Nathaniel Hawthorne
But the fallacy that there is “no canonized body of work” is not entirely accurate. There are huge volumes of works that study human behavior. The problem I have with social media classes like this is they study the medium rather than the text. It is the same issue I have with business and social media experts who attempt to sell an ROI of social media.
Can you imagine when Nathanial Hawthorne enrolled in Bowdoin College, if the first class he was required to take was The role of ink and paper in writing? How silly, you may say. But, the corrallary for what passes as modern education is just that.
To illustrate, let’s say we have a syllabus that separates out works by the type of writing instrument used. Works written in pencil, the quill pen, the manual typewriter, the IBM Selectric. Then, each is examined in the context of it’s medium, rather than how it connects to culture as whole, to the actual work produced, the author who produced it or the period in which it was produced. What professor would construct a syllabus around that? Not many. But, it might make an interesting, albeit somewhat useless, course.
When Hawthorne wrote a story, he did not study the technology of paper, ink and pens. He just wrote text. If he were writing today, he would feel just as comfortable using a MacBook as he was using a journal. To writers, artists, even business people, the value of the tools is not in how they work but in what can be created with them to affect other human beings to produce a result.
Twitter, blogs, RSS are technical tools, just as paper and pens are technical tools. We are studying the tools of the trade in institutions of higher education instead of the works they enable people to create and ideas they are able to advance. Did professors in the 1830s teach students how to load their pens with ink or how to bind pages into a book? No! They assumed these skills as a prerequisite to taking classes. Can professors now make those same assumptions? They should be able to, yet we have professors building entire courses around remediating students on how to use what are basic tools of our contemporary culture.
Technology changes, people do not. The same human condition we have been struggling against since the time we started walking upright plagues us still today, regardless of the tools we use. A Twitter community doesn’t work without people and has rules like every other group, though that somehow comes as a shock to most newbies. Email is still ultimately connected to a human being with feelings, emotions and reactions, even though many senders forget that when they hit the send button. Blogs are journals and articles people wrote who now have the ability to publish.
If we want to study the anthropological implications of information being received electronically as pieces on a grid, that is fine, but studying the technical tools in a post-secondary institution is like wagging a dog. At minimum, it is University 0.5 and belongs in the remediation department alongside “How to write a research paper” and “Invitation to Physics.”
Ahh..you hit it on the mark: “The problem I have with social media classes like this is they study the medium rather than the text.”
In Shannon’s post she mentions how “many of us blog, at least in part, to help others learn how to navigate the social web”…not true at all. Like you said, understanding how to use social media both for personal and business is understanding human behavior. Social media should be discussed and dissected from a sociology perspective. It’s people behind the method and their motivations that will drive the evolution of social media.
Social media should be looked at from an organizational behavior stand point – just replace the ox with Twitter and the worker with a Marketer.
I agree that learning to adapt communications to social media is about human behavior, however, mastery of the tools required for communication lets us forget that we’re using it — that’s the point. Once people are confident enough to communicate along these channels, they forget about the channel. Then they can focus on the human interaction.
It may be unfortunate that teachers need to spend time familiarizing students with the tools, but it’s necessary if they are going to be successful marketers and communicators one they graduate. Believe it or not, an adolescence spent on Facebook does not prepare students for a career in digital communication. Hawthorne may not have had an introductory course to “the role of ink in paper writing” but I’m sure someone in his childhood taught him to make letters on a page and most of us struggled with typing in the beginning. At some point, the tools need to be addressed.
You’re right to point out that technology changes, but I think people also change… there was a time when having a big, brand with a lot of power behind it meant a lot more to consumers… now it’s about small, personal interactions. I can envision a time in the future when our children get tired of the dialogue and yearn for a static ad that makes no attempt at a garnering feedback.
The teachers who are even addressing new forms of communication in the classroom are in the minority and I know how difficult that can be inside a large organization. The post was in large part an attempt to applaud their work.
@Shannon My larger point was about the role of education at the university level in general. It is shameful that we allow students in who are woefully ill-prepared to perform at even remedial levels. On the employment side, it is equally shameful that a college degree means as an employer, I have to spend time training basic phone skills to recent college graduates.
The more teachers compensate for their students, the less they will do on their own. While that may seem like a good thing in the short view to advance an agenda that is more urgent than important, in the larger picture, it will produce adults who eventually will not be able to think for themselves outside of what they have been told by others.
People do not change. We are driven by the same flaws of the human condition as we always have been. Crack open a copy of Canterbury Tales and tell me otherwise…
Save this post and look at it again in 20 years. Drop me a whatever-mail and let me know if doing for their students what they should do for themselves was a smart or dumb thing these teachers did. In the meantime, have a crack at Freakonomics
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