical Man that produces plays, publish books, interact on the Net by posting, commenting, singing, reading poetry, theater and so on-this remains a constant in our morphing and evolution within the 'given' technologies with their gadgets produced and designed for us its users using computer embedded techniques.

We are a species that listens and sees whatever is transmitted to us, that in the end we morph into and regurgitate all that we have received and post it, comment on it, fill in information for logging, buying, selling and appearing on the Web by logging and surfing at viral speeds and spreads on the Web. So, our education, in contemporary times, is being immersed within these technologies and the memes they transmit to us.

Media in this case, becomes education messages, information, data and whatever we need to read, participate in, disseminate, disperse, think about or react to all that is garnered and gathered by and from the data spewing gadgets churning their memes and zines.

Information And IT As Education And Occupation

Information Technology(IT) is a field of study focused on managing and processing information and the automatic retrieval of information. Information technology includes computers, telecommunications, and software deployment. So that, new technologies in the workplace and schools are creating a demand for a new skill level for students and employees. A study from the National Research Council concludes that by the year 2030, computers will displace humans in 60 percent of the current occupations

To us, this is hawked with efficiency and expediency, which will broaden our 'learning curve,' and it will dent or upgrade our capacity and ability to learn and grow and be relevant to the burgeoning technological environment in the now emergent technological society. Data is no more presented and gathered for us and made easy for us to not bother by going look for it in the library. Reading books is slowly being replaced by encyclopedic types like the Wikipedia search engines-information is accessed much more faster form various sources in the web and easier to attain akin to ordering a McDonald's burger.

Education: Teaching And Learning

Computers and the Web, today, have changed education as we know it, just by reading some of the points noted above about how computers and the Web are restructuring and changing our use of it, and its literacy programs that today's user need know.

So that, today's teachers need to be at least computer savvy as their students(who are for most times are ahead of their teachers in computer jargon, usage and applications). Today, computers are part of most schools, even pre-schools. In fact, at many colleges, students are required to have their own computers/Laptops.

Courses are designed around course management software such as Blackboard or Moodle, so that students can communicate outside of class, take quizzes online, and find their class materials easily. Teachers must, therefore, have a working knowledge of computers to integrate computer technology into the classroom effectively.

The Internet has obvious advantages in the classroom as a research tool for students, and effective use of the Internet allows teachers to expose students to places students otherwise could not access. There are simulations and instructional software programs on the Web that are incredible learning tools. Teachers can employ these products to give the students a taste of running global business, or provide experience of the Interactive Body.

So that today, being computer literate as an educator will help the teacher integrate technologies like these constructively into the lesson plans and much more greater and efficient interactions with the students. Teachers can take students on a virtual tours of Museums like MOMA to examine museum collections even if they are on the West Coast of America,or anywhere in the world. This computer literacy has spawned E-books and now we look at the case of E-books below, in terms of also how these have caused a marked shift from using the traditional ways of executing education and learning

The Case of E-Books Vs. Print Books

According to Investopedia:

In the last two years, e-books have outsold print books While this is great for publishing, it can be daunting for readers. If you are used to going to the local bookstore, browsing the aisles and perhaps reading the first chapter before purchasing, you still can … with a little adjustment. Most publishers, and nearly all online book retailers offer readers the opportunities to sample a book before you purchase it Offers even offer free reads or free first chapters on their personal websites. both formats have their advantages and disadvantages.

For instance "large publishers" have to deal with overhead expenses, this includes office space, utilities, benefits and salaries. So that, taking up on an author, they are never guaranteed that the work of the author will be successful; so, publishers take a huge risk whenever they sign-up an author. They also incur expenses throughout the printing, editing and distribution. At publishing houses , a single book can have as many as five editors, such as content editors, grammar editors, line editors,character editorsAll these factors go into producing a book

Neil Postman writes:

"I know that education is not the same as schooling, and that, in fact, not much of our education takes place in school. That is why poverty is a great educator. Schooling may be a subversive or a conserving activity, but it is certainly a circumscribed one.

"What is relentless is our education, which, for good or ill, gives us no rest. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness, but not always because politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches cynicism, but not always. Television is a great educator as well. Mostly it teaches consumerism, but not always. It is the "not always" that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling."

"The faith is that despite some of the debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the world. Which is to say, that non-trivial schooling can provide point of view from which what is can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be filled with possibilities.

"What this means is that all its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living. Such an enterprise is not easy to pursue, since our politicians rarely speak of it, our technology is indifferent to it, and our commerce despises it.

"People who have a say about schooling ask questions like, "Should we privatize our schools?" "Should we have national standards of assessment?" How should we use computers" "What use can we make of television?" "How shall we teach reading?" "Can we teach listening?"

There are many question regarding schooling, and some of these questions are interesting and some are not. But what they have in common is that they evade the issue of what schools are for. It is as if we are a nation of technicians, consumed by our expertise in how something should be done, afraid or incapable of thinking about why.

We have been groomed by Technological gadgets, with their in-built technologies, which have helped or conditioned us to speed and make efficient our information, in the process extending us, easy to access beyond our wildest imaginations.

Postman's description of education and learning is what we can say is an analogical description of what we used to know as schooling, and then he asks questions as to how should the new technologies and their gadget are altering our ways of knowing how to teach the old school easily, and what should be the new ways of executing pedagogy be like in the technological age(Digital Education).

In a brief manner, we will look at the various gadgets that are seemingly instructors of the future in school, as noted above in the Hub.

Technology and Gadgets as Instructors

Telegraph: We know that the introduction of the Telegraph has collapsed as delegated authority and management structures familiarized in many organizational or bureaucratic structures. This division and separation of structures, stages, spaces and tasks, which are characteristic of visual societies in the West, were broken down and enhanced by the introduction of the telegraph.

This has allowed and was readily accepted by the society to be used, and the public applied it and used it uncritically. We use and abuse contemporary technological gadgets with their in-built technology and technique in modern societies as if they were part of us and our lives depended on them. The telegraphic technology altered and taught us how to message even faster and efficiently.

McLuhan writes:

"Whereas all previous technology[save speech itself] had, in effect, extended parts of our bodies. Electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself, including the brain. Our central nervous system is a unified field quite without segments.

"We live today in the Age of Information and of Communication because electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men participate. The simultaneity of electric communication, also characteristic of our nervous system, makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world.

"To a large degree, our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age, is a fact of passive, rather than active experience. Actively, we are more likely to have this awareness when reading the newspaper or watching a TV show, [or surfing the Web"]-my italics and addition."

The Print:

Long before Gutenberg developed the printing press, a great deal of printing has earlier been done by block printing. These printers were preceded by typographic Printing. McLuhan states that:

"Visual information stored orally shows us that science in the western world had for a long time been dependent on the visual factor.

"A literate culture based on the technology of the alphabet, is in turn reduced from the spoken language to a visual mode. As electricity has created multiple non-visual means of storing and retrieving information, not only culture, but science has also shifted it entire base and character."

"Printing in pictorial statements can be repeated precisely and indefinitely. The alphabet left the visual components as supreme in the word, reducing all other sensuous fact of the spoken word to this form. The print was seized upon as a means of imparting information, as well as an incentive to piety and meditation.

The art of making pictorial statements in a precise and repeatable form is one that we have long taken for granted in the West and the rest of the modern world. But it is usually forgotten that without prints and blueprints, without maps and geometry, the world of modern sciences and technologies would hardly exist.

Learning anything would be cumbersome and very slow and discouraging.

The Press: Literacy and education were made possible by the invention and widespread use of printing, from movable type and this dramatically changed the entire fabric of Western culture. Books were published and printing helped to change and transition from the philosophy of the Middle ages to new and perplexing perspectives of the modern era.

The introduction of paper making techniques in Europe accelerated the expansion of commerce and education. The printing press technology spread with the speed comparable to the data processing systems and orbiting satellites of our time.

It is important to note that print culture and technology tended to reflect the priorities of the social forces it was applied upon, since printing prior to printing, communications took place primarily in a communal context. At that time, people held very limited conceptions of time and space. But the rapid increase in book production on a large scale speeded up the flow of information and ideas.

The growth of literacy promoted social fragmentation conducive to Protestantism. Reading,in the end, became a private activity, the antithesis of communal thought and behavior. But it was the press which during Luther's time that gave arsenal to his words to the greater reaches of the reading public.

Evolution From Telegraph To Printing Paper, To Steam Engine, The Public, etc...

The industrialization of paper making and the invention of steam engine allowed for the growth in newspaper circulation during the latter half of the century. People in taverns, trains, taverns, coffeehouses, clubs and so forth increase the readership than their actual sales figures would show.

A British media scholar wrote that, "The developments in the scale, technology and finance of the press facilitated the growth of newspapers as independent and influential political organs both expressing and guiding public opinion. Government and politicians could no longer exert much influence over the press, and proprietors had to respond to the demands of their new paymaster-the public: one might say that government restrictions were replaced by commercial control."

In the nineteenth century, the press changed from a political voice to a vast impersonal institution. The advent of the penny press and their rise to mass circulation increased the opportunity and access for information and entertainment to the societally disadvantaged. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, new media were emerging touching everyday life viscerally than had any newspaper or any product of the printed word.

The Sender; The Receiver And The Message: The Extension Of Man

McLuhan states:

"We can look at all forms of transport of goods and information both as a metaphor of exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message.

"The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters ratios among the senses.These principal factors in media have a serious impact on existing social forms through acceleration and disruption. All means of interchange and of human inter-association tend to improve by acceleration. This gave rise to mass learning and dialogue.

"A graphic revolution that paralleled mass circulation of newspapers was the ability to make, preserve and disseminate precise images; through the advent of this new cultural machinery, verisimilitude took on a new meaning.

Vivid image-making apparatuses made everyday reality pale by comparison, and whoever controlled the image-making apparatus, ultimately wielded more power than the owners of banks and factories. The owners of the media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.

