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Did the Sans-Coulottes Wear Nikes?
The Impact of Electronic Media on the Understanding and Teaching of History
David Trask
Guilford Technical Community College
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HISTORIANS ARE LIVING in a challenging era. As products of the age
of print, we must find effective ways to introduce the study of
history, an academic discipline embedded in the conventions and
understandings of print media, to students whose facility with the
print world is limited. It is electronic media with which they are
most familiar. This is a new challenge for a profession built on
the assumption that historical understanding evolves as the appearance
of new articles and monographs requires a rethinking of familiar
but gradually changing interpretations. Students do not live in
this world. It is electronic media that are shaping student understanding
of some of the foundational notions of significance, sequence, institutions,
and human agency. Because professional history developed its conventions
and goals—and achieved a dominant place in curricula—within
the world of print, it is imperative that historians now reconsider
what they do in the classroom. They must address the problem of
how to reach students and insure historians a place in an emerging
curricula that responds to the perceptions and experiences that
are part and parcel of the world of electronic media. |
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The goal of this essay is to use media theory to suggest that a fuller understanding of how electronic media have reshaped the understandings, perceptions and expectations that students bring to the classroom is the necessary first step to providing effective instruction able to convey a sense of the historical to our students.1 For the purpose of this analysis the term "electronic media" includes both television and computer/internet technologies although the latter receive the most attention. |
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Before assessing some of the ideas about media impacts on historical understanding, it is important to note two issues that have attracted much of the attention about computers and students: the "digital divide" and characterizations of the attitudes of "Generation X." Although interesting and important issues in their own right, concern over these topics obscures rather than illuminates possible media effects that are part of what students bring to the classroom. The "digital divide" is the term applied to the existence of differential access and use of computers by different segments of society. The most traditional form of this issue is the fear that the cost of computers will mean that economically poor children will lag increasingly behind wealthier children in the use of the tool that is becoming increasingly important for employment, communication and recreation.2 Another element of this debate is the recognition that even though there have been gains in gender equity in schools in the 1990s, important gender differences remain in computer usage. Thoughtful analysts want more research on a whole range of cultural, psychological, environmental and other issues to get a handle on the real significance of the lower levels of female enrollment in computer courses in order to understand why access to computers at school has not insured that boys and girls participate equally in courses that promise better access to the jobs of the future.3 Left out of these discussions, however, is any extended analysis of the ways that computer media may reshape the perceptions and understandings that students bring to the classroom. |
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A more basic cause of delay in the
serious assessment of the impact of electronic media, however, has
been the now-fading debates about the deficiencies of "Generation
X" students. By defining these students as deficient in some manner—upbringing,
television, broken families, slacker behavior—many critics
chose not to look closely at the environment in which this generation
grew up.
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Theirs was the first generation immersed in a world of pervasive
cable television, TV remote controls, technologically sophisticated
video games, MTV, twenty-four hour sports, and the internet with
its numerous sites, chat rooms, MUDs and MOOs. Teachers regarded
these activities as obstacles to learning rather than as outward
signs of a new way of looking at the world and their reaction was
largely to tell students to shape up and get focused. This emphasis
on the presumed behavioral foibles of Gen X forestalled the kinds
of analyses of electronic media that are the concern of this essay.
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Theorists Debate the Possible Impacts of the Electronic Media
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Media analysts are quick to point
out that the injection of new media does not affect every culture—or
even all members or segments of a single culture—in the same
way. The addition of new media leads people to mix the old and the
new, a remixing of their world including their sense of its possibilities
and dynamics. Furthermore, the time when one is born in the midst
of this process of remixing has a major impact on one's sense of
these changes and their meaning.
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From this perspective, classroom historians and their students were
born at different moments in the development of electronic media
and carry with them all of the baggage of birth in different media
ages. As we shall later see, even a cursory review of some of the
ideas of media impact presents historians with a long list of resonant
hypotheses about the perspectives that students—but not their
teachers—bring to class. |
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Concerns that electronic media are
altering (usually in the sense of diminishing) important skills
have triggered discussions about the trade-offs involved in the
adoption of new media. Some analysts argue that television diminishes
the ability of people to read while others argue equally fervently
that computers require and reward reading. Where some fear that
students do not possess the ability to process the mountains of
information present on the web, others offer the positive vision
that effective teachers can enrich their classes by connecting their
students to these same mountains. There is also a more pointed debate
about student attention span. The inability to focus on a single
topic for an extended period of time—sometimes labeled as Attention
Deficit Disorder (ADD)—has been regarded as a negative impact of
television and net surfing. However, apologists for electronic media
regard the charge of "short attention span" as a slur on the important
ability of students to evaluate information rapidly before moving
on to the next item. From this latter perspective everyone, including
historians, needs to develop the skill of rapid evaluation in order
to handle the waves of information available in the electronic age.
