The screen goes blank. Windows won’t
open. Download an attachment and you can’t find it. The password is case
sensitive. The computer crashes. Pop-up
Ads block text. Files get corrupted. Photos
melt into garbledy code. Files get erased. Formatting is scrambled. Blue screen of death. Help!
Help? There is no help.
Instructions, if you can find them, are loaded with jargon. They tell
you to click on blah. There is no
blah on which to click. Community chats just bitch and moan (as I’m
doing here). There are no phone contact numbers. If there is one, it’s menus,
menus, menus. Click. Click. Click.
All right then. Suppose you master, let’s say, Google
docs. There are thousands of techies at
Google who must look like they’re working.
They can’t leave well enough alone.
They fix what isn’t broken. They are
constantly devising new systems full of bugs.
They drop old features. Nyah, Nyah, you can’t win.
Tech rage. Melt down.
I’ve been on the edge of taking an axe to my PC way more than I can
admit. But no matter how much I bellow, the device sits there impervious. Might
as well be a demon in there—playing me like a marionette. I could get paranoid.
In his landmark book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
Marshall McLuhan warned us that “The medium is the message”: the message
is “the scale or pace or pattern” that a new invention introduces into human
affairs. The way I apply this to
teaching is to say that students learn how I am, not what I say—the
medium, how; not the content, what. When I was teaching a class of professors how
to teach college writing, I asked them at the end of the semester what was most
important to them. I was hoping they
would cite my punctuation routines, my research, my class management. No. What
they cited the most, what they carried away into their own teaching was my love
and enthusiasm for writing. It was the how
of my teaching not the what that was the message.
So what do digitalized messages tell us—what is the how of
them?
Digitalized media are built on the base 2 binary
numerical system—0 and 1, 0 and 1—this way or that way—yes and no. Programmers devise pathways based on 0 and 1.
Once you choose either 0 or 1, you must follow that path. Then choose 0 or 1. There is no going
back. Like the old experiments with
pigeons pecking at a lever for food pellets. You have to get it right or no
pellets for you. This rigid medium, complicated by the fact that all these systems
are microscopically delivered and invisible, produces these overarching messages:
(1)
Everything is either this or that. Right or wrong. No wiggle room.
(2)
The computer always wins—its way or no
way.
(3)
There is only one way to do things.
(4)
You have to figure out what it wants and
how it wants it.
(5)
You don’t count.
(6)
You have to be vigilant.
(7)
You’re not in on the
secrets.
(8)
You don’t belong in
the divine eschelon.
(9)
You are at its
mercy.
(10)
If you rebel, you will be punished.
These messages a myriad of times a day, day after day, year
after year, a lifetime—go in very deeply.
They create a sense of helplessness.
And despair. A dynamic of
vigilance—of trying to figure out what someone, in this case, something
wants.
Studies have shown that noise, odor, or light pollution does the
most harm when the brain so adapts to it that we don’t notice it any more—in other
words, the brain has been changed to accommodate the tyranny of the
pollution. We become vehicles for the pollution.
So, too, once we stop noticing how we are being affected by the digitalized
world, we have succumbed to becoming them—to becoming robots. That would be devastating, enough. But the messages infiltrate all areas of our
lives.
We have a world that is built on extremes—rigid extremes that forbid
human error, emotional or spiritual flux, individual personality—no relationships,
syntheses, creativity. Fascistic and sociopathic personalities—who pander to
extremes—are voted into office. It’s
all-or-nothing with them. And we are helpless. Helplessness leads to addictions—drugs,
alcohol, shopping, Netflix binging, phones, phones, phones. We become addicted to praying to the Digital
Gods to shower their favor on us. Please let this work. Click, click. Please let this work.
And I’m writing this post on my HP—an acronym for Higher
Power?
Works Cited:
Cover art:
Text:
McLuhan,
Marshall. Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964.
Because I Can
Teach Link:
The Tree of
Knowledge: Binary Oppositions:
