The final five chapters of T. V. Reed's Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era provide less of an overview of the general landscape of digital technologies in the 21st century than a more nuanced analysis of some of its constituent parts. Reed explores the political implications and liberatory potential of digital technologies; the role that violence ("militainment") and sexuality play in video games; the ways in which digital technologies are used in the classroom; and issues of accessibility and representation on the "world wide web" and "the real world."
Reed's project seems to be predicated on the idea that those who employ digital technologies most effectively and creatively ultimately determine their uses, perceptions, and efficacies. Which is to say that there are certainly advantages and privileges associated with, well, accessibility for one, but also advanced digital or technological literacies as well. However, Reed seems most concerned with conveying the idea that digital techologies are not so much agents in themselves as tools or mediums that might be manipulated and mobilized in aid of any number of different purposes and ends. And it is an agent's prerogative, not the digital technology itself, that determines these purposes and ends, which in turn constitutes how digital technologies are defined, understood, and used.
In keeping these particular ideas at the forefront of his project, Reed seems to be responding to both proponents and detractors of digital technologies, identifying with the liberatory potential of digital immersion while remaining firmly situated in the real world and its multitude of social, cultural, and political inequalities. In many ways, Reed celebrates uses of digital technologies that pander to both of these "worlds," truly symbiotic assemblages of the digital and the real that engage in advocacy and social justice. Indeed, he suggests that the efficacy of "digital protests" rests on the notion that "it is close connection to 'real world' away-from-keyboard sites that makes online netroots activism most effective" (134).
I tend to agree with Reed on a number of fronts here, particularly the zeal he expresses regarding constructing more bridges to the real world. For this reason I found Chapter 8 really compelling and engaging because it spoke so directly to many of my own interests and anxieties regarding using digital technologies in the classroom. Whereas detractors of this marriage, condescendingly dubbed "edutainment," seem to denigrate the ways in which "online spaces may be undermining our ability to think linearly, to pay attention to long narrative storylines, and to grasp complex sustained logical arguments" (170)--and I suspect that Reed is NOT in this camp--I would say, that learning is taking place, that something is being absorbed. In fact, a lot of things are being absorbed. In what ways all of this information is relayed or compartmentalized is perhaps a more interesting and plausible line of inquiry. No matter the answer, it strikes me that the extent to which digital technologies have certainly transformed information and learning dramatically, in my mind, exacerbates the need to engage these technologies in the classroom.
Yet Reed makes a very astute and important distinction in this chapter between using and integrating technology in the classroom (169) that I feel is important to any pedagogy that employs digital technologies in any way. I was particularly taken with his unrelenting commitment to matters of social justice and his unwillingness to equivocate from the "[r]eal concerns about digitizing education," which always seem to gravitate around "issues of social fairness, equality and digital inclusion, as linked to creative teaching" (171). Which is to say that there is likely a world of difference between screening a movie like Crash with minimal, superficial, and stereotypical gestures to race as an abstract concept and using a song like Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty" as a point of entry for discussing Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, Missouri and/or issues of whiteness in the surrounding community.
The difference lies in our capacity as instructors to enter different ideological and cultural spaces, not so much to make such spaces palatable to an existing space. Over the course of the last few years I've really taken to the idea of "making the familiar strange." Oftentimes that work has been rather intimidating but immensely rewarding. And I guess in the spirit of that mantra I ought to consider what a classroom WITHOUT digital technologies might look like and how I would navigate that space. Food for thought.
Chamillionaire - "Ridin'"
No comments:
Post a Comment