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There is also debate about the degree to which electronic media may have altered our understanding of the operation of current societies, especially our own. Television, for example, is increasingly portrayed as the primary component of the "national memory" that students and society possess. But whether this has created a truncated or an enhanced understanding of the past remains an open question.8 Electronic media may undermine many of the fictions of the past that supported hierarchies that were oppressive of human aspiration; and electronic media may also undermine the national narratives (fictions?) which tie countries together.9 Global media may be significantly restructuring the role of the nation state because these media simultaneously facilitate the growth of global entities which may be more powerful than many nation states while also fostering, via internet and email, micro-loyalties which are emotionally more satisfying than the bond to the nation state. The long-standing tie between national history and national historians, a basic justification for continued public funding for education, could be challenged by this trend.10 Collectively these ideas suggest that electronic media may free us from the constraints of time and space while shattering some of the basic categories we use to organize our understanding of the world.11 |
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Electronically related changes may affect understandings of self as well as society. Television and the computer may promote a sense of radical individualism in American society that can be both socially disruptive and personally liberating. This trend is captured by the notion that "if it's about me, it must be interesting."12 Computers make it possible for people, especially students, to explore different aspects of their emotions and interests in the privacy of a chat room under assumed identities. Computers may also facilitate asocial behavior as people work out their sense of themselves in the absence of other people.13 Taken together, the flood of information, the rise of radical individualism, and the distrust of the state, may combine to undermine the goal of learning as a part of character formation because electronic media promote a "recapitulative style" of learning in which students use television programs, chat room encounters—and course work—as a springboard for discussing their own concerns with their peers rather than seeking to master course content as a worthwhile end in itself.14 |
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From Media Theory to the History Classroom
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The initial value of these theories is for the formation of hypotheses about student performance that make sense based on the experiences of individual instructors. These ideas can be ranged along a spectrum that starts with minimal impacts and moves toward the more pervasive. While concerns about media impact have been present at least since the onset of television, the early arguments posited a relatively minimal impact based on the idea that media do not matter because they are "neutral" technologies. From this perspective the significant difference between current and earlier times is largely seen as confined to program content.15 Because students were exposed to different story lines than their teachers, this position holds, it was natural for students to fail to recognize many instructor analogies or references to events that seemed fundamental to earlier generations. This argument suggests that if faculty had only known about "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" or "Friends," then they could have presented historical ideas in ways more recognizable to their students. This theory retains some validity. Faculty today are at least somewhat aware that students use television content to make sense of historical phenomena. For example, a number of students in my classes use the Nike admonition to "just do it" to explain what Parisians were thinking just prior to their assault on the Bastille. They seem to think that as the crowd gathered and grew, some anonymous sans-culotte yelled that the mob should "just do it" and the attack began. Students who think this way write essays that seldom assess the issues that led up to events such as food shortages, the gathering of royal troops outside the city, the grievances of the Estates or the ideas of the Enlightenment. According to this view, the classroom difference between faculty and students is largely generational and based on differences in vocabulary and experience. If faculty could work out a common language with students, then all other issues would presumably diminish. |
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However, another theory about the impact of television holds that there are deeper reasons why students can no longer decode the elements of written argumentation. Because they have not read extensively, they have limited ability to recognize even basic "signals" that writers use to construct presentations. For example, a well-versed reader knows how words such as "meanwhile" or "on the other hand" indicate a shift to a parallel trend or event or a new perspective on the topic under consideration. This problem also extends to the recognition of ironic phrases that are not meant to be taken literally. This view of the problem is very close to recent debates about the fate of history in the schools because it blames students for watching too much television rather than perfecting reading skills. |
