Fall Paper

Acacia Graddy-Gamel

MSTU4016

Fall 2009 Final Paper

In modern pedagogical practice, the concept of memorization has become somewhat maligned. Technological advances permit students to have almost instantaneous access to facts and thus devalue the virtue of committing them to memory. Advances in technology have made it possible for people to divert their mental resources to critical analysis and making connections instead of pure retention. Pedagogical theories have not quite caught up to these advances in technology and educators must still strike an effective balance between ensuring a core base of knowledge and avoiding coverage of easily accessible data. At the beginning of the semester, I had not given much thought to how pedagogical practices had evolved over time, or the sheer energy and focus on memorization in past educational practice. More than that, I had never considered how a focus on memorization could mitigate a capacity for critical analysis. As the semester went on and we moved through different media, the connection became clear.

As early as mid September, we were reading Havelock and Plato and learning how Plato viewed the role of memorization in education. With memorization being the sole way to pass on a cultural legacy, an oral tradition precluded proper analysis. As Havelock stated about Plato in our reading, “He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it.”

This was a revolutionary concept that we now (typically) take for granted. In our later readings, Havelock presents Plato’s view that the real purpose of education is to equip someone to lead an examined life. To my mind, there has really never been any other relevant purpose to education than to teach problem solving skills and critical reasoning. As progressive educational institutions have steadily moved away from memorization in the classroom, Plato would likely be pleased with the result.

Certain technological advances, particularly print, made it possible to start uncoupling the acts of accessing information and memorization. People began to use their capacities to memorize to instead visualize scenes from the books they were reading and divert more mental capacity onto separating themselves from their texts. A byproduct of this was that they also started to separate from each other. Reading is a deeply solitary act, as many of the readings in this class have discussed, and a million people reading the same text will have a million interpretations of it.

The act of mass-producing media removed control of the content from the individual and on to the institution, whether a private publisher or a church. So while people might have the mental freedom to analyze a text, they still only received the perspective intended by a given institution. A classic example of this can be found in the formations of the biblical canon. There is still disparity between the Protestant Old Testament (39 books) and the Catholic Old Testament (46 books). That is not just a great deal of discrepancy between the two perspectives, but representative of the level of control that media producers and distributors have over material before it gets to the consumer. The Bible is also an excellent example of this movement from memorization to critical analysis because of the gate-keeping function the Catholic Church provided. People were discouraged from reading it on their own; it was material that was intended to be accessed through a priest. The idea of critical interpretation by laypeople was also anathema to the Church and part of what spurred the Reformation. So in this case, access and capacity to analyze were inextricably interlinked and ability to memorize was very much a secondary concern, further reinforcing the notion that physical possession of a text precluded the need to commit it to memory.

In order to access specific pieces of information, though, readers needed to have a deep fluency in a particular text. This is a huge difference from the position that consumers of media find themselves in now, when the command of a few key words online will instantly summon a passage. Unfortunately, they also summon a hundred other unrelated things, which leads to the development of a new skill set that these medieval readers would not have to use nearly as heavily: discriminating amongst a surfeit of seemingly related information to locate precisely the information one is looking for. As Birkerts says in the Gutenberg Elegies, “In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality. The possibility of maximum focus is undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await. The result is that we know countless more “bits” of information, both important and trivial, than our ancestors. We know them without a stable sense of context, for where the field is that vast all schemes must be seen as provisional. We depend far less on memory; that faculty has all but atrophied from lack of use.” (p. 72)

So the question becomes: what place do these new skills have in an educational environment? Is it the responsibility of educators, as Plato would like, to teach these critical thinking skills over memorization? Is it their responsibility to balance the crucial older skills of literacy and mathematical reasoning with newer skills of analysis, multiplatform research and media literacy? I would say so. Beginning this course, I was already inclined to believe that it was the province of education to teach critical thinking, and after completing this course, I am even more convinced that it is absolutely necessary to cultivate these skills from the earliest possible age, not just to enable people to navigate the rapidly changing technological landscape, but also to help them regain a sense of meaning and footing in a world that is suffering what Birkerts called “a loss of depth” (p. 73).