Motion Pictures:

The influence of Hollywood on movies and its industries in pervasive and inescapable. Hollywood and its metaphorical environment are a major source of television fare, and movies still pull lines of customers outside movie house country-wide. Filmmaking is an industry with power, influence and appeal through its focus on development, their managerial structures, production practices and the artistic creations of the studios.

Motion picture monopoly was designed to control all phases of the motion picture industry: production, distribution and exhibition. Movies as a nonverbal form of experience are like photography, a form of statement and syntax.

McLuhan Observes:

"If the movie merges the mechanical an organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the sequence of stills that is typography, providing his own words and soundtrack.

"He tries to follow the contours of the authors mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy in the viewer and the reader.

"We have to bear in mind that what we see as a motion picture [and television] is achieved within highly prescribed series of convention, was mainly developed in Hollywood. Everything we see in movies has gone through a complicated creative process involving lighting, lenses,film stock, camera movement and so on.

"Even filming of reality, that is, sports, news, speeches and so on, this involves apparatuses and procedures that are highly manipulative in nature. At the same time motion pictures conventions reflect the single-minded pursuits of profits by the front office and stock holders.

"The widely accepted practices and procedures that prevailed in Hollywood was through the constant pressure from institutions of social control outside the industry, civic, political, and religious groups, who clamored for motion picture censorship. The front office worked very hard to accommodate them and quell the swelling opposition.

"The Movie is not only a supreme expression of mechanism, it also offers the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams.

"The introduction of the projector and screen innovated the typographical culture as we knew it. Along with TV, the projectors are in fact teaching machines. These films and devices were worked because they easily adapted from books and utilized the direction of dialogue.

These teaching machines are really private tutors, and they illustrate how every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the new effect is secured by the old method, amplified, or modified by some new feature. Movies adapted from books were turned into films shown through projectors and movies."

Television:

Television created a world where the dissemination of images was in fact having a widespread effect in mass communication and mass viewing. Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image is the posture of children in the early grades. Since TV, children-regardless of the eye condition-average about six and a half inches from the printed page.

Our children cover the printed page with the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image. With perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they carry-out at he commands of the TV image. They pore, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves in-depth within the medium.

This is what they had learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic book medium. TV carried the process much further. Suddenly they are transferred to the hot print medium with its uniform patterns and fast lineal movement. Pointlessly they strive to read print in depth.

They bring to print all their senses, and print rejects them. Even adults are affected and effected by television in the same manner as the children. Print asks for the isolated and stripped-down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium(McLuhan).

For millions of people television programming provides a separate reality, one full of seemingly living images. The familiarity of television makes it an unheeded influencing force.

Behind the glitz and flickering images is a complex force with imperatives and inclinations, which have cultural consequences. What Radio has affected, television was able to transfer and make contemporary television's policies, priorities and products, from radio products and productions, which the industry could not do without. National networks, advertiser finance, government regulation, and program practices, all are proliferation of the pattern that evolved in the first half of this past century.

More than any other medium of expression, television fills out the idle hours, providing reassurance and relaxation. It structures not only our general perceptions about the world, but our patterned social existence. Its messages and images distilled through this electronic cube reach us in our kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms and on the Internet.

The psychic and social disturbances created by TV image, and not the TV programming, is occasionally commented-upon by the Press. With TV, the viewer is the screen, and he/she is bombarded with light impulses that imbues his "soul skin with subconscious inklings" (Marshall).

The film image, offers many more millions of data per second, and the viewer does not have to make the same drastic reduction to form his impression. He/She tends to accept the full image as a package deal. TV content and programming is the factor that influences outlook and action that is derived from the book medium, which shows a break between form and content.

For good or bad, the TV image has exerted a unifying synesthetic force on the sense-life of these literate societies such as they never had for centuries. The effects of the lesson of TV to contemporary societies are still being studied and with the advent of the Internet, the research is still ongoing. But television has had an everlasting impact on how we learn, school and educate ourselves.

The Internet. The Technological Master Teacher

Whenever we log onto the computer terminal, we get welcomed into a vast new world of information that is presently revolutionizing and changing the way we learn today and into the future. The World Wide Web (WWW) represents an information explosion unknown in the annals of world history. It even rivals the invention of the printing press and broadcasting, TV by how it is presently affecting and will affect our lives.

The internet now links our homes, businesses, schools hospitals and libraries. It links people in different time, places, schools, homes and libraries worldwide. This information superhighway is also changing and affecting the way we learn and interact with each other in a myriad ways.

The World Wide Web on the computer is a growing and expanding new environment, growing faster than our abilities to document or civilizing it. Howard Rheingold says that the industries inadvertently gave private consumers access to those billions of dollars by selling them a tiny device to link the two technologies together: a computer modem.

By hooking up the personal computer through a modem, one gains access to a global communication network, with all every computer system linked to that network. It is important to note that the Internet is social anarchy because there is not governing body for the system.

The net is also used by scientists, hobbyists, hackers,writers, artists, researchers, corporations, activists and so forth. More than a hundred million people speak to one another through the computer text and they get their information from researchers, observers, archived material and people who are out of control.