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We must add to these observations about television a more important analysis of the impact of the computer and the internet, an impact that has led many to identify pervasive shifts in student perception which have the most serious classroom implications. The ideas underlying this analysis are not radical propositions in the world of media theory; they are: 1) that material presented in print media is generally linear whereas material presented in electronic media tends to be nonlinear, and 2) that concepts of time and space are culturally constructed.16 It is essential that historians understand and accept the implications of these ideas. In particular they must learn how to understand and deal with the nonlinear. Electronic media create all sorts of sequences and juxtapositions and consequently space and time are both experienced differently from twenty or fifty or one hundred years ago.17 The world no longer exists, if it ever did, as a sequence because now it can be both experienced and presented in numerous configurations. The television remote control enables its possessor to jump from program to program while the media themselves stitch together the nightly news with the conjunction, "now...this."18 In a sense all television programming occurs in the present and all spaces are equidistant from each of us.19 These nonlinearities pale in comparison with the web, however, where hyperlinks give the internet surfer numerous options of where to "go" next. |
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The issue is no longer that teacher and student have different vocabularies and have learned different stories. Instead, the two now see, understand, and construct the world in different ways. Historians stress the awareness of sequence (if not the memorization of dates). Students who are accustomed to dealing with the world of electronic media seem to be unable to "see" the structure of a historical argument in the same way that people who are color blind may not be able to distinguish between red and green except for their memorized placement on a stoplight. But many students today are not grasping even basic information. They place less value on getting the events in exactly the "right" order in their papers because they neither see nor value time/sequence in the same way that many historians do. They fall back on their own estimates of how events should have unfolded. For example on exams in my course, Louis XVI more and more frequently loses his head immediately after his return from Varennes in June, 1791, because it seems to be a logical consequence of the flight. Given this state of affairs, we must ask if time and space and sequence and causation appear differently (or not at all) in the world of electronic media which have shaped students' minds. Are all of the building blocks which order historical analyses meaningless to students who hear or read them and so consequently they cannot be expected to appear in student papers? Does this mean that much of the historians' way of turning information into meaning is also lost?20 The answer, basically, depends on how historians address the conditions created by the new media. We will address some possible remedies for this situation later. |
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So far the analysis has focused on differences in understanding texts. What happens when the meaning of text itself is changed? The theoretical approach which asks this question holds that the further we move into understandings of electronic media, the more we see changed approaches toward texts, what they mean, and how to use them. The electronic age is accompanied by two assumptions: 1) that the number of texts has become infinite, and 2) that their purpose is now just as sources of bits of information or ideas which may be used by anyone as a springboard for arguments that may not otherwise connect with the ideas and concerns of the original source.21 The idea that there is significance in the intentions of the author or the context in which the work was produced has been greatly weakened if not altogether lost. For historians, however, knowledge on any particular subject has been regarded, at least in theory, as finite. Part of the test of historical knowledge has traditionally been the ability of the historian to show how one's research findings relate to prior writings in the field. In effect historians built a discipline in which historical texts can be grounded in time and space, validated, and then become the basis for authoritative interpretations of the past. The very nature of electronic information—and the experience of working with it that more and more of our students will bring to the classroom—thus presents both great challenges and great opportunities for the classroom instructor. |
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Electronic texts threaten to become infinite. They can only be sampled, not mastered. It is not possible now, if it ever was, to make an "authoritative" statement based on the idea that the writer has looked at "everything" in the field. Traditionally, after an historian learned a field or topic, the task of "keeping current" was restricted to new articles and books; indeed, many schools today use the criterion "keeps current with his/her field" as a part of individual professional development plans. Today electronic versions of texts produced in much earlier times can be placed online years after they were originally written. An historian who has left an analytical field alone for a year before looking to see what had been added, would have to conduct an electronic search identical to that carried out by someone approaching the topic for the first time. Even so, search engines may retrieve only a small portion of the relevant texts in a given search. Students have some appreciation of these problems. Therefore, even as they bring to class the ability to search the internet, they know that locating everything or even everything "good" cannot be part of the grade. The most that many faculty ask of students is to differentiate between "good" and "bad" sites. |
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Electronic texts are not grounded in space and time and are therefore immune to many of the traditional validation tests that could establish their "authority."22 Some faculty therefore teach students to be aware of the overall quality and purpose of a web site on which a document is found and want students to place a higher value on those that are sponsored by universities, museums, or faculty. Other efforts include the creation of "web rings." Groups that have a shared interest in a topic create a web ring containing only "validated" sites on that topic. No site is linked to the web ring until it has been reviewed for its contribution to the theme of the ring.23 This effort seeks to reduce the infinity of texts by quality control; but even if it is successful in some instances for some groups of texts, the plethora of total available texts and the student expectation that infinity is the norm will fill our classrooms with students not interested in "authority" in the historian's tradition of attaching words to time, place or author.24 |