While it would seem easy to paint a rosy picture of technological access sacrificing our capacity for memorization and granting us this hitherto uncultivated capacity to analyze and draw connections, it is an unfortunate byproduct of our technological that our critical abilities are devolving along with our memories. People are overwhelmed by content and do not take the time to evaluate their sources. When we read Lanier at the beginning of the semester, he expressed a concern about the vast repository of unverified information available on the Internet and the common mistake people make of not checking sources or doing any form of due diligence when gathering information online. It is a very real concern and educators have an additionally difficult task of teaching a new form of research and vetting to a generation used to having information at their fingertips but shockingly unused to questioning its validity.

In writing these blogs and doing this reading, I have come back to this same idea of shunting the task of information retention onto external sources and freeing up one’s mental resources to make connections between those sources. That somehow, if we can train ourselves to effectively access and utilize these external repositories, we will enable ourselves to reach levels of insight that we could not reach before. The more that I’ve come to think about it though, the more I worry that that will not happen until we also renew a set of skills that we have been neglecting in this process of aggregating this information: the skills of discernment, depth of study and singular focus. I don’t see that one necessarily has to preclude another. With some training and prioritizing, I believe it will be possible for people to apply the mental discipline necessary to committing an epic poem to memory to formulating thoughtful connections between pieces of information with focus and engagement, even if they have not committed those pieces of information to memory themselves. I have not been turned into a pessimist by this realization, but rather acknowledged that the problem is far more complex than I initially thought.

One of the things I found most remarkable about this reading was the high esteem with which McLuhan views television. In modern critical study of film and television, film is considered the far more involved medium than television—requiring an active participation on the part of the thoughtful viewer—who considers plot, structure, character behavior, lighting, artistic design, editorial work, camera work, auditory decisions and exploration of themes. While the content is important, the medium is equally important, and does serve (hot medium?) all of the information necessary to the viewer, but leaves a great deal for the viewer to resolve on their own in terms of connecting the information presented to other films and mediums that they are familiar with and being certain that they are accessing all of the data being delivered. Many casual viewers of film are not conscious of all of the data they are receiving (particularly auditory data) and how it affects their interaction with the media.

That being said, free television has quickly become the unwanted stepchild of modern art forms (and in some ways technology). Many shows appeal to the lowest common denominator, require a minimum of involvement or audience participation and demonstrate an acute lack of thoughtfulness and information perceived. The idea that this form involves more participation than film is… bewildering to me. Perhaps it was a response to the relative newness of the form when he wrote this.

Overall though, some comments to touch to another point of McLuhan’s, albeit from a slightly tangential perspective. McLuhan says “The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. lt is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV's mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn't want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.”(p. 443).

The problem with this demonstrated in modern society comes in the popularity of hero tales, particularly in television and film. As a personal note, I’m a huge fan of hero tales, and my girlfriend despises them (for the reasons I’m about to outline). I studied film and literature in college; she studied social movements. People watch films and television about epic protagonists who engage in sweeping dramatic actions and get caught up in the power of the story. They feel, through their identification, that they are participating in the story, and that they are actually effecting societal change by participating in a viewing activity. However, they are not actually changing anything. A sense of personal epic narrative has actually stunted people’s capacity to engage in real change that involves group movements and slow progress. Are people really participating in television? Does it give viewers something to do? Do they fill in information or do they just substitute their own experience of the real world with the experience of characters and thus become more inoculated to a passive relationship with the real world because they cannot have the sweeping narrative of fiction?

Sales are not a bad thing

The wonders of selling to me

Through the ads on prime time TV

Lose their appeal

And all of their zeal

When you see I get hulu for free

While the Beninger reading brought up a lot of fascinating ideas in terms of social control and technology, one thing I’d like to focus on is the concept of marketing, which has changed drastically as communications technology has advanced. The connection between marketing tools and popular entertainment has become so inextricable as to be unexamined by the consumer. If you watch free television or listen to free radio, the cost to you as a consumer is sitting through the advertisements of the show sponsors, who assess demographic data of the program and try to determine what sales method would deliver their product most effectively to you. As Beninger says, on page 20, “Although advertisers were initially wary of broadcasting because audiences could not be easily identified, by 1930 sponsors were spending $60 million annually on radio in the United States alone”. That problem of audience identification and isolating effectiveness is one that he goes on to elaborate later in the text—exploring mediums from questionnaires to house-to-house interviews and the famed Nielsen ratings system.

