PmWiki | EAO / FormingTodaysDigitalNative

''Forming today's digital native''

In the Ratio (the particular one I am drawing from) under the heading of 'Responsible freedom', we find a reference to serious critical formation which enables people to:

-> pass respectful and objective judgments on persons and events and take a stand on cultural models and social norms. From this point of view it is important to be able to look at the means of social communication [read 'media'] critically and use them responsibly (Salesian Ratio n. 3.1.5)

'''Media ecology'''

We need to look at the communications 'ecology' of today's digital native and many of its 'immigrants'. We can display this more easily graphically by comparing 1975 with the present day:

and now:

(Both images are taken from PDF presentation available from http://www.pewinternet.org/presentation_display.asp?r=65)

Or to put this in other ways, today we can get information from a wide range of sources, via ubiquitous media and gadgets. Once it was a question of radio, TV, telephone, mail (snail) and newspaper, and these to some extent, at least in a community context, had a 'community control' factor about them, meaning that it was the community which often had the radio and TV set put at the disposition of its members, or placed phones in appropriate places for members' use, bought several newspapers, and so on. Today this situation has changed dramatically and irrevocably.

''Personal and convergent''

It was interesting that the General Chapter referred to thus far in this book, identified two kinds of media in particular, 'personal' and 'convergent'. It is these two phenomena which are clearly identified in the illustration immediately above. We could also call personal media by other names – most mobile devices today are personal media, and allow their users to do a range of things which would once have been achieved by different media and devices: a user can send and receive text, take a still photo, play games, access the Internet, send and receive email, engage in instant messaging, play music, record a video, get mobile maps and watch TV or video all from a single device in some instances! Media convergence.

The same General Chapter spoke of the challenge this places before formation:

-> The culture of personal media can compromise one's ability to mature in personal relationships and exposes young people to the danger of very negative encounters and dependencies. This is the 'playground' where we need to be present in order to listen, enlighten, and to guide.

Elsewhere the Chapter asked various departments at the level of leadership in the Congregation to reflect on the “new challenges of the culture of personal media for formation”. Examine both contexts of the term 'culture of personal media' for a moment. The first context suggests that this is a 'playground' (though a pretty rough one by the sounds of it) where those who do the forming, educators, need to be present in order to 'listen, enlighten, guide'. I doubt that this is meant to be a comment on online spiritual direction (though it may not exclude that) but rather a comment on accompaniment of young people who are part of the online culture.

'''Challenge: control'''

When something is a culture it is akin to being a way of life with its patterns of behaviour, beliefs, symbolised meanings and so on. What might be distinguishing features of a 'personal media culture'? One issue might be the shift in the locus of control. The 'means of social communication', which are now ubiquitous, mobile, personal and converging, are hardly under any sort of overall community 'control' as earlier media might have been. And a second issue might be that of content creation; if anything distinguishes personal from public media, or even from mass media, it is that the individual is now the content creator. The question of responsible use, then, must take into account these issues of control and content creation.

'''Challenge: community'''

Another cultural challenge in this area is to do with the shift from place-to-place to person-to-person, where communications are concerned, and what that means for community life. In the case of the fixed land line telephone, I call another community in the place where that community resides, even if I am looking for a particular individual. But we do that less and less today. Instead the mobile phone, pager or wireless Internet no longer means linking person to place. And even within a community, community members may well remain connected these days, but not as people rooted in the 'home base' of house, school or wherever they are. All of this is part of the culture of personal media and what a different culture it is! People are separately able to operate networks for information, collaboration, support, sociability, sense of belonging. A reflection question, then, is what impact does this have on the way I live in community? Is 'networked individualism' of the kind just described necessarily a bad thing? How can it be used for the good of the community?

'''Challenge: interactivity'''

Yet another challenge lies in the term 'personal media', or rather, understanding what it means, because one could too easily assume it means something selfish, or narcissistic. It may just as easily mean increased interactivity, the difference being that the individual now has the choice of being interactive. There is a skill that comes with this, and it is not a skill we currently find detailed adequately (or even mentioned) in the Ratio: networking. Networking has become a life skill, not just something you do when you want something. It is true, I believe, that the principles built into relationships according to the Preventive System are the kinds of principles involved in networking, but I would see great value in re-interpreting these principles in the light of network experience today. Why? Because the one factor that has changed so much since Don Bosco's time is the technological one. Technology facilitates networking.

There are other challenges lying within the notion of interactivity. Interaction of a virtual kind does not necessarily mean acceptance of the other for what and who he or she is....does not always even allow knowledge of what or who the other is. Interactivity can also be something of a fetish which of itself does not overcome the human problem of loneliness. Hence there is a need to form the digital native as a communicating individual, not just a connecting, interactive individual. Form him or her as someone who communicates, listens, understands.

