WAT UP WORLD

This presentation by Michael Wesch was really darn cool. He looks at the way new media is changing our world, emphasising the inadequacy of “critical thinking” as a means of preparing our youth for the future.

I enjoyed the part when he compared a photo of his students looking bored in a lecture with a photo showing a crowd of overexcited teenagers at the American Idol auditions. I giggled. Just a bit.

Wesch talks about how we now have “ubiquitous” computing, communication and information – at unlimited speed, about every topic, everywhere, from anywhere, on all kinds of devices. This, he says, makes it “ridiculously easy” to connect, organise, share, collect, collaborate, publish. This is the new state of media.

He discusses the influence of media – “media mediate relationships”, so when media change, relationships change. For example, the television rearranged living rooms, and rearranged conversations of culture.

However, television conversations are merely one-way conversations. One-to-many. New media, on the other hand, has opened the world up to a multitude of continuously cumulative many-to-many conversations. Communication is now how it has never been before. People respond to each other in all sorts of ways.

Wesch uses a number of examples – people and organisations responding to things with spoofs, communities using this new  media network as a device to save lives, or people attempting to do something for the mere sake of it being remarkable. For example, a man conducted a choir spread across the world – he recorded himself conducting the song, put the sheet music online, and anyone in the world could join in singing. Damn cool.

Anyway, Wesch goes through all of these sorts of things to stress what is possible with this new technology, this new media, this new communication. And then he takes this and compares it with life within the walls of the classroom. Shots of written student confessions about their lives at university are shown – for example, “I pay for $100 textbooks I never open”, “18% of teachers know my name”. I can relate to this. It is a strangely disconnected thing, university education. Not necessarily bad, just curious. He stresses the idea of students, and youth in general, currently being “meaning-seekers”. He explains that this – university – is where the most serious preparation of youth is happening, and they’re not even engaged.

This is because the new media world requires a new quality in people. The skill of being able to create new knowledge. So, students need to be moved from being “knowledgeable to [being] knowledge-able”.

Just a little side-note here – I felt rather smug while watching him talk about knowledge-creating, because it reminded me of my first Networked Media tutorial where we went around the class saying what we had got out of the first lecture, and I had said something about the course being about us learning to create knowledge. Yay. I done did something goodly in this course. For once. In ma lyf.

Wesch wants us to recognise how we now need to harness that “something in the air”, that entire body of human knowledge, that world of new media, and use it to prepare our youth for the future. He stresses “knowledge-ability” as a practice. Students should be trained for this world by embracing real problems and collaborating with each other to solve them, harnessing relevant tools whenever possible.

Ultimately, he emphasises that students need to be guided to move beyond meaning-seeking to meaning-creating. This is the new demand presented by this new world of media.

COOL.