While most advertising is appealing in a general sense, it is only with the advent of the Internet that we really get targeted ad content. Google has made a fortune on the business model that by analyzing the things that you, as the individual, are interested in (and then selling that information to marketers), they can sell to you and only you. By having a wide variety of ads available to target people who use certain language in their searches, marketers can appeal specifically to people with a much higher rate of success. It is a ruthlessly efficient advertising system, and what’s more, consumers are in some ways grateful for it, because they are receiving product awareness of things much more likely to appeal to them and likely receiving far less marketing inundation that does not.

If you step away from the clichéd view that all marketing is bad and designed to sell you things you don’t want or need—that marketing creates a sense of false need in the consumer who can get along perfectly fine without a product—you begin to see the true genius and benefit of these targeted marketing models—both to buyers and to sellers. While this data accumulation is without doubt an almost insidious form of social control, it is also a way of respecting and acknowledging everyone’s different interests and needs and permitting more demographic subgroups to flourish. No longer are all women ages 18-25 viewed equally and sold to equally. I prefer to look at it as a positive thing, despite the sinister overtones. I live in a capitalist society. I use products. I like to know about new products that may appeal to me. I know that what appeals to me will likely not appeal to most people. Therefore, I appreciate being marketed to directly and unobtrusively, using the Google and Facebook models. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the relationship between media technology and advertising over the next fifty years, particularly as pay models (iTunes, etc.) start to assert their presence. Make no mistake, they’re still collecting demographic data about you and selling it, you’re just not seeing the results as directly.

No need to send a horse. Stop. I've just revolutionized communication. Stop.

Centralizing communications

The telegraph transformed many nations

I can send such clear orders

To my colonial borders

And boost epic real-time wealth creation

Carey writes about the telegraph changing the news and speaks to how the unlimited distance of the wire service created a need for “objective news”. The word limits of the telegraph required only the barest facts to be conveyed, leaving the majority of the article to be fleshed out in the newsroom by people who were not present for the event. This form of editorial flexibility leads to a curious sense of “objective” journalism. If readers labor under the view that they are getting the absolute facts because the root content is the same from paper to paper, it forces news outlets to bury their biases even deeper.

It made me think of current movements in the blogosphere where people cite news articles or report on events directly and openly acknowledge their biases. Now that we live in a time where people have such free access to generating their own content and opinions about shared ‘news’, readers are more active critical thinkers and conscientious writers have found it expedient to divulge as much of their own bias as possible up front. While on one hand, this is a boon for readers, there is still a substantial schism between this amateur reporting and the professionally vetted news institutions. However, the sheer volume of contributors makes it extremely difficult to isolate the information that one would care about and verify that the source of the material is legitimate. In viewing this commentary through this lens, it becomes almost laughable to think that objective news reporting is even possible, especially through a fifty word telegraph.

My form of self-identiification can beat up your form of self-identification

A nationalist identity

Helps to create community

Because then me and you,

Whether Christian or Jew,

Have some sense of fraternity

Reading about the evolution of nationalism this weekend struck a particularly strong chord with me because I traveled to Washington DC this weekend. If there was ever a place deliberately designed with the glorification of the concept of a national identity in mind—it is Washington. In visiting the World War II memorial, what struck me (viewed through the lens of this reading) was the multiple levels of identity being explored. All Americans identify with the memorial as Americans. Each state or territory that sent troops into battle is represented individually, allowing for more personal levels of identification. I saw people taking pictures of themselves in front of the names of their states. Was that the intention of the memorial? Probably not, but as an example of nationalist identification, it was clear to see.