'''Challenge: Self'''

I wonder what the digital era is doing to a traditional unitary sense of self. Cultures with stable symbols can produce such a sense of self, but can the post modern and fragmented world? Can digital culture? I suspect digital culture does not even want to. Computer-mediated communication technologies offer people opportunities to enter artificial environments, spaces where they can interact with each other. Besides their task-oriented and information/data-processing capabilities, computers are socially situated. To enter cyberspace, people adopt personae and play with identities and multiple roles as the possibilities of meeting others are infinite along the Information Highway. The digital self in cyberspace challenges traditional notions of the self and calls for redefinition of the self when extended into cyberspace. People encounter paradoxical situations as they construct their selves in cyberspace. When interfacing with computers, they are persuaded of the illusion of space or place behind their computer monitors in which they imaginatively and consciously construct, represent or perceive their digital identities while interacting with other digital identities. There is a tendency to forget the body in cyberspace. The technological construction of the self in cyberspace can be thought of as adding a new dimension to one’s self-concept. The Ratio attempts to respond to the general postmodern situation, emphasising the need for “psychological balance, needed in a special way in a context that can lead to fragmentation and psychological fragility”(Ratio n. 62) but this still does not tackle the specific challenge referred to above, or at least not adequately.

The Ratio is such a complete document overall, that the question is not that all the right things are not said, but that the new way of looking at so many things to do with the human self in a digital culture is not currently identified clearly. So when the Ratio speaks of the need for reflection (the ability to reflect, the need for personal reflection), it might well now need to identify a further reason for this: we live in a digital culture that always seeks to connect, does not have a lot of time for silence, and both these things can be limitations. Obsession with connecting and lack of silence, constant interruption make reflection very difficult, and make it difficult too to learn to listen to God. The digital native today is in need of a formation to respect for silence, reflection, respect for his or her own self, and the selves of others.

'''Challenge: short everything'''

There's a rather complex set of challenges here, I think. The Web favours short-form content, we get teaspoonfuls of information, snippets of text. There is considerable educational criticism of the short attention spans of today's student, and this is seen as the result of bits and bytes and chunks of information.

That is one side of the story. Turn that around and we see that length and depth are devalued. That is more serious still in the context of formation. It plays some role, I am sure, in the lessened interest in long-term commitment. And you cannot put culture of any kind into a zip file!

One good side of the globalised and connected world we live in is that we are more aware than ever of other cultures, and in the broader world of religion, inter-religious dialogue is encouraged and facilitated in our digital culture – and by it. One of my own confrere, who lives in this inter-religious dialogue context and actively promotes it in North East India, commented to me as he was reading through these chapters, that the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness might help us here. Like the frames of a movie that pass by at a sufficient speed to produce the illusion of seamless continuity, the doctrine of momentariness holds that the process of arising and perishing happens so rapidly that we are not normally aware of the succession of moments. In trying to understand what my confrere was suggesting here, I concluded, if I may return to the helpful Tibetan bell chime in my Firefox browser, that the teasponfuls, the snippets, the passing moments do not of themselves have to be bad – what is important is to give today's human beings who live within this context of short, passing moments a means of meditating upon the very momentariness and evanescence of things. In fact, someone asked me if the Tibetan chime rings on the hour or randomly and I responded that it rings randomly – which is its value. It calls attention to the passing and unexpected moment. It is up to me then to prolong that in reflection and prayer.

'''Challenge: connect, connect!'''

Once you have a situation where media can be worn on the person, does not need to be located in some space other than one I need to visit or deliberately locate myself in, and you combine this with wireless telephony, then you have a new imperative, it seems. Connect! I personally find it quite off-putting, to the point of rudeness, when someone answers a mobile phone call when they are talking to me. Once upon a time we taught etiquette to young people. That went out ages ago, but there is certainly a need, at some stage in the life of the young digital native, to teach new rules of etiquette, and the instance I have mentioned is one of them. The mobile phone certainly needs treatment all of its own, not only in terms of etiquette. It can become a fetish for the privatised individual immersed in a world of me. Who I call and when doesn't really matter, so long as I call someone. That of course, may be a parody, or it may not, but it too is not solved by simply preventing this 'article of clothing' if I may call it that, from being worn. We need to form the mobile phone user.

As someone with linguistic training, I am not about to launch into a tirade on SMS messaging for its effects on the English or any other language. SMS messaging is a legitimate development in descriptive linguistic terms. Let primary and secondary education develop appropriate strategies for that aspect of language development. What interests me, instead, is 'the speech act', another level in the Tower of Babel! At least in a voice connection we tend to establish context, go through a few preliminaries. Not so with SMS messages. The very conventions of the form suggest abbreviation, and this can extend to lack of context, unclear addresser-addressee roles, any of which can affect meaning, and create a feeling of interruption and disruption. Another area, then for formation-education to consider, to help young users appreciate.

The response to these practical issues raised under the 'connect' challenge needs a name. Let's call it 'digital awareness'. The question is how technologies and their users are integrated into various social contexts – in this case a community context. What I am suggesting here is that while on the one hand personal media in particular tend to create monads rather than media space for genuine community, we can take a more positive approach by helping people to understand these technologies as enabling, and as offering opportunity for genuine awareness of others. This will involve very practical issues such as a discerning 'diet' of who, what and when to connect with, critical skills once connected, but also the more underlying kinds of issues I am raising here. Mind you, there is already a broader term in place and we might simply use that: media education, but it tends to get tied up too much with the instruments themselves.

'''Challenge: ongoing formation'''

At the very commencement of this book I said that “Technology, especially digital technology, is no longer something separate, something we can look at dispassionately as an object of study. It has now become so integrated as to become part of the communication act itself, part of the process of creating meaning”, and that this has enormous implications for us. One of these is ongoing formation. Learning has now become a dynamic process involving technology not as an 'outside' element, a range of instruments, but integrated fully. Young people are engaged in social networks and communities of practice from an early age. At the heart of their interaction is a digital culture of meaning making. There is a long-term and global context now for young people. This touches on what is called 'ongoing formation' and I am convinced that ongoing formation (lifelong learning if you like) for the digital native is a very different animal to what is was for those before. This aspect of a Ratio too needs to be revisited.

What are the kinds of elements making up this very different context? Active citizenship, digital literacy, networking, multi-cultural awareness, teamwork and collaboration, cultural heritage, the point being here that the digital culture is not just a context, not just an offering of tools to help but an integral part of meaning making today. And it will continue to be so for these young people for whom this just comes naturally. Once upon a time someone coming into a group to learn and absorb the culture of that group did just that. That is rarely the case today, I would suggest. Humankind generally are now members of a digital culture, and someone coming into a group is part of that wider membership. That wider membership is also part of the journey of lifelong learning, ongoing formation. I am not saying we cannot focus on the ongoing formation relative to the group, but I am saying that this will always be in a much wider context now.

Quite apart from the deeper issues involved in the above challenges, there are quite practical ones. Email has been with us for twenty or more years already, yet there has not been a sufficient (to my mind) analysis of how this has changed things for the communicative act, especially in the context in which I am referring to here – the religious community. It is not as if email is just an additional facility we have. It has irrevocably changed the way we communicate! And yet there do not seem to be established institutional codes of conduct in place. The social dynamic created by fast connections and email itself is one of immediacy and immediateness. We assume that a person will respond immediately to an email, and when the response is not immediate, we tend to impute reasons – many of which may not be valid. The email may simply not have arrived. But the assumption that people should be there when we need them is one of transferral – the technology creates this possibility, but that does not mean that people, recipients of our emails, need necessarily feel they have to respond immediately. Some of course adapt an automatic reply approach, a message that reads 'Thank you for your email. I shall be in touch at my earliest convenience'. It is a start, but if not actually followed up on regularly, it creates more misunderstandings and imputations!

'''It's not all 'challenge''''

Sometimes I feel we frame issues all too casually, forgetting the freight of meaning certain words carry with them. 'Challenge' is such a case; it has the sense of being provocative, has its history of dueling, sentries challenging intruders and the like. We cannot overlook that freight of meaning when we use the word, so speaking of the 'new challenges of the culture of personal media for formation' does not escape the idea of provocation, intrusion, duel, lining up for a fight. Good educators – and formators – also look at what has changed, perhaps irrevocably, to see the good that can be drawn from it, and the lessons that must now be learned.

If we accept, and I do not know how we could not accept, that the world has shifted decisively from a logic of broadcast (in media culture terms) to that of many-to-many, and that personal media (anything from the laptop to Facebook) is part of this many-to-many, we first note the implications, amongst which: information glut, data smog, unfiltered, myriad uses of rhetoric and persuasion competing for the individual's attention. Then as educators we draw at least one lesson: there is need for a new skill these days – how to assemble information. Interestingly enough, 'personal media' comes to its own rescue here, at least in part. Digital natives and many digital immigrants today make good use of RSS (which has more than one possible etymological explanation as a term, but let's be happy for now with 'Rich Site Summary'). I know I use it daily because it helps me wade through enormous amounts of information to get what I want or think I need. I don't do the wading. RSS technology does it for me according to the criteria I give it. RSS will target issues and stories, help people personalise their news, subscribe to groups, offer background, and, perhaps most importantly, help relate items to one another.

