The Net decontextualizes experience and it doesn't work for me

One of the ways we humans understand the world is through contextualizing. The brain connects the new with the already known. It's a physiological process with psychological and emotional dimensions.

Just imagine if every time you went to a grocery store, you had to "start from scratch" figuring out the context. What's a grocery, what can I buy here, how does the process work, how am I supposed to behave? Is it safe?

Anyone who's traveled in foreign culture knows what I'm talking about. It's engaging beyond many of life's experiences. It's also challenging and scary and exhausting.

Once I was in Istanbul briefly, on my own, taking a ferry across the harbor to catch a train. I'd never been anywhere where the language was completely indecipherable. But the context was decipherable and what I needed to do was clear--find someone who spoke English to tell what to do next. And maybe more importantly, all the relevant dimensions of the context were transparent because as an agent within the context, even with all the things that could have happened, I was fairly at ease with what I could read from and do with the context.


The Net is made up of decontextualized experiences and this doesn't work for me.  

This doesn't happen quite so fluently on the web. First off because human cognition is embodied.  It's all about the senses and the materiality of existence. Mind is material. A conversation is bodily endeavor. A philosopher's thoughts manifest in writing. So immediately I notice that Net experiences dehydrate my experience, and does so by giving me meaning only in the form of the written word, digitized 2-dimensional imagery and compressed audio input. All of which is fairly sterile. And the sterility doesn't dissipate with human interaction because the interactions themselves are dehydrated and sterilized. Moreover they're potentially uninviting and dangerous. Recently, one of the few critics of edu-tech mania has turned off comments on her blog because of aggressive misogynists and man-splainers.

So not only do my senses atrophy online, but my soul does. My humanity is profoundly compromised. And I'm noticing this more and more, the longer I've been here.

But ok, soooo...I don't care for the human and social experience on the Net, but here I am, a fairly intelligent, digitally literate person trying to make sense of something meaningful to me like a blog post. Because I do like ideas and knowing, and their power.

How I do figure things out?....pretty much I read and read and read and read and read and read and read and read and read and read. It's exhausting and a time-suck. And I'm not ill, don't have kids and a dog to feed, or a lawn to mow.

Just imagine being in a grocery story, and all the red labels on packages weren't the color red but on the label was printed:  "this is a red label." And then imagine that anyone could create these red labels. Some would read "this is a read label," "this is a label of the complimentary color to green."

The Net isn't bad, gawd no, it's just profoundly dehumanizing, and alienates the human condition. And this matters when we're talking about the human endeavors of learning and education.

Caring and Technology

It occurred to me recently that my ethic of caring is completely undermined when it comes to technology.

I'm disabled from acting on the empathy I feel towards others and what amounts to an everyday discomfort of using technology to do X.

The discomfort includes feelings of anxiety, frustration, desperation, anger, uncertainty and disappointment. It's the lived experiences themselves and remembering them. And it's the outcomes and influences of these lived experiences on our lives and those around us.

This is the discomfort I've experienced and witnessed others experiencing using technology for teaching and learning. It's one context; I'm sure it's not an anomaly.

It's International Women's Day today. Women across the globe, regardless of their socio-economic status do the bulk of the emotional, unpaid labor in societies. Their lives are more work.

So it matters to me that a given technology ends up involving more work, more time, more effort, and for what?

These posts:  The Ironies of Educational Technology and The Inhumanity of Smart Technology say it too. They wonder too. For what?

It's occurred to me that the culture of technology is not a caring culture and that I'm complicit in this cultural hegemony. It's collaborative and "supportive" but this is not caring.

Caring would manifest in technology designed with people in mind, not with processes and procedures.

It would change at a more humane pace so that all the people involved in making technological systems happen had time to become competent, and so that users could effectively use them. 

Caring would have rhetorical resonance. Language reflecting the meanings and relationships forged through the technology would stymie the hyperbolization of technological solutionism.

The most care I can give is to be honest and refrain from the rhetoric of hyperbole and solutionism.

My new pocket dictionary is easier to use than the digital ones

I just received a Langensheidt Pocket Italian/English dictionary for a gift, and low and behold it's easier to use than any of digital dictionaries I'm using, e.g. iphone/ipad app, google translate or an internet based dictionary.

I've been doing digital because hey, it's there, and hey it's "supposed to be better."

The main reason it's not better is usability. With the good old dicto, my thumb glides over the pages in 2 heartbeats then eye scans the pages in 2 more.

Finito. On with what I was doing.

With all the digital versions I have to type in the entry. I have to scroll. Neither of these tasks is as effortless as thumb rippling and eye scanning. My small hands are pretty facile with the phone too.

Nope, interacting with the device requires more effort to do the task. And this matters a lot, a way lot, actually.

I notice technology ever more encroaching on my effort capacity. Well I've always noticed the effort involved with technology and weighed it against the ROE (return on effort). The last few years I've become more sensitized though. My cumulative experiences of the procedural hell of working in Blackboard and helping other people do it have been revelational, particularly juxtaposed to working in Second Life.

In both cases, one has to ask: why, what for?

I'm here to do something. That something isn't the technology.

Oh yeah, and I can read the good old dictionary in the sunlight too.