“…all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”

This point cannot be gainsayed, but it begins to call to mind the various forms of virtual communities present on the Internet. People start to partition themselves by identity aspects that were never used as defining characteristics in the past—from stamp collectors to fans of particular television shows—because it has never been easier to create a community and feel an immediate sense of fellowship and identification. Only time will tell if the paramount importance of nationalism currently will diminish or increase as the internet becomes more pervasive. Currently it seems to be moving in both directions simultaneously—as people perceive the differences between themselves and their neighbor to be less, they reflexively raise their boundaries higher and cling to identities that clearly demarcate the Self and the Other. Who knows if we will continue to compound identity upon identity as a way of defining the Self and the Other, or we will seek more rigorously to find our commonalities.

To be connected to one’s fellow man

Means one stays alone for a span

Oh the things schoolboys glean

From lewd magazines

Or reading a Bible that’s banned

Eisenstein posits a great deal of information to digest in a mere fifty pages. While casual students of history take it for granted that the advent of the printing press precipitated things like the Protestant Reformation, there is a great deal of assumed gradualness about the process of disseminating printed documents to the masses. However, not only does Eisenstein dispute these assumptions, she also raises the idea that the act of pushing people away from illuminated manuscripts and towards print began a process of standardizing thinking while it standardized textual presentation. Moreover, the idea of the burgeoning print industry crossing national, religious and linguistic boundaries is an extremely compelling one. The power of print to duplicate and disseminate in a way that far outstripped scribal work completely changed the face of nearly every field- from law to astronomy.

Above all, the most interesting part of the reading was the exploration of the gradual solipsistic isolation and self-reflection that people found themselves in once literacy had become so pervasive. “Not a desire to withdraw from a worldly society or the city of man but a gregarious curiosity about them could by the eighteenth century be satisfied by silent perusal of journals, gazettes, or newsletters. Increasingly the well-informed man of affairs had to spend part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellowmen.” (p. 41) This notion of technology being an agent of simultaneous unification and isolation is one that we will doubtless keep returning to as every technical advance since—the radio, television, computer and mobile devices- continue to advance this seemingly contradictory state.

Visualize a Hunchback

Some recollect with aplomb

Their visual memory, a balm

The triumph of reading

May be misleading

Nous n'oublions pas Notre-Dame

The reading for this week, on metamemory and memory theory, naturally makes one start to consider how they formulate their own memories. The system of developing memory loci makes a great deal of sense once one considers one’s own relationship with locations and associated memories. When in a location, it is easy to immediately invoke strong memories associated with the place that can be shockingly detailed. Visual memory is one of our most powerful tools (though I would personally argue that scent memory is the most evocative of experience, though far more difficult to imagine and deliberately construct) for structured and deliberate recollection. The implications of this as people moved from an oral tradition to a written tradition are outlined in “The Art of Memory”.

One of the questions related to this, and covered to a degree by Hugo is what happens when print becomes ubiquitous? As communication technology improves, people are able to spend less and less mental energy on the act of memory, and they foist the responsibility of storing data onto external sources. This has its good points (mass accessibility) as well as its bad points (reduced mental discipline, reliance on ephemeral objects) and this discussion continues in earnest with the birth of each new technology.

One thing that struck me about this reading, referenced by the authors only obliquely, is the astonishing capacity of the brain to generate and retain detailed visual imagery. Despite generations of people adapting to the written word, our most potent tools of recollection are visual. When calling to mind a scene in a book, attentive readers do not summon images of the words on the page, but representative images of what is described. Who among us read the Hugo, considering the power of architecture and writing, and did not immediately picture a building of sweeping majesty (and likely personal resonance)? Can architecture be destroyed by writing? Never while people continue to imagine buildings.

The Great National Myth

A pedagogic component to art

Will help keep your nation quite smart

Make citizens compliant

Just a bit self-reliant

And from your domain they’ll not part

This is the second time I’ve read the Aenied for a class, and so I have a little bit of background in it. While it co-opts the style of Homer’s writing, its agenda is somewhat different. If we suppose that Homer’s purpose (in part) was to use the Iliad and the Odyssey as ways of passing on a cultural encyclopedia to the Greeks, to teach them their own cultural identity—Homer’s ideal of what the Greeks should be, the Aenied is the deliberate act of Virgil to push patron Augustus Caesar’s political agenda for Rome.