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One classroom ramification of this is tied to student use of evidence. One of my most difficult teaching tasks is to get students to use sufficient examples or evidence as they build their essays. They seem to make judgements based on their initial impressions of the topic and act as if they believe that there is little to a topic that they do not see at first glance. They need to be reminded of that famous question: "What did President Nixon know and when did he know it?" When asked, this question was designed to limit the range of possible explanations for a sequence of events and to help find the correct one. What techniques will get our students to work within this same framework? One way to do it is to discuss the proper use of footnotes. The historian's requirement for footnotes is based on the idea that a serious scholar can work through another scholar's argument in the same manner as the author did in research. It is the parallel of the math teacher's requirement that students "show their work." This is a hard sell for students who know that two searches on the internet usually do not wind up at the same point. Furthermore there are not a lot of examples of footnoting outside history class. Television shows use talking heads and lists of advisors in their credits but they do not attach specific citations to particular individual assertions except through the occasional injection of an expert "talking head." |
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In the world of electronic media, however, the issue is more than simply that students do not encounter sufficient role models of the "right" way to do academic work. It is important here to revisit the idea that students may practice a recapitulative approach to learning which means that they may have different goals and styles for dealing with academic learning.25 For historians, the litmus test is whether an interpretation meshes with what we know about an issue from its sources and interpreters. By contrast, the recapitulative approach is tied to the effort to form one's own reactions or mental associations with a particular set of events without regard for what others have said and without a full review of the evidence. Existing media foster this approach and this tendency will be reinforced by some of the expanding possibilities of hypertext and interactive media. For example, Janet H. Murray argues that as the merger of media systems proceeds, it will become more and more possible for individuals to intervene in television programs to take control of individual characters and to rework programs over and over with the goal of trying out alternative plot twists.26 |
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The attractions of reworking plots according to highly personal criteria are already with us. Sports fans have frequent opportunities to use chat rooms to discuss coaching decisions as an event unfolds while some television viewers have the opportunity to vote on the fate of characters as teledramas proceed. A special instance of this phenomenon occurred when one of my students brought me a book which he identified as "alternative history."27 It was not counterfactual history as sometimes practiced or railed against within the profession—the kind of history that asks "what if" D-Day had failed in 1944 or "what if" the United States had not dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? The gist of the student's book was a story of World War II where, in the midst of the conflict, an alien invasion necessitated that Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler overcome their differences in order to work together to defeat space invaders. Certainly these were not alternatives most historians ever considered. As contrary as this seems to historical analysis, it is consistent with views of knowledge in cyberspace, some aspects of postmodern theory, and some current cultural trends in this country. This is true despite the fact that historians would assert that it is not legitimate history. However, approaches of this sort may hook students into the study of history because they resonate with the student. |
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While students do not spend a lot of time contemplating differing meanings of texts, they do match up classroom content and practice with their understandings of the world learned largely through electronic media. It is their world and it is also our world. We are all drinking the same water and breathing the same air. With just a couple of examples we can see that some of their approaches are not very different from those of the rest of society or from those of historians themselves. |
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Historians now see students who are reluctant to read, to work with texts, or to consider multiple explanations. Some faculty reduce this reluctance to engage with the issues to student hopes that the teacher will relent, cut to the chase, and reveal the bottom line answer to the issue under discussion. However this form of student behavior may have a deeper meaning. Some observers of the thought processes of traditional-aged students (18-21 year olds) argue that this reluctance is a measure of the distrust of and deep disregard toward lectures and texts. Students with this mindset tend to reject statements that might control or at least shape their thinking. From this perspective the refusal to deal with linear texts linearly is portrayed as a moment of liberation.28 Teachers must seek ways to get students to overcome their disinclination to grapple with texts and ideas. |