This is a reality check for them and a test, and they also use it as a cultural program and weapon. All these people are operating and conversing, conferencing , commenting and posting topics, whilst they receive these responses, in the bulletin boards.

This territory on the Web is called 'Cyberspace'. Many people, governments,corporations and law-makers are perceiving this new technology as uncontrollable and brings about new challenges and social effects. There is no denying that the Web is becoming the technological master teacher.

The Internet is an integral part of our lives, and our ability to use and interact within the Internet and the World Wide Web(WWW) will only converge even more with our daily lives. Therefore, it is important to understand how the Internet works and the choices available.

For instance, the many ways one communicates with friends, family, professors, and business associates over the Internet,you can do so by using Instant Messaging, Group , social networking. Web Logs and Video Logs. Wikis, Podcasts, and Webcasts to communicate via the Internet.

Social Networking is a means by which people use the Internet to communicate and share information among their immediate friends, and meet and connect with others through common interests, experiences and friends. social networking services such and the Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp have become widely popular because they provide ways for members to communicate with friends, through a variety of means such as by voice, chat, instant message, and videoconference so that members do not need separate communication accounts. social networking is used for business, too.

Listening on the Web: Learning From the Web

Speaking and listening seemed to be immediate experience when people interact face-to-face. When the twentieth century electronic media, radio, television and recording tape were adjusted, this assumption regarding 'immediacy,' many messages became more accessible, and were normally associated with immediacy. This means that media became more and more "immediate," and sophisticated and they came to be experienced less like the old analog media.

When we reached the technological sphere of the telegraph(which made writing and reading more interactive and spontaneous in an extended way) and radio (which made speaking and listening spontaneous, (although the communicators were distant) in media, our communications distinctions became more blurred.

Purdy writes that: "Written and spoken modes offered their own advantages, of course. Speech, especially in face-to-face situations, provides more holistic clues to meaning, including a speaker's appearance, vocal tone and gestures. Written texts invite, presume, and, in fact, shape a nexus of vast networks of context, and have been able to spin out complicated stories and nuances that broadcasters can only hint at.

Listening skills and encoding and decoding of messages has always been associated with listening, responding and interpreting are skills that do not fit into the old categories anymore."(Analogical Sphere)

Walter Ong states that:

"The new media now fueled by an on-line culture are moving inevitably in the direction of a listening mode. Immersion, co-authorship, interdependence and interpretive responsibility are the keys to this new model. Effective listeners have always known they had to immerse themselves in a kind of ecology of experience; they've always known they were to some extent coauthors in communication; they've known that listening and speaking are not really separable, but are interdependent processes that co-create "presence"; they've known that social and political power has never resided solely with dictators, presidents , or charismatic speakers and writers, but also with the responsiveness and responsibilities of listeners.

"Listening is a phenomenologically different experience than observing or reading, in that sound surround us. We listen, experientially speaking, within sound, not outside it, to it, or toward it. A listener turns-changes perspective-yet we can hear for the sound refuses to be bound entirely by perspective or direction. With computers, we are similarly surrounded by the medium as it expects particular actions and responses from us. The medium is simultaneously an extension of us and an environment for us (Ong).

The computer and its Web product does and facilitates for listening, talking and viewing simultaneously, thus changing the old paradigm of communication and upgrading it to the digital age.

Computers are not just tools or even conduits, but create their own experiential listening environments that is becoming naturalistic ad pervasive in human life. The computer culture forces us to redefine what mediated communication means. In the old culture,messages and meanings were transmitted or transported; in the new media, messages are offered, deposited and ,in some sense, invested, through a viral stream.

"With the Web, to receive a message, one cannot simply be a receptacle; you reach out to meet the message, the idea, the meaning, the feeling, at least halfway. The listening self is in motion, taking action, traveling, connecting, accessing. In this time we do not wait for messages, we move toward them. This movement is to a new space, a new distant and deferred presence, that is both familiar and unfamiliar: the viral metadata viral stream. This sense of presence is unfamiliar because old metaphors seem oddly dissonant; they are also familiar because they legitimize the essence of communications. At the same time give it a new spin and meaning and way of communications between human using the new techniques, technologies and gizmos.

"Computers sometimes seem like tools for our communication, or like media for containing and sending our messages, sometimes like extensions of ourselves, and most often like environments in which we live, immersed as if in the midst of sound. Understanding listening as a "between" process is getting nearer towards understanding the new on-line Web culture. It surely looks like at this time and age, Media is our future Pedagogical sphere and environment and instructor,as already noted above. It has surpassed the old ways of knowing, communicating and educating masses. It has changed, completely, the environment of media communication and media dissemination

"But it is important to keep in mind that the engineering of learning is very often puffed up, assigned an importance it does not deserve. As an old saying goes. 'There are one and twenty ways to sing tribal lays, and all of them are correct.' So it is with learning. There is no one who can say that this or that is the best way to know things, to feel things, to see things, to remember things, to apply things, to connect things, and that no other will do as well. In fact, to make such a claim is to trivialize learning, to reduce it to a mechanical skill."(Neil Postman)

Postman adds to the discourse on education by elucidating his postulations as follows:

"Of course, here are many learnings that are little else but a mechanical skill, and in such cases, there well may be a best way. But to become a different person because of something you have learned — to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered — that is a different matter.