In the Aenied, Virgil has created a cultural myth of shared identity, drawing on common stories and shared religious concepts to offer legitimacy to a set of values and a past that all Romans can take pride in. These values are expressed through story in a variety of ways. When Aeneas sees those being punished in the underworld, their crimes are more than just myths—they are warnings for Roman citizens against undesirable behavior. Likewise, in a circular fashion, Virgil increases Augustus Caesar’s legitimacy as a ruler by gifting him with this divine (and seemingly pre-ordained) heritage.

Ultimately, Virgil and Augustus Caesar both saw the dazzling potential of utilizing an epic poem as a means of civic education and they seized upon that opportunity to create the Rome that they wanted to see. In writing this blog, I was discussing these concepts with Amy and trying to articulate what other circumstances where people have created a work of art or narrative piece with the explicit agenda of defining a national identity or unifying a people into a shared identity group. The only things we could think of are religious texts, most particularly the Torah. I would be curious to see what other people think of when they think of these kinds of works.

Absolute Truthiness

The cave is quite the sensation

For those intent on the provocation,

Your concept of Truth

Might to me be uncouth,

But whose absolute sways the nation?

Plato’s “True World” outside the cave is equivalent to Latour’s concept of Science (the politicization of the sciences through epistemology in order to render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature.) Latour calls out the obvious problem with the cave allegory: the very existence of an inviolable, incontrovertible Truth. “Because, without [the division], there would be no more reservoir of incontrovertible certainties that could be brought in to put an end to the incessant chatter of obscurantism and ignorance. There would no longer be a sure way to distinguish what is true from what is false. One could no longer break free of social determiners to understand what things themselves are…”

Throughout history, people have sought guarantors of absolute truth, something to tell us what is Right and what is Wrong. Perhaps Plato’s saving grace in his exploration of the cave analogy is that he doesn’t offer his thesis there of what is Right, but merely points out that there IS Right and Wrong, Truth and Falsehood.

Educators have to be wary of absolute truth being dangled in front of them. There are few ideas more seductive than those of absolutes. Everyone wants assurances that they are right and that their way is the right way. We all think that we are the enlightened ones, obligated to return to the cave out of a selfless sensibility—but no one knows anything for certain.

Philosopher Plato sat in his cave,

With flick'ring shadows that would not behave

These false appiritions

Encompassed his vision

And were the reality most crave

With this prompt, I find my two classes intersecting in a beautiful way. Two weeks ago I had to write about my personal philosophy of education. As a graduate of progressive institutions, I had always received an education that focused explicitly on interdisciplinary connections, critical thinking and analytic reasoning. It wasn’t until I got much older that I realized that this was not a normal educational experience. So to comment directly to the discussion prompt: I feel that preparing a person to lead an examined life should be one of the primary educational objectives and that it is very feasible, particularly at a time in technological development where the need for people to have raw information memorized is growing less and less relevant. Of far greater importance is people’s ability to critically reason, draw connections and apply problem-solving and deductive reasoning to a variety of subjects.

These educational developments and directions owe themselves in some part to Plato’s ideas, though they thankfully recognize the relevance of art, poetry and metaphor as “pointing the soul upwards” as well. While Plato’s list of prescribed subjects was extremely limited, it is to be understood that he was proposing a pedagogical revolution and thus had a great deal to consider. Educational practice should function to constantly point the soul upward and allow everyone the opportunity to enrich themselves through learning about themselves and the world around them. Havelock focuses a great deal on explaining exactly how difficult Plato’s task was and how important the development of writing was to permitting that. Right now we face a similar period in educational evolution. With all this information available at our fingertips, “what” teachers should teach becomes significantly less important than “why” and “how” teachers should teach it. Were Plato alive to assess modern education, hopefully he would feel more amenable to the role of art, though he might still wonder why so much emphasis is placed on memorization when students should be taught analytic skills.

Ow, my brain.

These advances in human cognition

Might have met with Homeric derision

To part body from mind

Might be thought unkind

But it’s worthy of great recognition

As one might expect considering the subject matter, I had a lot of thoughts about this reading... and I really enjoyed it, but I had serious difficulty articulating all the concepts effectively. So I'm going to give it a shot, but I feel very scattered about this one...

