We Must Behave As If We Are Famous

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 January 2014.

I had an interesting fight in my head with an Apple rep the other day that made me think about the Internet vision.

Basically, I was really frustrated that Apple creates devices that permanently alter the notion of what education is, but simultaneously pretend they are creating technology to help us do our jobs better, when really, they are obliterating our jobs as they have existed.  

There was this weird insistence he had that the existing architecture could house the new environment.  He'd talk about the beauty of a girl handing in a Garageband song in place of her history term paper and getting an A on it.  From my perspective, a song is a very different thing than a term paper, and if I were to accept a Garageband song, that should be the assignment itself and I should teach Garageband literacy.  

But the fight got me thinking.  

He was simultaneously criticizing us as teachers for living in the past while trying to assure us that the old ways are as important to the future as ever.  I suggested that new technology creates new forms and obsolesces old ones and that print literacy, the thing I teach and that he wants to help me teach, is the old form obsolesced by digital culture.  The nature of scholarship itself has to shift: if multi-media, hyperlinked presentations are a superior mode of scholarly idea exchange, I need to teach toward that, not the five-paragraph essay.  I couldn't get why he kept validating what I was doing as the right thing while simultaneously calling it backward and out of step with the times.

At any rate, my sister has been very interested in a lecture she heard in which a guy said that film photography is real photography and that we have no idea what digital photography is yet because people have just been using it as an analog for real photography without thinking of its true nature.  That really resonated with the frustrations I was feeling with the Apple rep.  The guy had been thinking about the new technology as being a slight improvement to the old technology without recognizing what it actually was or how it completely shifts the ecology of the academic world, despite the fact that he was trying to extol the virtues of shifting.  

And then I started thinking about our digital adventure.  

McLuhan said that satellite technology recalls the proscenium arch--that it makes all of us feel as though we must behave as if we are famous.  I definitely had my experiments with fame as a medium in college, and the Arthur White project is full of issues of rock-and-roll mythmaking.  It's interesting that the story is grounded in 1970's record production and the 21st century digital quest for the legitimate, the proliferation of new historical approaches, and the disruption of hegemonic cultural narratives.  

Poetry as we've known it is just about dead, the novel is basically dead, film has a couple centuries left tops, but this new digital form doesn't even have a name or much of a tradition yet.  It soaks up all sorts of forms, but it isn't a form itself yet.  We're completely immersed in it but we haven't named many of its tropes yet, can't point back to its geniuses and study their work...there's no Aristotelianism of the form yet.  

We cave into the pressures of the form by denying ourselves any privacy in constructing the world of Arthur White, but we still subvert the form by developing an extended narrative that aims toward truth, beauty, and goodness...to the wonder of God, as we've discussed.  It's a chance to be in our age but not of it, to work within the true form of our day while fighting the sorts of philosophy (or lack of philosophy) the form perpetuates.

So, in short, I like it.