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On the other hand, this kind of student behavior may reflect the inability of national narratives to continue to draw students into the study of history. In a number of recent studies historians have questioned the profession's focus on the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis and called for the need to free history from the clutches of the nation-state or from the elites in control of government. This impetus comes on top of the traditional desire to get behind the cloak of patriotism to identify the "real" motives and goals of national decisions. Some media analysts have argued that the nation-state is losing its appeal as it is simultaneously undermined and overwhelmed by the new possibilities of electronic media. These media make it possible for individuals to locate and interact with groups smaller and emotionally more rewarding than the state. Meanwhile multinational corporations, their reach facilitated by electronic media, are outflanking if not overpowering many nations.29 Both these circumstances lead students to join others in cynicism toward national governments. |
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Looked at still another way, technologies, including media, can facilitate the wider attainment of once scarce cultural values. For example, radical individualism—acting as if the rest of society does not exist (or exists to play narrowly defined roles in one's life)—has been a long-standing dream of many, though by no means everyone, in the United States. Romanticizing the life of the cowboy while overlooking the reality of that life, or purchasing a sport utility vehicle so one will not have to "stay between the lines" except at the gas station are two examples of the commercially sanctioned sense of escape from society. Cyberspace—or at least its advertisers—has fanned the flame of this desire to live unobligated to others. Is historical knowledge seen as an impingement on this ideal? One analyst states that "Cyberspace is the place where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming."30 Although few students would acknowledge this pursuit of detachment from others, many of my online students do praise the internet for its convenience, for its presumed ability to take much of the drudgery out of life and school by reducing the number of moments of contact with others. Said one, "I don't have to go to the library and climb all those stairs to research a paper. Its just click-click-click and in ten minutes I have all I need." For many of my students doing term papers, if a source is not available on the internet, it is thought not to exist. |
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These general examples suggest that much of the behavior of our students is culturally sanctioned. Student reactions to history, a discipline requiring the study of texts and the recognition that the past may be a force in their lives, parallel other trends in society. If our students want to ignore the past and make themselves the measure of all they survey, they are not alone. Electronic technologies are facilitating the achievement of long desired but largely unattainable goals of disconnection from society even as they also make wider personal connections possible. The issues we face in the classroom are societal and cultural, not generational. But this isn't the end of the story. As Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen have written, Americans report lots of enjoyable, meaningful encounters with the past—they just haven't had many of them in history classes within the frameworks of academic history.31 Our task as instructors is to figure out the meaning of the historical in the electronic world and find out how to connect with it and to make our courses historical in ways we can also regard as valid. |
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What Should We Do?
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Too often the focus on electronic media is restricted to technique, and instructors find themselves worrying about how to teach themselves and their students to write hypertext or master promising software packages. This aspect of adapting traditional college work to electronic media should be done elsewhere and college-wide in order to provide history faculty with more time to address the large intellectual concerns central to their academic discipline. For historians these broader issues include introducing students to unfamiliar past worlds, teaching them how to study them historically, and showing them how to develop and present their understandings in coherent ways. This is where we should spend our time. But what does this assertion mean in the classroom? The following list is only suggestive but tries to address some of the more sweeping impacts of electronic media. |
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1. Give students some historical perspective on their unique media moment. At the start of the course, teach the issue of media shift including theories of the impact of different media. Modern European history (including the AP version) currently spans the world from Gutenberg to the gigabyte. Discuss media issues related to both eras. Read some of the materials on the impact of the printing press but reach beyond an examination of its role in the Reformation. Include other impacts often associated with printing such as the enhanced ability of writers to reach wider audiences, the transformation of listeners into readers, the conferral of power to different groups of people, the facilitation of the scientific revolution, and the promotion of linear thought and self-reflection. Then point out how the relatively recent transition to electronic media may represent a parallel shift of equal importance and explain some of the these possibilities as well. If students see how elements of modern history flow from the development of moveable type, students then can be drawn into exploring some of the parallel issues of their own world.
2. Recognize that the products of historical study—the lecture and the monograph—are more clearly the captive of print media than historical work itself. Achieve this realization in class by using a side stage approach as a bridge between the work and the product of historians. 32 Get away from the lecture as the presentation of the finished product of historical study and move to a discussion of how you go about the research required for your lectures and writing. Transform your whole course from the presentation of the finished products of historical study into consideration of the processes of analysis by, in effect, having students work with your mental rough drafts and the intermediate thoughts you considered on the way to your final conclusions. Set aside time for students to consider how they know what they know.