"For that to happen, you need a reason. And this is the metaphysical problem I speak of. A reason, as I use the word here, is different from a motivation. Within the context of schooling, motivation refers to a temporary psychic event in which curiosity is aroused and attention is focused. I do not mean to disparage it. But it must not be confused with a reason for the being in a classroom, for listening to a teacher, for taking an examination, for doing homework, for putting up with school even if you are not motivated."

Postman further adds: "The kind of reason is somewhat abstract, not always present in one's consciousness, not at all easy to describe. And yet, for all that, without it schooling does not work. For school to make sense, the young, the parents, and their teachers must have a god to serve, or, even better, several gods. If they have none, school is pointless."

Nietzsche's famous aphorism is relevant here: "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." This applies as much to learning as to living. (Italics mine) To put it simply, there is no surer way to bring an end to schooling than for it to have an end.(Neil Postman) Ending serious and"Deep reading" has unforeseen consequences that the narrative below addresses fully.

Internet Reading And How it Limits Our Autonomy:

This Hub is an attempt to show how the coming of the Internet really has affected our abilities to read whole books and think deeply about them. This issue has been written about by Jesse A. Goldberg wherein we are tutored on this subject as follows:

"Traditionally, human beings and tools are thought to be in a simple relationship with one another. All agency is located in the person, consequently making the human being the sole object of power which acts on its subject, the tool. As we move forward into an era of increasingly powerful digital technologies, this model has to be re-examined.

"Instead of a one-way relationship in which the human agent has total control as the sole actor and the tool is merely the objected acted upon — a mere means to an end, which the human agent has total control as the sole actor and the tool is merely the object acted upon - a mere means to an end which the human agent has in mind, it would be more accurate today in the face of digital technology, specifically the Internet, offers potential complications into human beings' discussion and understanding of free will.

"Even as the Internet appears to open up options and capacities for individuals to exercise increased 'autonomy', it also has the potential to change the very ways in which human beings think, thereby impeding human capacities for meaningful self-reflection, a necessary if not sufficient criterion for rational autonomy."

Yochai Benkler talking about 'Individual Freedom' Autonomy, Information, and Law, argues that "the emergence of the networked information economy has the potential to increase individual autonomy. ...this networked information economy has the potential to increase individual's information, allowing for more informed decisions, as well as a greater raw number of possible decisions… the transformation of people's form passive consumers of media (watching TV) to active participants (creating YouTube videos), which in itself is an augmentation of individual autonomy."

Jesse goes on to add that:

"The problem with Benkler's analysis is that it reaches too far without addressing more fundamental aspect of autonomy first: an agent is said to be autonomous in acting if and only if the agent can be said to be, to some extent, 'ultimately' responsible for itself. Information networks certainly increase the available capacities of individual autonomy, but more options does not necessarily mean more freedom."

Benkler should have landed here in his evaluation:

"Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. It is in this "greater realm" for agency that we can see the value of information network economy to individual autonomy.

"But again, having a greater realm within which to make autonomous decisions does not translate to greater autonomy since individual autonomy is contingent on an agent's ability or lack thereof to make self-caused decision and meaningfully reflected on the motivations for such decisions."

Nicholas Carr argues that the Internet is fundamentally changing how our brains work and how our minds function. Carr says that the way in which we interact with texts is evolving as use of the Internet increases, which in turn affects our ways of thinking, both at a conceptual level and a biological level, and sees these shifts in our mental lives as potentially problematic. In fact, Carr's reasoning can be taken a step further to offer a critique to Benkler's praise of the Internet's potential for augmenting individual autonomy.

According to Jesse, "Car argues by moving from anecdotal accounts of social and psychological theory to empirical studies and ends at essentially philosophical conclusions. Tis is formerly speaking a valid method of argumentation: start with the ordinary experience, offer established theories with authoritative sources as possible explanations of these experiences, substantiate said theories with (scientifically accumulated) empirical evidence, and form a conclusion about the nature of the experience which started he chain of inquisition." What does this form of argumentation offer us, then?

Computer Assisted Learning: Reading E-Books and Traditional Books

First, it seems evident that, "media or other technologies we use in learning or practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Since the brain is plastic throughout most of a person's life, according to James Olds. As a person changes the way he or she uses technology to read, his or her brain will change as well. Carr offers the historical example of Friedrich Nietzsche to supplement this point: after buying a typewriter to assist him is eyesight began to fail. "[Nietzsche's] already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic."