For as long as human beings have been able to conceptualize their own mortality and speculate about what happens after death, they have been looking for language to define abstract concepts. However, expanding language to incorporate these concepts led to people changing their thoughts about things that they had previously taken for granted, like the relationship of their limbs to the rest of their bodies.

The crucial cultural invention that accelerated the articulation of abstract concepts was the development of religion. In starting to conceive of an invisible divinity and attribute to it causation of events and concerns beyond their ken, humanity began to need the language for things they could not see and touch. The necessity of imputing supernatural (or as Snell would articulate it, in fact, quite natural) powers to these divine beings started humanity on the path to finding a concept of their own individual spirits, which led to language to distinguish the ‘self’ from the ‘spirit’ and the ‘body’.

In observing the transition from Homer to Heraclitus and how this articulation evolved, it was particularly insightful to read the Snell, who forced a re-examination of basic ideas that the reader would take for granted because of the filter of culminated Western thought. As Snell says, “It has long been observed that in comparatively primitive speech abstractions are as yet undeveloped, while immediate sense perceptions furnish it with a wealth of concrete symbols which seem strange to a more sophisticated tongue.” In translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, readers are given a text that has been translated for literary beauty and readability more than literal accuracy, so many of these sense perceptions as articulated by Homer are read with all the implied abstraction of contemporary English rather than the intended meaning of the author for that meaning would be almost indecipherable to the modern reader, so it becomes very difficult to imagine how the abstractions we take for granted were foreign to Homer.

One of the most crucial evolutions in thought between Homer and Heraclitus can be defined here: “[Heraclitus’] rejection of external guardian spirits (F60) has profound consequences: we make our own destinies. In a world of flux and hidden stability, of war and hidden peace, we choose to be one of the sleepers or to wake up.” In moving past externalized guardian spirits and focusing on self-determination and self-awareness, Heraclitus begins to create both accountability and sovereignty and internalize the rich unseen outer world. People are not just reactive in action, but proactive, and it is in proactivity that we push civilization forward.

Wait, you mean the Iliad's NOT a textbook?

Plato’s against memor’zation

Insisting on deliberation,

For without analysis

You risk pushing fallacies

In teaching to each generation

There is a lot of great stuff going on in the Havelock and in the Homer. By way of context, I’ve read the Iliad in whole or substantial parts at least three times in my academic career—once in high school and twice in college for different courses on literature and philosophy—so I am pretty familiar with the text and decoding it. That said, it was a pleasure to read it again bearing in mind Havelock’s points and the discussion question.

Not being very familiar with the Greek educational system, it was absolutely fascinating to view the Iliad as a means of passing on a cultural history, albeit one meant to be memorized rather than analyzed. On its surface, Plato’s antipathy towards Homer’s lack of absolute expertise seems absolutely bizarre. However, when total memorization and empathic absorption is the only way to effectively incorporate information, deliberation is less important than reaction and rote recitation. Or as Havelock put it, “He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it.” Plato is attempting to completely overthrow the pedagogical norm, and has quite a challenge ahead of him.

Within the context of the Iliad itself, the question of deliberation in action is a fascinating one. Characters don’t actually deliberate or analyze situations—they act. Gods act regardless of consequence and men act in response to situations set up by the gods or their baser impulses. The only time any character demonstrates a moment of deliberation in his action (lines 90-215), it is represented by the appearance of the goddess Athena. Athena is recognized as the goddess of wisdom, to be sure, but the important thing to note is that Achilles did not deliberate on his actions of his own accord—he was swayed from an impulsive decision by divine counsel. Had he even been remotely tempted to act counter to Athena, doubtless he would have learned from the humbling decimation the Greeks had just suffered at the hands of Apollo. So what is Homeric deliberation then? Is it action without critical analysis? Is it a mark of a hero that they act solely based on either instinct or divine decree?