3. Choose several instances, near the start of the course, to introduce historical evidence before you establish the historical context surrounding the evidence. This takes advantage of the power of computers and hypertext to juxtapose events and cultures, and to work backwards and forwards in time. Part of the benefit of this approach is that it helps defeat the widely held student notion that what they see in their first glance at a topic is all there is to that topic and makes them address evidence more fully. This approach can be achieved in several ways. My primary experience with this approach is the result of the "Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age" project of the American Historical Association for which I developed a unit entitled "Biafra, Nigeria, the West and the World."33 I chose the Biafran secession movement because it is totally outside the experience of all students except for my few African students. The project starts with statements about the onset of war—the Biafran Declaration of Independence, General Gowon's victory statement three years later, and a collection of observations about the war from Europeans who wanted it to stop. From there I ask students to work backwards in time to look at ever earlier statements and decisions in the hopes that each step back will add more understanding of the event. In addition I have tried to make students more aware of how they have learned by keeping a journal of their analyses and reflections at each step. A second, non-electronic, way to achieve many of the same lessons about historical work could be based on the development of a small set of printed documents (five to seven) that could be given to groups of students one at a time, in random order. They would be asked to analyze each document, draw conclusions about what it says and what it means before receiving the next one in the collection. The context of the event could be added over time by the instructor-as-source-of-information in response to specific questions that students developed in the course of their analysis. Both of these approaches encourage "deep" analysis of issues by eliminating the internet as a source of infinite "answers" and by placing the ability to ask questions at the center of the historian's enterprise.
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There are, of course, other tricks in a teacher's arsenal. Teach as if your subject is a foreign culture even if it is recent United States history (or the history of some other culture not foreign to you). Require students to write and write and write while critiquing their work in terms of the characteristics of effective historical argumentation. Point out to students that historians believe it is better to have unanswered questions than to have unquestioned answers. Avoid the temptation to simply debunk a few national myths in a way that teaches them that their understanding of the world was complete and that history leaves them believing there is nothing to add to their mental arsenal except reaffirmation of pre-existing cynicism. |
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These "solutions" are only starting points for dealing with the impact of electronic media on historical understanding. James O'Donnell is correct. We need to try to imagine "our way forward to the people that we, or our children, may become."34 If we don't, we may be marginalized in this new century and will thereby deprive our students and society of a fuller connection with the past and the meanings it can add to our world. Or to put a historian's point on it, we need to avoid going the way of the philologists of the nineteenth century whose work lost touch with the flow of events. |
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Notes
1
See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), pp.175-177, an example of analysis of communication as an intersubjective activity in contrast to the idea that media are neutral in the process of communication.
2
See, for example, the essays in Brian D. Loader, ed., Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency, and Policy in the Information Age (London, 1998).
3
American Association of University Women, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children (New York, 1999), pp. 70-73.
4
A powerful example of the indictments of this group of students is Peter Sacks, Generation X Goes to College (Chicago, 1996) which is subtitled An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America. Consider his position on the impact of television: "Colorful, mesmerizing images and sounds flash and go; at a child's whim Big Bird metamorphoses into Mr. Brady, who in turn is transformed into an MTV sex object. The spectacle that Generation X was born watching is never boring—the hand-held remote guarantees that much.... Their desire to be entertained [in the classroom] seemed at times a low but constant background buzz, providing the real cultural context that shaped virtually everything that went on in the classroom." p.143.
5
A sympathetic account that identifies pressures from society at large for the problems experienced by Generation X can be found in a special section of Utne Reader (July/August, 1994) entitled "Today's Teens: Dissed, Mythed and Totally Pissed: A Generation and a Nation at Risk." Two classic analyses of this cohort of students are Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, 13th Gen Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (New York, 1993) by two demographers, and Douglas Coupland's novel, GenerationX: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York, 1991). Both are printed and organized in a style reminiscent of computer writing and communication. The voice of Generation X is captured in a group of essays, Eric Liu, ed., Next Young American Writers on the New Generation (New York, 1994).
