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Frankenstein in the University
5/28/2008
But the advent of more visual and oral media are encouraging new forms of communication, and, arguably, different forms of thinking that are promoting what the scholar Walter Ong has called "secondary orality." Ong wrote almost all of his work before the advent of recent technologies like Amazon's Kindle, the iPod, and Youtube. Nevertheless Ong's phrase, "secondary orality" is still used by current critics to delineate a shift away from the deliberative and quiescent thinking that people engage in when reading and writing, to a more emotive, shared, and collaborative form of thinking that is ostensibly fostered by post-literate communication technologies. These same critics note that while reading and writing allow us to take note of inconsistencies between one author's exegesis and another's, this is more difficult to do when listening to or viewing speeches; consequently the lack of exposure to inconsistency prevents less-literate people from developing healthy measures of self-doubt.Portrayed this way, the new media are not merely lenses that uncover new meaning, they become lenses that transform meaning and restructure cognition. As Ong's teacher, Marshall McLuhan, famously put it, "The medium becomes the message." When critics describe media in this fashion, they are bestowing an awful lot of insidious power on a technology. And when this much covert power is attributed to a technology one might even be inclined to think that it is playing a determinative role in shaping consciousness and reworking our social and cognitive matrices.
Online Education
If stories about the new media and the cognitive abilities of the Net generation make hard determinism an increasingly attractive perspective, such interpretations are also found among the cohort of professors who claim that they will never teach online because it's a pale similitude of the learning experience they are able to create in the brick and mortar classroom. Although assessments of online versus face-to-face teaching are not revealing definitive differences in terms of learning outcomes, there are faculty who are highly skeptical of online education anyway. To these people, the specter of a virtual university is a horror to be avoided as much as the residential college education is to be hallowed. In "Digital Diploma Mills; the Automation of Higher Education" the historian David Noble sees the technologization of learning as a development that is jeopardizing faculty autonomy and making faculty increasing subject to "....administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even censorship...." To be fair, Noble isn't telling a strict tale of technological determinism, since the technology isn't metastasizing through academe of its own accord so much as being promoted and deployed by administrators eager to commodify the university. But since, in Nobles words, "the technology, like the automation of other industries, robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their working lives, [and] the product of their labor...." faculty may feel that intellectual freedom is being subsumed and desiccated by machines.
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