I've taught a few variations now on a class that I'm currently calling "Digital Diversity." It's a class that I really enjoy teaching, and that focuses on a topic very close to my heart: discussing all of the insidious and wonderful little ways that our day-to-day lives are tied seemingly inextricably to the internet and computing technology nowadays.
Though most of my classes get a better reception the more times I teach them (which I like to think indicates my ability to adjust and improve according to feedback and more pedagogical reflection) or at the very least balance out at a pretty acceptable level of success, Digital Diversity has been pretty distinctly and obviously less successful each time I've taught it. I've been trying to figure out why for a long time, in the process pouring a lot of thought and extra work into solving the problem (including writing a few more blog posts about it, which are currently sitting at the top of my "Drafts" folder), and I haven't come to any solid conclusions or discovered any obvious solutions yet. However, stumbling across an old email this morning might have helped me understand what's going on a little bit better.
The email in question was from an old colleague of mine and it popped up in gmail as one of the results of a totally unrelated search, a weird quirk in the search algorithm. It was a reminder about a project said colleague was working on as part of a class we were taking together. The colleague was interested in studying Twitter, and so, for one particular week of the seminar, she was requesting that we all install the Twitter app on our phones, enable all notifications, and then be prepared to discuss the experience of being "always-on" through the app when class reconvened.
That's it. Today, a discussion about how annoying Twitter notifications are is like a discussion about how annoying it is when the weather calls for sun and it starts raining. Everyone gets it. It's hardly a topic that needs the environment of a graduate-level seminar in cultural studies to happen. But I distinctly remember being extremely interested in the topic from an academic standpoint when this seminar was going on. I remember my colleagues and the professor being extremely interested. And I remember the discussion being engaging and enlightening. That seminar took place maybe six years ago. In the last six years, social networking over the internet has become so tightly integrated into most of our lives that to speak of it analytically, critically, is, for want of a better word, passé.
I was a graduate student in an environment in which talking about the politics of identity creation on Facebook, on Twitter, and so on, was a burgeoning topic of interest and (apparently) intense importance, at least in the discourses of cultural and media studies. And I was learning about these subjects through research and dissertation work as they were being spoken about and written about in that same way. And I was learning to teach about these subjects as they were being spoken about and written about in that same way.
Flashforward to six years later, and it's beginning to feel like my pedagogical approach is flawed. I learned (in part) how to teach while working under the assumption that these technologies and our applications of them were exceptional and that they should be presented, discussed, and deconstructed as such. In 2014, there is nothing more reflexive (or at least, so it seems) to college-age students than using Facebook and Twitter as one of their main ways (if not their primary way) of interacting with the world outside themselves socioculturally. In my class, when I want them to think about whether or not Facebook's interface inherently and importantly limits their ability to express themselves to their friends in ways that might not exist in face-to-face conversation or conversation over the telephone, they are bored.
This is, of course, nobody's fault, but I'm not sure how to overcome the difficulty nonetheless. Every time I change the course, I update readings, I change assignments, I alter notes, I approach subjects from different angles. On a day-to-day basis I read at least 2-3 articles regarding technology use and its effects on our culture, not just to "stay current" but because it's what I'm interested in as a person, not just as a teacher. It's not as if I'm coming to class with anecdotes about Friendster and screenshots of my old GeoCities page (don't try to find it; you can't). But I wonder if there's a chronological or maybe even generational gap that's effecting my pedagogy here: to me, even fifty years from now, a lot of these technologies and our applications of them will always be a) fascinating and b) worthy of critique, because I remember what it was like when they first came into being, how dramatically things changed. It's possible that all the research, revision, and pedagogy workshops in the world aren't going to be able to close that gap between me and students who take classes like Digital Diversity.
Thoughts?