6
For the application of this "hypodermic" model to electronic media, see David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London, 1995), pp.126-127. Philosophical analysis of how a new technology redefines a situation is Albert Borgmann's distinction between a "thing" and a "device" in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago, 1984), Chapter 9, "The Device Paradigm." See also the discussion of "Heidegger's Hammer" in Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld From Garden to Earth (Bloomington, Indiana, 1990), pp. 31-34.
7
"We are coming to understand that what we so valued as an attention span is something entirely different from what we thought. As practiced, an attention span is not a power of concentration or self-discipline in the least, but rather a measure of a viewer's susceptibility to the hypnotic affects of linear programming.... The child of the remote control may indeed have a 'shorter' attention span as defined by the behavioral psychologist of our prechaotic culture's academic institutions (which are themselves dedicated to little more than preserving their own historical stature). But this same child also has a much broader attention range. The skill to be valued in the twenty-first century is not length of attention span but the ability to multitask—to do many things at once, well." Douglas Rushkoff, Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos (New York, 1996), pp.49-50 (emphasis in the original).
8
The power of repeated viewings of movie videos to shape one's "memory" of the past is documented in Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia, 2001), Chapter 10. For an extended critique of television's impact on memory, see David Marc, Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss (Syracuse, 1995).
9
A sweeping analysis of the ways the formation of a national narrative was achieved by suppressing information about the losses sustained by numerous groups is Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995). The recovery of these voices is part of the broader contemporary trend toward challenging the national stories sanctioned by the state. Consider this trend in tandem with the work of Robert Morley and Kevin Robins. They argue that the proliferation of broadcast channels through cable and satellite television is likely to move us towards a more fragmented social world than that of traditional national broadcast television. These new forms of communication may in fact play a significant part in deconstructing national cultures, and the interactive and 'rescheduling' potentialities of video and other new communications technologies may well disrupt assumptions of any 'necessary simultaneity' of social experience." p. 68.
10
See Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II, The Power of Identity (Malden, Massachusetts, 1997). Also Morley and Robins, p.24.
11
According to many analysts cultures are no longer demarcated in time and space. See, for example, Eric Wolf: 'the concept of a fixed, unitary and bounded culture must give way to a sense of fluidity and permeability of cultural sets.' Europe and the People without History, (Berkeley, California, 1982), p. 387. (cited in Morley and Robins, p. 87). See also Jonathan Boyarin (ed.), Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (Minneapolis, 1994) who argues that today's traditional ideas of space and time have been promoted to enhance the position of the nation-state. "I further suggest that our reified notions of objective and separate time and space are peculiarly linked to the modern identification of a nation with a sharply bounded, continuously occupied space controlled by a single sovereign state, comprising a set of autonomous yet essentially identical individuals." p. 2.
12
The phrase was used in a column on Monica Lewinsky by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
13
The fullest analysis of this phenomenon is Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York, 1995). "The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create. What kinds of personae do we make? What relation do these have to what we have traditionally thought of as the whole person? Are they experienced as an expanded self or as separate from the self? Do our real-life selves learn lessons from our virtual personae? Are these virtual personae fragments of a coherent real-life personality? How do they communicate with one another? Why are we doing this? Is this a shallow game, a giant waste of time? Is it an expression of an identity crisis of the sort we traditionally associate with adolescence? Or are we watching the slow emergence of a new, more multiple style of thinking about the mind?" p.180.
14
The term "recapitulative style" is from Douglas Rushkoff's analysis. The term defines "distanced participation that allows them [kids] to turn what used to be an isolating experience [television viewing] into an expression of community. They don't want to get drawn into the drama and don't seek or offer moral statements: "The television becomes a hearth, casting light on a room filled with participants." p. 225. "They must stay alert and disengaged, constantly aware of the inability of moral platitudes—the metaphorical existence portrayed on stage—to answer complex human dilemmas." p. 224. Why is recapitulation necessarily more advanced or better than literal or metaphorical understandings of the world? Because, according to Rushkoff, it is capable of representing our chaotic cultural experience in a manner that allows us to relate to it. It gives us an insight into how nature works, and motivates us to become more fully conscious and self-determining. There are implications here for the traditional classroom or at least for the expectations which students bring to this setting. Unlike literal models, recapitulation doesn't demand that people memorize facts and commands, especially when there are too many to keep track of. Unlike metaphor, recapitulation doesn't demand a definite but potentially dangerous conclusion. p. 228. "For this younger generation, discontinuous media is not the exception it is the rule. As a result they have adopted a social philosophy very different from their predecessors. They do not work to recombine and reduce the seemingly endless stream of media bits into coherent, unified pictures, and they no longer believe in hard-and-fast answers to the world's problems." p. 44. This preferred activity of many students may be close to what Walter Ong calls "secondary orality" which he sees as informed by the preexisting literate culture. He reports that the phenomenon is largely unstudied. p. 171.