From a pedagogical perspective, the Havelock reading got me thinking a lot about the purpose of rote memorization at all. It has gone in and out of fashion recently, especially in basic mathematics and vocabulary building. It seems that as access to written fact has become the dominant paradigm in the educational environment, it is far less relevant to teach facts than it is to teach how to interpret them and analyze them. In a world dominated by today’s aggressively pervasive technologies, this becomes moreso as the available source materials have increased infinitely. Today’s students have to learn to research, discern and decode the wealth of information at their fingertips and memorization becomes irrelevant in a society with devices that permit portable near instantaneous recollection.

Globalization, Wikitelligence and why the free market isn't so free

When thinking on globalization,

One cannot lose sight of the nation,

So China's priorities

derail Western authorities

Oh, unsuspecting hegemonic creation

Globalization is a hot topic word in media. Depending on who you ask, globalization will solve all the world's problems or sink us into a morass of economic and social inequality, all while ruining our environment. Still, globalization itself is rarely defined, though authors who bandy about it do so with an agenda. The Steger was particularly useful in distinguishing three different globalism agendas: market globalism, left justice globalism and jihadist globalism, all of which take advantage of globalization and advances in technology to further their own needs, they all "articulate and translate the rising global imaginary - notions of community increasingly tied to the global - into concrete political programmes and agendas."

Moreover, there is a lot of tension in the readings between the ideas of globalism replacing nationalism as a prevailing ideology (a la Friedman) and nationalism experiencing a resurgent power and relevance in defiance against a globalist agenda, particularly one that focuses on Western and Americentric ideas. As Gray says, “Nationalism fueled the rapid growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is doing the same in China and India at the present time. In both countries globalization is being embraced not only because of the prosperity it makes possible, but also for the opportunity it creates to challenge Western hegemony. As China and India become great powers they will demand recognition of their distinctive cultures and values, and international institutions will have to be reshaped to reflect the legitimacy of a variety of economic and political models. At that point the universal claims of the United States and other Western nations will be fundamentally challenged, and the global balance of power will shift.” Therefore, paradoxically, it is nationalist motivations that are fueling a movement towards globalization: taking advantage of economic, technological and social opportunities globally to advance a national (or other unifying group—whether religious, ideological, racial, etc.) agenda.

The uncoupling of capitalism, democracy and globalization was a crucial feature of the Gray article and key to understanding the implications of globalist agendas across the world. While most cursory looks at globalization would seem to promote a leveling of the playing field, in reality, political entities all want to be ‘more equal than others’. It is difficult to imagine who would willingly forsake either an existing position of cultural and economic dominance or a chance to achieve it.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the reading was the framing of the fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s as responses to unchecked capitalism and economic inequality. Having always looked at the rise of National Socialism through the lens of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles as being the direct cause of hyperinflation and unemployment, it is compelling to consider it through the lens of unchecked free market rapaciousness and draw correlations to modern economic inequalities—particularly as those tendencies manifest themselves right now in both secular and religious ways.

In terms of academic and pedagogical implications, the Lanier felt the most directly relevant. In concerns about collectivism and collaborative references like Wikipedia, the tyranny of the majority would necessitate reducing things to the lowest common denominator and thus diminishing the social intelligence. There have already been studies done that show that modern students accept most of what they read on Wikipedia and other internet sources as factual without stopping to consider the credibility of the source—a source that, as Lanier points out, is becoming more difficult to trace as anonymity and collective intelligence are becoming more common on the web. My girlfriend and I had a long conversation about this article and this very point, where she contested that for Wikipedia to have developed any credibility at all, it had to be mostly factually accurate, otherwise people would not use it and its lack of reliability would have rendered it obsolete. When I countered by comparing it to a physical encyclopedia (considered a legitimate source by most instructors, whereas Wikipedia is not), she pointed out that the masses can serve a similar function to the editorial gatekeepers behind a conventional encyclopedia, and we cannot easily (nor is anyone inclined to) trace the individual identities or biases of authors of Encyclopedia Brittanica articles either. Moreover, Wikipedia and internet authorship opens up a more democratic set of views that, if critically vetted by responsible readers, can be far more valuable than a conventionally published text. Or, as she put it, “History is written by the winners, but at least on Wikipedia, sometimes it’s written by losers”. These considerations will have to be factored in by modern educators who have to re-evaluate their own ideas of source legitimacy and train their students in effective critical evaluation.

