Avoiding Pyrrhic Victories: On Technology

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 31, no. 3, 2001 Avoiding Pyrrhic Victories: On Technology Greg Fowler Advanced technology without advanced thought creates not advancement, but demise. When a society becomes a product of its own technology it destroys itself. Neale Donald Walsch Rather than following a broadcast-model world for entertainment, and a broadcast-model world for learning, and a broadcast, talk-down, authoritarian world in the family and in the workplace, these kids are going to have a much more open, interactive, collaborative, verbal, thoughtful environment, and that will change the way they will be as adults. These kids will dominate the 21st century. Don Tapscott Cutting Through the Constructs One of my Boomer friends recently voiced frustration with social influences upon his ability to raise his child. My friend’s complaint was with the weathering away of his absolute authority as a parent. “It seems that I have very little ability to teach my child my values!” he exclaimed as we were eating dinner one evening. “If I tell my child something about the way I see the world she simply gets online and talks to someone who sees the world differently and I end up seeming like the bad guy or the idiot!” It is not an idle complaint. Sixth graders who want to examine how the British see the American Revolution no longer run to an encyclopedias or book; they can simply jump into a chat room in London and ask someone. I recently gave an assignment in one of my classes to examine the psychological development of a racist. Did students go to journals from the American Psychological Association? No. Recent newspaper articles? No. More than half of them jumped into chat rooms or went to hate sites of the World Wide Web to ask the question: “What=s going on in your head?” According to studies by Teenage Research Unlimited, Canadian Review of American Studies 31 (2001) 138 the percentage of teenagers who think it is “cool” to be online jumped from 50% in 1984 to 88% in 1997 (Tapscott 97). Rhonda Toon, an elementary school teacher in rural Georgia, remembers how one day she was taking kids on a field trip. She was worried about the weather, but as she stood looking out the window at the sky the kids got online and called up the National Weather Service. The same was true for another teacher: “One of the kids noticed that when you broke a wintergreen Life Saver, it emitted a little light. We wondered why. The kids started e-mailing different scientists and they got different answers. Don=t think that wasn’t a great teaching experience@ (Malinowski 45). Don Tapscott has authored several books on the Digital Age paradigm shift in America . He suggests that these kids, armed with the most powerful tools in history, will transform the workforce and the way wealth is created. We are seeing the rise of the Net Generation, the post-Bridger generation, known also as Millennials. “The boomers,” Tapscott asserts, were the first generation to have a youth that was prolonged. The economic climate was such that we thought things would always be O.K. We were optimistic, we had time to question, and we had relative freedom of responsibility. TV played an important role – it made the world smaller. But when it came down to trying to change the world, we had relatively few communications tools. (Malinowski 45) According to Tapscott, things have changed since then for succeeding generations: Now, the biggest generation ever has access to these interactive tools, where they are actors, not just recipients, and they can instantly find others who hold similar views. In past revolutions, communications were centralized, hierarchical, immutable, one way, and they carried the values of their owners. New media is the antithesis: it’s interactive, it’s distributed, it’s highly malleable, it’s what we want it to be. (Malinowski 45) How will this Net Generation be different? Net-Geners, Tapscott claims, have several key characteristics: they have a great acceptance of diversity, are very curious, and show considerable assertiveness and self reliance. These kids are critical thinkers...