Mr. C. R. Gollum’s comments on yesterday’s post have me thinking about post-industrial education again. He was correct in pointing out that public education works to maximize the efficiency of the industrial system and prescient, I’m sure, in claiming that 100% efficiency will never be reached. The reasons for this are many, but the most important reason is that the question of industrial efficiency is historically moot. Industrial capacity no longer represents the pinnacle of wealth and well-being, though it is certainly still a constituent. It is beyond a cliché, however, to point out that this is the information age, and that purely industrial priorities are no longer enough to drive the machine. Nevertheless, Mr. Gollum’s theme still stands: We are approaching the needs of our time in typical, front-loaded, stampede and cattle-grate fashion. “We need a lot more people that are patient, unhurried, and elegant in their approach to problems,” says C. R. Gollum, and he’s right. Why don’t we have them? Because we are mesmerized, sterilized and, ultimately, terrified by what has become of our world since it went online.
A cliché is often wisdom that you hear so many times that you’ve stopped listening to it. Sometime in the 1990s, a tidbit about computers entered my conscious, downloaded from the mainstream. Something about processor speeds doubling every 18 months. Every two pregnancies, the world is painstakingly recreated, twice as big. Recreated across this microcosm of 18 years—the horizon of adulthood and threshold of generations.
The initial context of this concept involved the rapidly approaching theoretical and technical limits of computer processing speeds. But the limits of computing are not practical concerns of the mainstream, and do not explain the general diffusion of this technological anecdote. As Mr. Gollum also observes, we’re past the point where we know what to do with the things we’ve already automated. That’s a scary thought, and the sublimation of it may lie near the foundation of contemporary existential fear. It is almost comforting to imagine that one of these iterations of 18 months will finally bring a halt to this exponential profusion of computation. At the same time, it is frightening to imagine the sudden cessation of ever-new gadgets, treatments, improvements, extensions, applications, attachments, versions and options that we have not only grown accustomed to, but also expect of the future.
Now that time has allowed me a little distance from its computational context, I am beginning to see the other things that hold this cliché in place in our culture. The periodic doubling of processing speeds is a compelling analogy for our own sense of historical acceleration. The last five old-fashioned, organic generations have each had to live with the hyper-reality of technological reinvention. So much so that our idea of generations describes both family succession and historical epochs.
Part of us still knows that in the middle ages, just like all places before and outside modernity, a generation merely made a mark of slight incline or decline across the recurrent cycle of time. In those days, only gods or conquerors could change the world as it turned.
Our modern generations, however, have had to live with a world that grows up with the kids and yet answers to no king or deity. Generations now find themselves not just at different ages, but on different planes, looking back across the chasm at worlds as different as children and adults. We find ourselves calculating an exchange rate between generations, so that we can evaluate who is too old to keep up, too young to control, too vulgar, not cool, a dinosaur, up to date, obsolete.
It has been established at least as long as the anecdote of 18 months that computer literacy is the baseline measure of contemporary competence. Today’s oldest grandparents are the last generations grandfathered out of the computer literacy requirement. Computer literacy is the litmus of their children’s world, the boomer generation, the generation where everyone had to learn to read again, as adults. Their children, Mr. Stickfigure among them, were the first generation to become computer literate as children. As nominal adults now, ourselves, we take a certain native pride in this, in having been the original ten-year-olds tinkering with this device our parents couldn’t understand.
We’re the ones who are supposed to have learned something from the story about doubling processor speeds. In the information age, we don’t even have to wait for the next organic generation for the world to change. The computer literacy of my childhood is precisely as outdated as a Commodore 64. At that time, computer literacy and computer programming where almost identical. My young compatriots were the last people to know everything there is to know about their desktop computers.
Since then, in less time that it has taken for us to raise our own children, computer literacy has become both more and less like general literacy. Computer literacy is more like general literacy because the changes in computer interface have increasingly allowed us to interact with our computers as readers and writers. To be considered computer literate, in other words, you no longer need to be a programmer. However, my generation—or at least its educators—must face a challenge analogous to the one our parents faced while we were commandeering their computers as children. We must begin to understand something that is foreign to us, even though we think of ourselves as owning it.
I wonder, for instance, what it’s like to grow up in a world of hypertexts. When I sat on the couch and read books as a kid, I was partaking of the same literacy that my parents and grandparents had experienced. Even to those of us with computers, reading texts off the screen was merely a change of medium, a shift in the place of literacy, but not its range or function. It wasn’t until we were teenagers that we began to experience the possibilities of hypertext and came to know computer literacy as a different kind of reading and writing. We were the first generation to master this literacy, but we were not the first generation born into it. That is the generation we are currently teaching, the generation with not experiential reason to believe that the hypertext didn’t always exist right alongside ink and paper texts.
This generation has absolutely no basis for bookish nostalgia, and they never will. They will never know about all the human ages when reading meant looking at ink on paper and could only be read one page at a time, from beginning to end. As teachers of literacy, even the youngest and hippest of my generation have more in common with our parents and grandparents when it comes to the shared experience of learning to read and write. Before our time, we find ourselves dinosaurs of education, unwilling or unable to consider how the basic shape of literacy must follow the changing shape of texts. When we were kids, we never saw anything that looked like the hypertext, so we shouldn’t pretend that we know what it’s like to grow up with that monster in the room. Probably, we should recognize what our parents had to recognize when we started tinkering with their Commodores: If we don’t get hip to this, we’re not going to have anything to teach the kids.
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