Virtually Real: The Documentary

As I said to Steve Sheffield recently, I have 98 out of the 1000 pieces I need to make start writing and editing the film but I was just missing the glue. Well, this week I not only found the glue, but I found one with the perfect pigment. An article from an ‘05 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Eductation finally started to address the issues of Virtually Real that find most compelling: community and culture.

The most interesting about the article The Net Generation Goes To College is the diverging opinions even within higher education regarding what is responsible for the cultural shifts in today’s students: technology or parenting.

How often do we ever see one-dimensional answers to complex questions? There are usualy numerous factors that push large sociological and / or cultural issues one direction or another, and technology’s influence on youth is no exception. As the article points out there are some academicians who believe we need to bend our institutions to cope and accomodate these new students. There’s another professor quoted, however, who says (and I paraphrase) that the responsibility for capturing the short-attention spans of these students remains with the professors, and accomdating the whims of the students is not way to help the situation.

She sees the attitudes of these students as the perfect reflection of their upbringing, of the cultural shift in primary and secondary education that focuses so much on maintaining the self-esteem of students that it forgets to remind the students that they are often wrong, that they need to learn from others, that they don’t have all the answers, and that they need to learn how to LISTEN!

Now we’re getting somewhere. Combine this with the Web 3.0 on the horizon, and you ask yourself, do we REALLY want the total democratization of the free world? When anyone, anywhere has the ability to start huge movements that are potentially based on mis-information, do we really want power in the hands of anybody and everybody?

Now stating the above in the way that I have is partly just thinking out loud, but I also didn’t go back to edit it because it raises what I see as rhetorical questions about current Administration policies. It’s a tangent I don’t want to go off on right now, but it begs acknowledgement.

But regarding listening, and the new media for communication that today’s youth have, what is the definition of communication becoming? If you take even a small amount of time to look at linguistics you realize that effective communication between people who speak the same language can be a dubious proposition at best, but when language becomes truncated (IMing), and attention spans become shorter and shorter, and the amount of information bombardering a person at any given time continues to accelerate, are we not reaching a threshold past which we will no longer be able to communicate anything more effectively or deeply than grunts and stick waving?

With the power to communicate in the hands of everyone, and having fewer and fewer people listening, and limiting the depth to which anyone cares to pursue the examination of anything, are we not putting the real power into the hands of fewer and fewer people? Is this new age of communication (Web 3.0) potentially the undoing of human civiliation, returning us to the days of grunts and stick waving?