15
Marshall McLuhan was the major exception to this generalization. His ideas are reprised and updated for the computer age in Paul Levinson, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium (London, 1999).
16
See James J. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998), 133-143, for one example of what accepting nonlinearity will mean for history and the humanities; see Carol J. Greenhouse, A Moment's Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures (Ithaca, 1996) for a cross-cultural discussion of concepts of time.
17
The experience of a world of increasing speed and shrinking size has been a staple of the past two hundred years. See, for example, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983).
18
Neil Postman emphasizes the use of "now...this" as a conjunction in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, 1985), pp. 99-113.
19
The impact of the ability to watch the "millenium" arrive twenty-four times on television may well be one day regarded as significant as the earlier moment when people saw the earth from space as a single globe for the first time.
20
"Yet it may well be the case that the labyrinth of cyberspace is about the loss of authority and not meaning." Ron Burnett, "A Torn Page, Ghosts on the Computer Screen, Words, Images, Labyrinths: Exploring the Frontiers of Cyberspace," in George E. Marcus, ed., Connected Engagements with Media, Late Editions, vol. 3 (Chicago, 1996), p. 69.
21
Dick Ward and Ron Vetter argue that information for a digital teaching library should be made "granular," a term for data broken into discrete bits that relate as nearly as possible to only one search term in a data base as opposed to larger clusters of information that appear repeatedly in a number of different searches. "A Look at the Creation and Maintenance of a Digital Library of Educational Resources," North Carolina Sociological Association Annual Meeting, February 22, 2002.
22
"Hyperreality...is a site of collapse or implosion where referential or 'grounded' utterance becomes indistinguishable from the self-referential and the imaginary." Stuart Moulthrop, "You say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media," Postmodern Culture I, no. 3, p. 23 quoted in Ron Burnett, p.73.
23
"Quality, Imprimaturs, and Rings," unsigned editorial in Journal of the Association for History and Computing, Vol. II, Number 2, August, 1999. Online journal available at http://www.mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCII2/EDITORIALII2/Rings.html; Jeffrey Barlow and Phillip Huhta, "A Peer-Reviewed Web Ring for Students and Teachers of History," Journal of the Association for History and Computing, Volume II, Number 3, November, 1999. Online journal available at: http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/jahcII3/EDITORIALII3/Edit.html
24
"The labyrinth of cyberspace is more malleable. The information within its boundaries is never fixed and those who visit can change its form by altering the flow of data or by adding their own information to its memory banks. In other words, information loses its privileged status and becomes less identified with its author." Burnett, p. 70 .
25
See footnote 14.
26
Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York, 1997).
27
I have always been sorry that I did not jot down the bibliographic information for this work. I will when and if I see him next semester.
28
Rushkoff, Chapter 1, "The Fall of Linear Thinking and the Rise of Chaos."
29
Morley and Robins, Duara, Greenhouse, Kaplan and others.
30
Burnett, p.84.
31
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998). For example, "[Survey respondents] feel connected to the past in museums because authentic artifacts seem to transport them straight back to the times when history was being made. They feel unconnected to the past in history classrooms because they don't recognize themselves in the version of the past presented there. When asked to describe studying history in school, they most often used the words dull and irrelevant." (p. 12; italics in original)
32
I made an earlier attempt to address these issues and suggest suitable teaching techniques in "Teaching History in a-Historical Times: A Side Stage Approach," Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, XXI (Fall, 1996), pp. 59-67. The computer and the internet were not analyzed in any way in that essay.
33
The current web address for this project is: http://www.historians.org/tl/LessonPlans/nc/Trask/cover.htm This project demonstrates that its creator is a child of print in that it over-relies on the printed word and ignores many of the admonitions of web designers about the size of the ideal screen of information. This unit is the concluding unit of my survey of modern western civilization.
34
O'Donnell, 10.
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