Diebert’s introduction to “Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia” posits some difficult questions about humanity’s relationship to communication technology and how it influences our progress as a society. By presenting an examination of history framed through a medium theory lens, he forces the reader to consider their own assumptions about political authority, the influence of communication technology and even how the world is structured.

Of particular interest in examining the problems of modern society and communication is the collapse of boundaries that modern society has created between discrete political entities. Diebert says “We should not presuppose the "modern" distinction maintained between "politics," "economics," and "religion" in the composition of past or future world orders (p. 10)." This framework is a key analysis tool for comprehension of modern international relations, but is becoming rapidly obsolete. Unfortunately, navigation of this post-modern world order is in its infancy as it is a world of “de-territorialized communities, fragmented identities, transnational corporations, and cyberspatial flows of finance. It is a world in which brokers, cultists, and khalifs are as much in prominent relief as Canadians, Poles, and Kuwaitis. It is, paradoxically, a world made up of plural worlds, multiple realities and irrealities, digital artifacts stitched together in a web of spectacles, cineplexes, and not a single "global village;' and even less a system of territorially-distinct nationstates, postmodern world order is, rather, a pastiche of multiple and overlapping authorities - a quasi-feudal, "multicentric" system. (p. ix)”, which brings us to the question: how do we shift our own concepts of power structures and political entities to meaningfully interact in the new world order?

“While it is far too early to provide a clear outline of that emerging world order, the trends unearthed point away from single mass identities, linear political boundaries, and exclusive jurisdictions centered on territorial spaces, and toward multiple identities and nonterritorial communities, overlapping boundaries, and nonexclusive jurisdictions. (p. 15)”. A few examples that came to mind particularly in reading Diebert highlight the turmoil in the Middle East. The last major conflict that the United States engaged in, Vietnam, was a fight against a regime (and a political ideology with global implications, true), but a clearly defined regime. While this is definitely reductionist, the basic idea holds true. In America’s current conflicts, the enemy is far more nebulous, confined by neither country nor region, and the nature of warfare is adapting rapidly. Likewise, in the recent Iranian elections, global attention came down on Iran, shifting views on citizen journalism and protest methodology as well as raising questions about citizenship and democracy. Why are non-Iranians invested in Iranian elections? Where does the sovereign authority of a nation-state have to be accountable to a global sense of democracy? What does a global sense of democracy MEAN in a world still drawn up into nation-states?

While these are all weighty ideas that I look forward to exploring in great detail in this course, the crux of what got me excited and curious relating to my own studies came from the series of emails. In my program and career, I hope to utilize new media technologies to help secondary and post-secondary educators of the humanities improve their teaching and more effectively reach their students using all the tools available to them, so when I see statements like “The problem in reality is not that some schools are failing schools; it is that schooling, as our only educational strategy and system, fails with a significant portion of the population. Like any institutional system, schooling has its functional capacities and its functional limits. Children stumbling through the process with scant benefit and teachers struggling with miserable results does not mean that the children are uneducable nor the teachers incompetent; it means that the system of schooling has been pushed to the limits of its possible effectiveness,” it gets me very excited to think of how educators will be able to move outside conventional methods of education and re-imagine the process of study in ways that will encourage individual learners to reach the height of their potential.

When the author spoke of how e-learning should not be an electronic delivery system for a conventional textbook based education, but rather the springboard for a whole new look at learning, it made me realize how much my frame of understanding was limited by this traditional idea of education, even though I attended extremely progressive schools. In my office right now, we are working on a Global Classroom initiative with Jeffrey Sachs and the Earth Institute. Every day, twelve classrooms across the world connect through a video conferencing system to participate in interdisciplinary lectures on the problems of sustainable development by leading international experts in the field. Not only would this not have been logistically possible without advances in current technology, it would likely not have been conceived. It is not a very conventional approach to education.

I can’t wait to see what other assumptions will be challenged over this course of study and how it will help me think of my own role in education in a different way.