Nietzsche's writing-the direct expression of his thinking-had been changed as his medium of writing changed. This is but a particular example of Carr's greater argument that technology affects how we think. Carr demonstrates this through an image of a philosopher and a typewriter, and we see it today through most people's interactions with the Internet. Carr cites a recently published study of online research habits conducted by scholars form University College London which found that:

"People using [two popular research sites that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information] exhibited a form 'a form of skimming activity,'hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of a book by psychologist Maryanne Wolf: the kind of reading promoted by the internet may actually predispose us to engaging in surface-level readings rather than meaningful deep readings of tests. As a result of this, our ability to interpret text for ourselves — a key component of free thought and autonomous rationality — is deadened by engaging in this peculiar kind of reading."

This is where the influence of tools on human beings becomes most apparent and most frightening. This is no longer within the realm of changing "merely" how we read and write, but it begins to et at the ways in which changes in those two precesses transform the very ways we think, which in turn augment or limit our ability to meaningfully engage with reality. It is worth quoting Carr at length:

"The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the Intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas." Deep Reading, as Manyanne Wolf argues, is 'indistinguishable from deep thinking.'

Deep thinking is a necessary component of true rational autonomy. According to many defenders of free will and/or moral responsibility, if an agent is to be truly rationally autonomous, it must be able to engage in critical introspection. This is because an agent must be able to identify the source of its own actions and decisions and reflect on its own motives, changing them according to choice that than allowing them to be formed and shaped exclusively by social biological, psychological, or other deterministic forces.

In order to truly and meaningfully engage in introspection, an agent must be capable of deep thinking, since such a performance requires immense reading skills due to the multitude of psychological barriers many human beings put up between their capacities for self-perception and their understanding of the inner selves in order to avoid possibly painful revelations that they are not ready to hold. The Internet changes how we read and thereby impedes our ability to engage in meaningful deep reading, thus hampering our ability to engage in meaningful introspection. This makes it enormously difficult to claim significant degrees of rational autonomy, and therefore difficult to claim to be deserving of "Kantian Respect."

The Internet, then, offers us an opportunity to re-configure our understanding of the relationship between human beings and their tools. When we create things to use for our own purposes, these tools can and do indeed act back on us, in some cases changes the very ways we think. It is especially poignant to make this observation in the face of the development of the Internet because information technology's potential to dramatically augment or infringe on human autonomy.

While views like Benkler's are certainly valid, the extent to which digital technology increases our freedom can be overestimated in the face of such tempting optimistic conclusions, and the risks involved are easily neglected by many as a result. While the Internet may indeed open up choices and opportunities to people that were never there before, it also has the potential to degrade individual's deep reading capacities, which is a dangerous threat to these individuals' claim to free will since deep reading is necessary for meaningful introspection which is necessary to claims on rational autonomy (Jesse)

Access and limits to Information

The Case For Poor People

The realization that the Black(African) owners of the major African media outlets have been financed by White funding sources, are supported by White advertisers, have gained access to their media properties through special dispensations, provisos, set-asides and affirmative action programs promulgated by the White rulers, globally. ... Consequently, the Black(African) community is spared a true, realistic and thorough education as to how the Western Media(American or otherwise) political system really works by the Black(African) media establishment.

It is not informed as to how the system is subverted by the White corporate elite; as to how the process of governance is almost unrelated to the electoral process and electing of politicians; as to how an economically powerless people are almost invariably a politically powerless people as well. The Black(African community is misled by electoral mumbo-jumbo and antiquated, ethereal political theory into placing all its hopes for survival, security and liberation in the hands of politicians who are as powerless as the community they represent[The ANC-led government a case in point].

Because of their personal and career ties to the White American/Eurocentric political systems, electoral processes and political parties. Black(African) politicians, along with their Black(African) media supporters are almost instinctively opposed to an independent, nationalistic political and economic movements. This is particularly the case when those movements rival their own leadership and influence the Black(African) community, and when they cannot control or squash them at the behest of their White political and party bosses/or financial potentates.

Therefore, the way forward for African people into liberation, power and education is to rid themselves of the leadership and influence of the Black(African) political media and white Media alliance as it exists today. The African media, as it should exist and constitute itself, should increase in its intensity and scope.

Underdeveloped Miseducation and Apartheid Use of Technology

Class Communications: Distorted Global Village

Schooling for the poor and people of color in the realm of media has demonstrated that this is going to be the end of education for those in the lower rungs of society. As the new electronic media have developed as "media fro a free" rather than "media for free," perceptive observers have warned that their low income status could leave many people of color off the information superhighway. Gerald M. Sass warned those attending a National Association of Black Journalists dinner, "We as a society are on the verge of launching the electronic version of 'separate but/and [un]equal.' The few available statistics suggest that the majority of users of key parts of the information superhighway are white male. The issue is the same as 100 or 200 years ago. It's access to information.

As the new technologies are becoming part and parcel of our pedagogy, this is taking place on a society that is divided and racially segmented. The most immediate implication of class communication in a racially diverse society is that minority groups will be more fully addressed than in a mass audience media system. Racial and cultural groups will no longer have to depend on mass audience media that consider them only a secondary audience, if they consider them at all. To the extent that the segmented media provide entertainment and information content that serves the needs of these audiences, racial and cultural groups will benefit from this growth in the media diversity.

