Our classroom and online discussions have led us to surface a reasoning flaw in Hindman’s argument, namely, his narrow definition of “political discourse.” We’ve pushed back on his analysis by asking, what happens when the porn that you look at is influencing your political commitments, and/or your political commitments are influenced by your porn? Or your DIY crafting blogs? Or your Netflix queue? After all, as many of our own feminist political commitments teach us, the personal is political (So maybe, just maybe, my recent Victoria’s Secret Google search, which Hitwise Competitive Intelligence no doubt tracked, has everything to do with my politics—especially if I’m looking to buy some bras to burn at my next feminist political protest).
Beyond the debate of the Internet revolutionizing American democracy, there is that other hotly contested issue of whether—for better of for worse—the Internet is revolutionizing education. Some of the literature we’ve encountered (Bejerano; Allen) seems to take a cautionary stance toward online education, conceptualizing online education in a fairly narrow, functional sense of either independent distance learning, or information and communication technologies (ICTs) as merely supplementary to traditional classroom instruction. The cautionary tone of the literature seems rooted in a concern that ICTs—despite their rapid advancements and increasing conveniences—simply cannot replicate the traditional ways that we’ve conceptualize and approached education. Ultimately, I’d argue that these articles are correct: online education can’t replicate traditional approaches to education, but only in the same sense that Bob Dylan’s transition to the electric guitar could not replicate his traditional folk music. Which is to say that with the advent of online communication, traditional education can never be replicated. In my opinion, attempts at doing so are fruitless, but not necessarily for the functional reason the literature has laid forth, but more, so for conceptual ones.
With all of our discussions of online communication—whether we’re discussing robots, politics, or pedagogy—I keep noticing our group’s collective movement to question the literature’s passive construction of particular definitions, particularly as we find them to be both too narrow and too broad. We’ve pointed out that Hindman seems as unreflective in his narrow definition of political discourse, as Sherry Turkle does in her ambiguous articulation of identity—one that seems to problematically conflate an authentic identity with a static
one. In keeping with this movement, and to return to my initial discussion of online education, I’d like to tease out a discussion of online education from a the perspective that is more interested in tending first to how ICTs might conceptually or theoretically alter education, rather than beginning first with issues of functionality.
But in order to do so, I first need to take a bit of a detour. One day in class we considered which characteristics we’d seek out in the perfect robot-friend. One joking response was, “I won’t have to explain to My Robot Buddy what performance studies is.” We laughed at this as an absolute criterion for a robot-friend, but I certainly identified with the frustration behind the sentiment, especially after having tried to explain—unsuccessfully, and in any variety of approaches that I can think of—to my extended family and non-academic friends, just what the heck it is that I’ve been studying for the past 7 years. More often than I’d like to admit, I’ve resigned myself to knowing that many of them think that performance studies is “kind of like theatre, but not really.”
The trouble for me is, again, one of too vague or too specific of definitions. Any time I try to go past that shallow conceptualization, I find myself saying awesomely pretentious sentences like, “the interdisciplinarity of the field is a performance in and of itself. One that reflects back the always shifting composition of any particular phenomenon that one might choose to investigate.” Selfishly, I don’t want my friends and family to think I’m a jackass. And, my general experience is that most people seem to prefer either really narrow or really broad definitions, because that middle ground—where we spend our time playing with definition—takes too much time and too much work.
But I’m keen to think about Turkle’s research (just maybe not her analysis of that research) and how the pervasiveness of ICTs might be changing how folks orient to that always shifting middle ground—particularly, as online communication can contribute to shifting identities, fractured subjectivities, and slippery definitions. And I can’t help but think about that shift as educational—a more conceptual kind of online education, if you will.
Turkle shores up several examples of how online communication is altering folk’s coherent and fixed notions of time, space, and identity. She offers the very useful metaphor of the cubist art movement as way to understand how communication technology is shifting our perceptions (63). Expanding on this metaphor, she explains cubism as a simultaneous presentation of multiple perspectives. The Internet, with its multiple windows and latticework of complex linking systems—in conjunction with various other globalized technologies (cell phones, email, text messages, and instant messaging)—expands our stable sense of self, space, and place by presenting these various perspectives simultaneously. While Turkle seems to lament this shift, nostalgic for the less complicated days of yore, I’m inclined to see it as a pedagogically productive approach for explaining performance studies to my Uncle Gary.
This is an example of cubism?
All of this is to say, that how ICTs contribute to perceptual shifts in our collective sense of reality is a rich site for thinking through questions of online education, communication education, and performance studies. With regard to these perceptual shifts, feminist pedagogue Carmen Luke, works through new media’s inevitable effect on students. Like Turkle, Luke agrees that increasingly students will not know of a reality outside of the compressed and reorganized world presented to them through Internet technologies. But in a departure from Turkle—who seems agreeable to sequestering a globalized reality—Luke argues that out of fairness and perceptual continuity for students altered realities, we must embrace online education inside and outside of the classroom. Incisively, Luke points to the traditional classroom as “one of the few places . . .used to discourage student from blending, mixing, and matching knowledge drawn from diverse textual sources and communications media” (398).
So, while we might not be immediately inclined to include Internet meme’s combining various tweets and interviewed gems of Charlie Sheen “bi-winning” and “Tiger blood, Adonis DNA” as part of the introductory university course, we should stay open to expanding our approaches to and definitions of education, by embracing multimodal pedagogies that reflect changing perceptions of our students.
Works Cited:
- Allen, Terre H. “Is the Rush to Provide On-Line Instruction Setting Our Students Up for Failure?” Communication Education 55.1 (2006): 122-126. Print.
- Bejerano, Arleen R. “The Genesis and Evolution of Online Degree Programs: Who Are They For and What Have We Lost Along The Way?” Communication Education 57.3 (2008): 408-414. Print.
- Luke, Carmen. “Pedagogy, Connectivity, Multimodality, and Interdisciplinarity.” Reading Research Quarterly 38.3 (2003): 397-403. Print.
Diana, I completely agree with the difficulty of "defining" my scholarly endeavors to family and friends, and the "kinda like theater--but different" has fallen out of my mouth more times than I'd like to count.
ReplyDeleteAnd I adore how "A Student's Guide to Performance Studies" completely omits (almost) anything to come out of a non-NYU background. You'd think such an esteemed school as Harvard would have the doctoral candidate who wrote the guide (Shana Komitee--it's hidden at the bottom) go past the first page of major hits to find out a different story.