Did anyone watch Frontline’s Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier last night on PBS? If not, it is on the PBS Web site in segments.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view
Much of it was annoying to me, especially when the professional reactionaries were trotted out (Todd Oppenheimer and Mark Bauerlein, frequent ranter on The Chronicle) to complain that things are not how they used to be.
I know. Documentary. All sides and all that. Still, I was annoyed by the overall negative tone.
But there were some nice moments.
I was especially interested in the Virtual Worlds segment (7th on the navigation bar up top), which focused on Second Life. Worth watching as an introduction to SL, perhaps, although it just briefly mentions education and focuses more on IBM.
Segment 2 on multi-taskers is also interesting. It covers recent research that suggests that multi-taskers in fact do NOT learn more effectively when doing more than one thing (there was a recent Chronicle article on this subject). They just think they do.
Or maybe it depends on what is being measured..
I did like seeing and hearing Mark Prensky (segment 5, I think). I loved it when he suggested those who fear that technology is changing how we learn, read, write, socialize, and interact are confusing the best ways we did something once upon a time with the best ways of doing something now (my words, but I think that’s what he was saying).
And I really am enjoying the roundtable discussion on the PBS site conducted blog style by some of the folks who were featured in the documentary. The discussion is on the Web site too.
Analogy time.
James Coburn, as George Kaplan, Rogue CIA Agent in the 1991 movie “Hudson Hawk”. “God, I miss communists. The Red threat, the agency had some respect then. Hell, I got laid every night!”
There are no more “communists”. Nowdays the “Red Threat” is something very different (but no less scary).
Times change. Today is not yesterday. I was an intelligence officer trained to be an expert on Eastern Europe. Now all the “targets” I was trained for are “friends” and the threat is gone (I won!) But, conversely so is the reason for my employment in that field.
I am a Baby Boomer. A whole bunch of my contemporaries in the intel field, who specialized in Eastern Europe, have gone into the Information Technology field.
We certainly are NOT afraid of technology. As a matter of fact, information technology is a very good match for analytical fast learners.
To lament the passing of an era is counter productive. Let it go and move on. If you can’t do that, just go home, pull down your curtains, turn off the lights, shut up and wait to die. You have outlived your usefulness. We are not bringing back yesterday so you can feel valuable. Tempus fugit.
By: Marney Mason on January 17, 2011
at 5:37 pm