At least in initial formation stages, in terms of the Ratio I keep referring to, we might teach something about the economy of attention that has developed out of the many-to-many and personal media scene. What are the implications of an economy of attention? We see it in action. A commercial world has to work on the basis of supply and demand, which in turn needs abundance and scarcity. Information is not scarce, so we get two results, one in itself quite bad – creating a false scarcity by locking stuff up and making you pay for access, be it knowledge contained in software or just knowledge, full stop. But the other result is not in itself bad; it just depends on how you handle it. Attention is made scarce. So it becomes the focus of productivity and hence we find all kinds of 'stages' for individuals to promenade on, YouTube being one of the more famous of these. We can help young people understand this phenomenon as one way to helping them manage it wisely.

Personal media are one element in a major shift in epistemology – the science of knowing. It is not all bad. There has been a major shift from print to multimedia, for instance. This affects the way we understand truth, since truth has long been associated with the printed word. Of course, printed word has carried charts and pictures for centuries now, but today that's not the issue. Print and image (and sound) have converged. The text is tied to the image far more essentially and integrally. Michael Heim (1999, 'Transmogrification': can be found on http://www.mheim.com/files/transmog.pdf) makes a point that truth is now presented through processes that are closer to rituals and iconographies than propositions expressed in text, and that incarnate truth such as the Sacred Word is transmitted through a complex of rituals and images integrated with text-words. This might tell us something rather important – the discussion of personal, convergent media, virtual reality may well fit within discussion of liturgy or sacrament.

If I look at my own Salesian tradition, I note something that has not lost its value and indeed has added value in the context we are now discussing: narrative knowledge. Don Bosco was a great story teller and used narrative at so many levels, including the famous 'good night' three minute summary of the day. Narrative knowledge has never been accountable to a more rigid epistemology of truth statements, so emphasising the role and significance of narrative knowledge today takes on even greater importance, given that personal media authoring (the individual becomes a media creator) is so important today. In fact, forming young educators to see the pedagogical ability of today's media to shape narrative as a form of knowing is essential.

'''Include what is positive about the hacker ethic'''

I have not forgotten our hacker! Today's digital native imbibes what has been called 'the hacker ethic' probably without being aware that it has a name. While I am well aware that I am using this term 'hacker' in a much broader way than the 'capital H' Hacker would like, I also see that things have changed radically since the 1960's! There's just 'more stuff' out there now, so that while capital H Hacker was something of a specialist, lower case h hacker has access to the computers, the iPhone, the networks. I very much like the following comment by Rafael Capurro:

-> The object of this passion [in reference to the passion of hacking] is life itself, passionate life, creativity. The key issue is that such a fundamental attitude is not restricted to computer hackerism. This means that the passion of life is stronger and broader than the passion of the Internet. In order to make sense, the passion of the Internet, hacker ethic in a narrow sense, has to become a passion for life. (Paper presented at the "Colloquium on Violence & Religion" COV&R Conference 2003 at University of Innsbruck: "Passions in Economy, Politics, and the Media. In Discussion with Christian Theology" June 18-21, 2003. Published in: Wolfgang Palaver, Petra Steinmair-Pösel (Eds.): Passions in Economy, Politics, and the Media. In Discussion with Christian Theology. Vienna: Lit Verlag 2005)

This passion for life, then, is something basic and reinforced within the hacker ethic, though with some likely confusion between the passion of doing good work and being creative and joyful. The hacker ethic seems to be an evolving reality, especially as it broadens out – the desire to share, the 'do no harm' (quite the opposite to the cracker) ethic of today's hacker is widely shared in a similar informal slogan for Google which everyone knows about: Don't be evil. Today's hacker believes we should trust – but test. Today's hacker will believe vigorously in protecting privacy, and will also not respond well to being told that it can't be done. I usually tell people who want to achieve a particular result with their computers that a good rule of thumb in this game is that it can be done! You just have to work out how.

It might seem a little odd for a Catholic formator-educator to be calling on the likes of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, but there seem to me to be two notions which have become reality for today's digital native, which need to be recognised and taken at least for their positive aspects as an educational and formation basis.

There is Gramsci's idea of the intellectual: He writes that "all [wo]men are intellectuals...but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals". What he meant by that was that everyone has an intellect and uses it but not all are intellectuals by social function. He explains this by stating that "everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket, [but] we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor".(B. Burke,1999, 2005: 'Antonio Gramsci, schooling and education', the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm. ). Today's digital native is already an intellectual in Gramsci's way of describing it as s/he has access to a wide range of experiences and knowledge via online access.

Then there are Foucault's "technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." (M. Foucault 1988: Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. by L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, P. H. Hutton. The University of Massachusetts Press. p.18). Rafael Capurro gives us a good lead how to take this up when he says:

-> I would like to suggest the following technologies of the self -- to be considered no less as technologies of the self for the other -- in order to cope with the passions of the Internet as well as with the passions in the internet, but surely not in order to attain immortality: the art of friendship in the face of oppression, the art of silence in the face of verbosity, and the art of laughter in the face of fear (Capurro, Rafael (2003): Ethik im Netz. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag)

A 2020 vision(:nl:)