Media targeted to racial and cultural groups depending on market segmentation advertising act to identify the characteristics that separate these groups from the majority and from each other, then reinforce those factors in their content and advertising. Advertisers may want to target their advertising to media that reach only affluent members of the racial group, or those in the age categories that buy their products. This means that the future of ethnic media could be dictated by their ability to attract the most lucrative segments of their racial group, not those in the greatest number of need.

But there are deeper implication to the classification and segmentation of racial and cultural groups in social fabric of the United States. Class communication an also mean that people of color become further separated, and possibly distanced, from the rest of society. Class communication points to a society which people may be integrated in term of the products they consume, but do not share a common culture based on the content of the entertainment or news media they use. Class communication means that a society will no longer be as strongly bonded by the media. This is a trend that affects all people in the United States who use the media, not only racial and cultural groups. The "Global Village" envisioned by the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s is developing as a worldwide network in which people are not so much drawn together by a common media content they read, hear, or watch; but by the products they consume. We may all be members of the same village, but we are sitting at our own campfires.

All of this is part of the great story of how humans use language to transformed by their own invention. The story, of course, did not end with the invention of speech. In fact, it begins there i.e. where speech made us human. The story continued to unfold with fantastic twists as human beings invented surrogate languages to widen their scope: ideographs, phonetic writing, then printing, then telegraphy, photography, radio, movies, television and computers, each of which transformed the world — sliced it, framed it, enlarged it, diminished it. To say all of this that we are merely toolmakers, and the word weavers. That is what makes us smart, moral and immoral; tolerant and bigoted. That is what makes us human.

But, the bottom line was that mass communication media sought and built an audience based on common interests, rather than differences. And out of this was forged the society that most Americans live in today. Now, with the emphasis on marketing and audience segmentation, the media play a very different role… The media, rather than trying to find commonalities among diverse groups in the mass audience, classify the differences and ways to capitalize on those differences through content and advertising. The force in society that once acted to bring people together, now works to reinforce the differences that keep them apart. It is in this way then that education for a society ends because the media and its technologies,instead of helping educe and evolve that society, the media freezes those part of that society that under develop and miseducate the society. In this way, one can see the end of education fostered by corporate media take-over.

Education is not the same thing as schooling, and that, in fact, not much of our education takes place in the school. Schooling may be a subversive or a conserving activity, but it is certainly a circumscribed one. It has a late beginning and an early end in between it pauses for summer vacations and holidays, and generously excuses us when we are ill. To the young, schooling seems relentless, but we know it is not. What is relentless is our education, which, for good or ill, gives us no rest. But not always. Politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicism. Television is a great educator as well. Mostly it teaches consumerism.

But not always.It is the "not always" that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling. The faith is that despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done, and will alter the lenses through which one sees the world; which is to say, that nontrivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what is can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be as filled with possibility.

What this means is that at bet its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which, is quite different from how to make a living. Such an enterprise is not easy to pursue, since our politicians rarely speak of it, our technology is indifferent to it, and our commerce despises it. Nonetheless, it is the weightiest and not important thing to write about.(Postman)

The computer, by combining left- and right-brain processes, might provide the way out of a paradox or double bind that the use of the alphabet n an electronic-information environment poses. In an article entitled "The Bind of communication," McLuhan and logan identified a paradox that arises out of his theory of communication. The use of the alphabet reinforced by the printing press created the dominance of left-brain patterns of thought and organization that have characterized science-based industrial society. One of the unfortunate side effects of these pattern of organization has been the tunnel vision of the specialist, which has contributed to a number of major global problems facing the world today such as pollution, the energy crisis, depletion of our natural resources, overpopulation, and the balance of nuclear terror and terrorism.

The Advent ofElectronic information systems brought with it new patterns of communication in which the right hemisphere began to reassert itself. The present-day concerns with environmental and ecological issues are in part due to this development. Unfortunately, some electric information systems, such as TV, have had a negative impact by destroying attention span and discouraging reading and other analytic skills associated with the left brain. Because human survival depends on our ability to manage and maintain the complex technological machinery we have created, the degradation of reading and other analytic skills could represent a serious problem

"We are caught in a double bind. Electronic Media are a mixed blessing. They encourage ecological patterns of thought and help us recognize the nature of our Global Village. On the other hand, they discourage the development of reading and the concomitant analytic skills associated with them."(McLuhan) Reading is a mixed blessing. Print encourages specialism and blinds us to the ecological patterns required for our survival. If our reading skills deteriorate, however, then the capacity to maintain the complex technological infrastructure also vital to our survival will be impaired.

The unique challenge facing educators is to be able o promote both sets of skills, the analytic ones associated with reading and the synthetic one associated with computers and other form so electronic information technology. There is no inherent conflict between print and electronic information or between left- and right brain patterns of knowledge. The dynamic tension between these different ways of organizing information can be very creative. A way of synthesizing them must be found.

The end of education is not nigh, and for its end to be, that means a new way is what we see and learn about today on the web. Students no more research papers in the classroom, but cut and paste from the web and put together a research paper; people do more of their reading not from books and newspapers, but get their information from the Web TV, Newspapers, Blogs and so on. Why we need to learn today is not the important 'why'; but how we are learning may be the way to go for the future. It might be that this is the end of education as we know it, but a new way of learning is what we're immersed in today in its early stages.

I think the amalgamation of the old ways of learning and the news ways we are not supposed to mean the end of education, but will require us to know how to learn in the future and increase our learning curve as indicated by the technologies and motivation Postman spoke of. We might have to learn about learning in learning and non-learning institutions. How we learn might help up ease into new ways of learning about learning; ways of knowing the emerging technologies anew.

Without Living Freely, Man, Will Turn To Fascism

Erich Fromm says:

"Fascism must be taken seriously, there is no greater mistake and no graver danger than to see that in our own society we are faced with the same phenomenon that is fertile soil for the rise of Fascism anywhere: the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual. This statement challenges the conventional belief that by freeing the individual form all external constraints, modern democracy has achieved true individualism.

"We are proud that we are not subject to any external authority, that we are free to express our thoughts and feelings, and we take it for granted that this freedom almost automatically guarantees our individuality. The right to express our thoughts, however, means something if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if our inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality."

Fromm goes on to add that:

"In pointing out how our economic conditions make for increasing isolation and powerlessness leading to a kind of escape that we find in the authoritarian character, or else to a compulsive conforming in the process of which the isolated individual, becomes an automaton, looses his self, and yet at the same time consciously conceives himself as free and subject only to himself. It is important to consider how our culture fosters this tendency to conform, even tough there is space for only a few outstanding examples, and thereby of the development of genuine individuality, starts very early, as matter of fact with the earliest training of a child" (Anna Hartoch)

This is to say that training must inevitably lead to suppression of spontaneity if the real aim of education is to further the inner independence and individuality of the child, its growth and integrity. The restrictions which such a kind of education may have to impose upon the growing child are only transitionary measures that really support the process of growth and expansion. In our culture, however, education too often result in the elimination of spontaneity and in the substitution of original psychic acts by superimposed feelings, thoughts, and wishes (Fromm). The miseducation of the poor is a process of 'dumbing the poor' down. It is through control of all facets of the lives of Africans in the world, as attested for above, that we can see a purportedly advanced nation like the USA purposefully giving third rate education to its oppressed Africans, and the Africans in the Diaspora that we see the miseducation of selected majority within its civilization

Learning to Learn About Learning

Psychologists of late have been preoccupied with learning theory, and one anthropologist, John Gillin, has worked learning theory into his text on anthropology. What complicates matters, however, is that people reared in different cultures learn to learn differently. Some do so by memory and wrote without reference to..

"Logic as we think of it, while some learn by demonstration but without the teacher requiring the student to do anything himself while 'learning.' Some cultures, like the America, stress doing as a principle of learning, while others have very little of the pragmatic. The Japanese even guide the hand of the pupil, while our teachers usually aren't permitted to touch the other person.

"Education and educational systems are about as laden with emotion and as characteristic of a given culture as its language. It should not come as a surprise that we encounter real opposition to our educational system when we make attempts to transfer it overseas… Learning to learn differently is something that has to be faced everyday by people who go overseas and try to train local personnel.

"It seems inconceivable to the average person brought up in one culture that something as basic as this could be done any differently from the way they themselves were taught. The fact is, however, that once people have learned to learn in a given way it is extremely hard for them to learn any other way" (Gillin).

Hall adds the following:

"The educator has much to learn about his own systems o learning by immersing himself in those that are so different that they raise questions that have never been raised before. Americans in particular have too long assumed that the US educational system represents the ultimate in evolution and that other systems re less advanced than our own. Even the highly elaborated and beautifully adapted educational techniques of Japan have been looked down upon. Just why we feel so complacent and smug can be explained only by the blindness that culture imposes on its members.

"Certainly there is very little reason for complacency when one looks, not at others, but at ourselves. The fact that so many of our children dislike school or finish their schooling uneducated suggests that we still have to learn about learning as a process. Yet the schools are not the only agents responsible for education. Parents and older people in general play a part.

"Having learned to learn in a particular fashion, adults can communicate their prejudices or convictions in a variety of subtle and often not so subtle ways. Americans need to break the educational logjam, and the American culture's approach to the teaching of reading is just one of the many obvious defects in American pedagogy. It is a symptom that something is wrong with our way of teaching. Instead of being rewarding for the child, learning has often become painful and difficult."

In all strands of American cultural life, one can find so many examples of technological adoration that is possible to write a book about it. And I would if it had not already done so well. But nowhere do you find more enthusiasm for the god of technology than among educators Lewis Perlman argues that modern information technologies have rendered schools entirely irrelevant, since there is now much more information available outside the classroom than inside…

Dr. Diane Ravitch envisions, with considerable relish, the challenge that technology presents to the tradition that, "Children (and adults) should be educated in a specific pace, for a certain numb